Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Iptv, stremio, real debrid and torrentio ftw! I'm paying for things, but it's a fraction of what we paid for all the subscriptions. And I can actually find things I want to watch!

welcome again.... and i stopped pirating movies and started streaming over internet on pirate website.

unRAID and Plex is the way.

Guide is a little outdated, but works like a dream. Ibracorp (Google them) is also very handy.

Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.

But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn't, you'd be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.

Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it's just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.

For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.

My family still has netflix so I use that sometimes. But... most of the time I'll download from a few places for movies:

1. rarbg, though the original went down I found a new one at https://therarbg.com/
2. yts, again the original went down but I've been using https://yts.mx/ which is fantastic.
3. stremio. set it up with some plugins and it's pretty useful.
4. this one is a little weird but https://databasegdriveplayer.xyz/player.php?imdb= I have a browser extension to pop up the relevant link on the imdb page, so I can just click that. not always best quality, but for some rarer titles it really does end up helping.

for client I've always really used transmission. it's small, comfy, works.

Deluge leaks your ip address if you use a VPN, I use QBittorrent for this reason.