I've returned to the high seas, eye patch and all.
I found a seedbox provider that is fairly cheap and works well. I have a long standing rss feed for new shows so next step is going to be getting it setup to auto download for me. I can do it locally but spectrum is hard core with the dmca notices and I don't want to risk losing my account.
Sonarr and Radarr with NZBGet, usenet indexer and a cheap unlimited news server provider, and you're laughing. I have everything downloading automagically as soon as its release, loads right into Jellyfin - all on a copyright notice keen ISP and never have any issues because im not sharing anything up, its all down with usenet
I have been looking into this solution, I am concerned on whether it will need a VPN or not. I have one already, but it does not play nice with my current solution.
The majority of countries, and the uk for sure, its not illegal to download content but it is illegal to upload it / share it. Therefore using usenet is fine to do, legally, without the aid of a VPN as you are merely consuming and not providing or uploading. I have been doing this for years with zero problem or letter from any of three isps i have been with the in last decade.
You're very welcome. I have a newsletter you can subscribe to if you'd like, though i should probably warn you it costs £5 a month and includes some advertising.
I have all my services set up on a docker container that has a VPN Killswitch, so if the VPN ever drops for any reason my "activity" is disabled automatically until I can notice and fix it.
I have Spectrum as well, but using a VPN w/ dead switch turned on has worked thus far. They really are ruthless with dmca though. Hate Spectrum with a deep, deep passion, and not just because of that, but everything else. There's a competitor rolling out fiber everywhere in my city though, so I will soon be ditching them, thankfully.
There are 2 companies running fiber in my city but I live in the outskirts in what I call country'ish, no clue if/when they make it to my street, there are only like 20 houses if that on my road.
No data cap anywhere that I am aware of. Despite being in what I call country'ish we have gigabit down from them but the upload is capped at like 35-40 megs.
They have no cap, but that's only because they agreed to not impose a cap for a period of time as part of the agreement with the FCC (FTC? One of those 3-letter agencies) that allowed them to absorb Time Warner Cable. That period of time is up, I'm pretty sure, so we shall see what they decide to do.
Or, I could pay the $9/month for a server that has a 10gig connection to the rest of the world and do my part by leaving them seeding for longer than I would otherwise.
Would love a seed box recommendation if you have one to share? My new place is off grid so with limited power prefer to offload a 24 hour server elsewhere so I can be a responsible seeder.
I'm using rapidseedbox.com but there are a ton of others out there. I tried them because they take crypto and I don't have to give them any info whatsoever.
I'm using rapidseedbox.com, they don't ask for any personal info and I paid with crypto. The lowend plan I'm using is $9/month and doesn't offer many options aside from sftp access, 3 or 4 torrent apps you can switch between and a couple of other things. The higher end plans offer a shit load more like plex, etc. They will send a dmca notice and then like 12 hours later delete the offending content. I've learned that you can just restart the torrent and re-download it and all is well going forward.
There are a ton of other options out there for seedboxes.
I pay about $300 per year for an IPTV service that provides over 3000 channels which means all the news and sports I can think of. Also on demand TV and movies, and recordings of popular live sports. It allows 2 public IPs so I share this service with my brother. It's amazing. I've used a few different IPTV services that got shutdown and this one is the best. It's been about 2 years now which is about as long as I've seen these services last so I hope it doesn't get shut down anytime soon.
I'd rather just run my own service for my own use. I have a nas and I use vlc on my TV to watch anything I want. I'm currently working on grabbing all of the shows that I want to re-watch and are available in their entirety, homeland, the wire, Dr who, Archer, etc. I'll also be keeping an eye on the paramount and others for shows that look interesting and add them to my rss feed.
Look up radarr and sonarr. Automate all your downloads. You can torrent with it but usenet is much easier. Additionally set up a server with unraid and add all the apps to docker. You got yourself a media server. Add plex and all the other arr apps in there too.
Even as a child, when we had cable, I would ask my dad why we still had to watch commercials even though we pay for the service. I understood why stations like CBS, NBC, or ABC may have needed ads as they were free over-the-air, but surely paying for cable should mean no ads, right?
Never had a good answer. It's pretty fucked up that we collectively allowed them to pull that shit on us and put up with it for like 3 decades.
There was a brief and glorious time when Pay Cable was billed as being ad-free. You would still see promos for other shows and channels between shows, but there were no commercial breaks!
Oh shit, I forgot about that being a thing. Wow, how the fuck did society get so accustomed to dealing with that BS? Granted, we almost broke out of it when streaming became mainstream, but it looks like we're about to get a screwed right back into it.