Streaming prices are out of hand. What are cheaper alternatives?
Theoretically speaking…if someone wanted to search for torrents, where would one visit? Afaik, piratebay is long gone.
Torrents-csv.com is pretty nice too.
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Thanks
Piratebay has hundreds of working proxies
Thanks
Fmhy net
If buying isn’t owning piracy isn’t stealing
Spotify specific:
Use the free service to listen to new stuff in order to find groups you like. For the sub cost you can buy an album per month and have it forever. I work in areas that don’t have great data connections, so having a local copy keeps the jams going without interruption or ads.
I also recommend Qobuz. They’re European and have high quality streaming + the option to buy and album and download it.
If you don’t mind the less legal way, you can easily use a program like streamrip and download whatever you want from the service.
And if you don’t have the money to spend, they have a trial for a month. Just rip whatever you need and have a nice offline collection. And if you need more, you can just make a start trial with a disposable e-mail.
There’s also lucida.to if you don’t want to be bothered with any of that.
Soma.fm and radio.garden are two streaming music service replacers. I have not used Soma, but Radio Garden is interesting because it gives you a map of every single participating radio station on the planet and lets you just scroll around the entire globe and pick a radio station.
You deserve all the upvotes today, but I can only give you one.
Thank you
Just steal everything. The powers that be rob you blind every day in a death by a thousand cuts kinda way.
They don’t give a fuck about you, don’t pay them any courtesies in return.
Yarr!
Harr
Fiddle dee dee
Do what you want, 'cause a Pirate is Free!
🏴☠️
Self-hosting and/or use Kanopy if your local library offers it
How have I never heard about Kanopy? This looks so cool!
fmhy.net is a constantly updated directory of streaming piracy sites. Make sure you have an ad blocker and enjoy any show from any service instantly with no sign up.
Beat me to it, love fmhy
I’d say piracy … but it’s definitely not cheaper the way I do it (at least not short term).
But if you have some spare storage and don’t need a huge amount of content, that’s a good option.
What are you spending the money on? Physical sever devices? Electricity?
Yeah, personal hardware. Replaced my 2 bay (2x 6 TB) NAS that had 5 USB drives attached with more powerful 12 bay NAS and 9x 20TB drives. Luckily before the insane price hikes due to the AI hype. Still, I invest like $7000 over all at least. That’s a lot of years of netflix/spotify :D
I don’t even bother with the electricity, it just is what it is.
Jeeeeeesus. I’ve got 20TB and that feels like a lot 😅
8 of the drives are on a raid 6 and one is a hot spare and converted to 1000 based terrabyte, I’m maxing out at 109.1 TB, but max volume size is 108 TB.
But I’ve interacted with people that had 1.2 PB … there is always a bigger fish ^^
Meanwhile, I’m over here about to attach a 2tb drive to my Nextcloud server and I thought that was a lot…
It’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to keep it. I acquire, watch, and delete.
I spend about $10/mo., and that’s a lot.
This is where I’m at after about a decade of being a self-described “data hoarder” and experiencing a drive failure a couple months ago and losing about 8tb of media that I realized I didn’t care at all about.
Now I have a custom script that runs on the 1st of every month that A) detects if movies and full TV series have been marked as “watched” more than 7 days ago and/or B) if movies and full TV series have never been started and unmatched after more than a year and deletes titles that meet either requirement, while outputting a ledger on my desktop showing what titles have been deleted, the date, and for what reason. I ran a dry run of the script and saw that I was about to save 12tb of storage and realized how unimportant 99% of the stuff marked was to me. Really important stuff (my David Lynch titles, for example), are manually marked for exclusion.
Anyway, but of a blog post but I’ve realized this is the way for me. My Plex library is now less cluttered and full of only new things. My other users on the account can still request anything they want and my Usenet+*arr+fiber optic server can have almost anything ready for them in 10 minutes or less
Absolutely. But I do want to keep it, the fact that streaming services can just remove shows from their service is one if the reasons I dislike them.
Also a lot family members and friends use that to rewatch old shows or keep up with newer ones at different times, so not an option for me.
It’s definitely the hard drives. A 1tb SSD is about $150, and can definitely get you far, but it’s never far enough
I use a 1 TB and a 2 TB ssd for temporary storage, sorting and transcoding. But for permanent storage, HDDs are the way to go if you want a lot.
How long would it take to watch 1 TB of video? A lifetime?
A single bluray movie will run around 50GB and full TV shows can easily be 100s of GBs.
Haha. That depends on a few factors. If you’re going to the highest fidelity possible, you could fill 1tb up with about 20 UHD movies at ~50gb each.
NTA but I spend about $30/month on various self-hosting-specific services: Usenet subscription, VPN, Plex Pass, a few little recurring donations to OSSes that I use, etc.
It’s not really self-hosting unless you own the hardware. But I support your sentiment!
I do own the hardware. 5x8tb (down from 6) drives of media on my desktop (Phanteks Enthoo Pro is the best case ever made)
It’s harder to deliver movies over the internet when there is a WAR going on.
Jellyfin on an old computer that you happen to have lying around is free.
You can get videos to watch by going to your library and checking them out and using MakeMKV to rip them to digital format and saving them to the Jellyfin server.
Alternatively, many thrift stores and pawn shops sell DVDs usually for a buck or two.
Why subscribe? Subs like this perpetuate a worse future. Go cold turkey for two years and re-evaluate then.
Streaming is not frugal by definition since you don’t own anything.
- Buy from Bandcamp, own and stream forever for a cheap price
- Torrent movies
- Torrent or Soulseek music
- Listen to podcasts, there are billions of those, it will last forever
- Free music on SomaFM, ByteFM, Radio Paradise, Shoutcast, etc.
- YouTube client like NewPipe if you have Android to listen to music
Buy from Bandcamp, own and stream forever for a cheap price
It’s also important to emphasize that artists make more from a Bandcamp purchase than if you had just streamed a few times on Shitify.
You would need to listen to a song 400+ times on Spotify to earn the artist $1. Or you could throw them a buck on Bandcamp Friday and get to download it forever. Plus the artist gets paid immediately from the Bandcamp purchase instead of quarterly streaming royalties.
Then my favourite artist has earned more from me streaming her music on tidal than if I’d bought her entire discography.
Good!
Care to share the artist name?
Eivør, there’s one person on tidal who listened to her more than me. I can only assume it’s a Faroese coma patient who’s relatives have put her on repeat in the hospital room in the hopes they’ll be brought back stranger things style.
Turns out I know of her from seeing a short of her (or a fan?) belting the intro to Enn in a parking garage. Never knew the artist name til now, but I never forgot that melody. Thanks for reintroducing me!
Soulseek is love, Soulseek is life.
The sea awaits you.
👉 Your local public library. You can borrow movies and books. Return them so someone else can use them too. Not run afoul of the law. Libraries are great!
Alternatively:
Give your former Netflix and Spotify subscription fees to the Internet Archive.
They are essentially a gigantic, global, public library.
Your library probably even has digital access to thousands of movies, books, and songs, so you don’t even have to leave the house!
That’s definitely true for books. I have an ereader and I often use my library account to add books on loan to the reader over the Internet. I don’t think there’s video available like that, but they do have physical media like CDs, DVDs, and BluRays.
Kanopy (video only) and Hoopla (multimedia) are two papers widely used in Canada and the US. There are other and international providers, but I don’t remember them off the top of my head.
