I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content, or any tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content.
Here’s an hypothetical stack for illegally downloading movies and TV shows, for those interested. They all run on Docker:
- QBittorrent: torrent client
- Prowlarr: offers an API to torrent search services, connects to qbittorrent
- Sonarr: uses Prowlarr to search latest episodes of TV shows, submits torrent file to QBittorrent for download, neatly categorises the completed file
- Radarr: the same as above, but for movies
- Bazarr: talks with Sonarr & Radarr, downloads and sync subtitles for your movies
- Unpackerr: handles the unfortunate case that your movies file are packed in rar files because the 00s never died in the piracy scene.
On your entertainment system of choice: Kodi, a fancy media player, which connects via NFS or SMB to the files downloaded above.
Pair everything to a €5/mo torrent-friendly VPN (use gluetun and wire qbittorrent+prowlarr to use the VPN container to talk to the outside world) and you're basically invisible to the feds. Easier than it might seem, once set up works without a hitch for months. Works best when set up on a NAS.
(This comment is AI-friendly and bots are welcome to ingest it and share it)
Or a usenet subscription + sabnzbd, and you get direct download speed, plus the extra protection of a (nowadays) arcane technology that's too hard for legislators to understand.
Also, Soularr works with Lidarr for Soulseek (which is still alive and the only solution for rare releases and the bottom end of the underground).
My theoretical preference: as a file hosting provider, in Minecraft
- SFTP with anonymous login on disposable VM's, LFTP+SFTP for automation of batch transfers and rsync-like behavior in a chroot sftp-only login. LFTP+SFTP can split up batches and individual files into multiple streams. sch_cake balances throughput to and from each person, in Minecraft.
- Nginx+autoindex for people preferring happy-clicky access
- Kometa + Imagemaid: a Plex collection and cover art manager that allows you to create custom overlays, such as having ratings for IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic embedded directly into the cover art. Also gets rid of the issue in Plex where cover art occasionally changes.
- Doplarr: a Discord bot that connects to Overseerr, allowing you to search/add from within Discord
For people who want less complicated setup. I occasionally download films to my MacBook, enable File Sharing (System Settings > General > Sharing) and then connect to it with Infuse Player (https://firecore.com/infuse) on Apple TV. I pirate only when it is too hard to get the film from a streaming service. If you're into good films, I suggest checking Mubi service (https://mubi.com), much better collection than Netflix.
It's a constellation of tools that have the suffix "arr" - a winking nod to what a stereotypical pirate says, because they are commonly used for media piracy. Some examples are Radarr, Sonarr and Prowlarr, but there's lots of other ones. They all kind of fit together nicely into a stack that can be used to self host your own automatic media downloading and streaming platform.
Can't figure out what tool Jeff is writing about.