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Is a VPN necessary for torrenting? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Alextheacceptable@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I don't live in the US, so my ISP doesn't really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren't cheap and I'm on a strict budget (wouldn't pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?

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[-] JasSmith@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Just an FYI: for the cost of a VPN, you can buy a Usenet subscription. Depending on your content, you'll get far better speeds, far more privacy, far more content, and far more availability.

[-] ramboteng@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Are there quality x265 rips like QxR on usenet?

[-] JasSmith@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yes but it's not quite as easy. For example, QxR generally releases everything on 1337. On Usenet you're going to get a mix of re-ups, remixes from various groups, new groups you haven't heard of, and they might be on various indexers. Generally speaking, I have no issues finding a good quality x265 rip, but I might have to try a couple if I haven't heard of the release team. For this reason I've configured preferences in Radarr and Sonarr which will preference QxR, for example. I also include public torrent trackers.

[-] Overzeetop@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I used to be all over usenet. Starting about 10-12 years ago most of the indexers turned to shit; either that or takedowns have eviscerated the back catalog of content from providers. I've yet to find a good tracker that can find anything (that's more than 12-24 hours old).

[-] JC@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I use usenet, but I find that I have a lot of issues finding content in other language than English. Also, finding rarer content is harder too. So I also use torrents to complete what I can't find over usenet. To this day I would like to get content in French, but it's hard.
This means that I still need a torrenting setup with VPN.

[-] SmokytheBear@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah this is my setup. Sure it does mean you have to pay for a couple of things, but I find its the best way. Plug a Usenet provider and a couple of indexers into the aars, set it as highest priority, then some decent torrent trackers as lower prio.

Usenet will handle grabbing the majority of your requests without having to worry about seeding, ratio and such and the torrent trackers act as a fallback and for stuff like season packs which don't tend to get uploaded to Usenet and anything older or rarer that might not be available on usenet. So far though I've found it's not too much that doesn't get grabbed by usenet, but the torrent trackers are a nice backup.

[-] xenos@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Nzbgeek

[-] Parallax@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I wish I had gotten into Usenet back in the day. I feel like I missed out on a big part of the early internet.

[-] kavides@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Where would be a good place to go to learn more about UseNet? Are there any resources you prefer?

[-] JasSmith@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

It is unfortunately a Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/index

My recommendation is to subscribe to Eweka when it's on promotion. I pay around $3/month since I pay for a year up front, and it recurs for that price.

Secondly, pay for NZBGeek.

Between those two you're mostly set. If you really start using your subscriptions a lot, you can look into alternate backbones and indexers.

You can automate all of this with Radarr and Sonarr. They are my favourite pieces of software ever.