The way I look at it is I’m not having to pay for Netflix [etc]
Right, same with my private torrent tracker but for $0/month. I don’t think Usenet is for me, I guess. Maybe if my tracker gets nuked somehow, which it hasn’t after like 20 years, then I’ll have to consider Usenet. 😅
For me, Usenet isn’t about availability; but speed, risk exposure, and convenience.
Torrents take longer, even with lots of quality seeds and fast network speeds; mostly because of the seeding process. Plus, while you are seeding: you have to publicly expose yourself as a content host, even if just through a VPN. Hosts are what copyright holders target, they don’t GAF about the people downloading, they try to take down the hosts to stop the spread. Finally you have to keep the content you downloaded in the format you downloaded, at least until seeding is done.
I prefer to use Tdarr to automatically transcode downloaded content into h265 (HEVC) to reduce it’s size. Most content is found in h264 (AVC); converting it, on average, reduces its size by ~30% while maintaining good quality. Overall this step has saved me at least ~7TB so far (Tdarr reports it’s saved 4.8TB, but I converted a ton of stuff with Embys convert feature before implementing Tdarr). That conversion can only be done after seeding or the torrent breaks as the original files are no longer available to seed. Usenet removes the seeding step completely, so I can do whatever I want with the files as soon as they’ve downloaded, which in it self only takes 5min.
VPN is probably a good idea regardless of what you use, yeah. I haven’t used a VPN in 20+ years of pirating. 😅 Probably a bad idea. 🫣
Torrents I’m fine with seeding. I never stop seeding my downloads. More data for the people!
I only download H.265 releases, so no need to reencode. I just dump all my downloaded movies in a movies/ directory, and all my shows in series/{Show Name}/{season XX boxset}/. Plex recognized everything fine, and now Jellyfin does as well after ditching Plex (because Plex don’t give af about their users, as I’ve noticed, story for another time).
I’m surprised Usenet content is mostly just H.264. sounds a bit behind the times.
Anyway, filled one 4 TB recently which is like ten years old, recently been getting closer and closer to filling a 10 TB drive, and got a completely unused 24 TB drive waiting to be installed. Bought while storage was still cheap. 😅 Should be set for the coming years.
That together with the top speeds of my tracker, and free price, hard to beat unless you’re worried about your ISP cracking down on you (which I’m not really as I’m based east of the pond).
I think I’ll hold off on Usenet for the time being.
Right, same with my private torrent tracker but for $0/month. I don’t think Usenet is for me, I guess. Maybe if my tracker gets nuked somehow, which it hasn’t after like 20 years, then I’ll have to consider Usenet. 😅
For me, Usenet isn’t about availability; but speed, risk exposure, and convenience.
Torrents take longer, even with lots of quality seeds and fast network speeds; mostly because of the seeding process. Plus, while you are seeding: you have to publicly expose yourself as a content host, even if just through a VPN. Hosts are what copyright holders target, they don’t GAF about the people downloading, they try to take down the hosts to stop the spread. Finally you have to keep the content you downloaded in the format you downloaded, at least until seeding is done.
I prefer to use Tdarr to automatically transcode downloaded content into h265 (HEVC) to reduce it’s size. Most content is found in h264 (AVC); converting it, on average, reduces its size by ~30% while maintaining good quality. Overall this step has saved me at least ~7TB so far (Tdarr reports it’s saved 4.8TB, but I converted a ton of stuff with Embys convert feature before implementing Tdarr). That conversion can only be done after seeding or the torrent breaks as the original files are no longer available to seed. Usenet removes the seeding step completely, so I can do whatever I want with the files as soon as they’ve downloaded, which in it self only takes 5min.
VPN is probably a good idea regardless of what you use, yeah. I haven’t used a VPN in 20+ years of pirating. 😅 Probably a bad idea. 🫣
Torrents I’m fine with seeding. I never stop seeding my downloads. More data for the people!
I only download H.265 releases, so no need to reencode. I just dump all my downloaded movies in a movies/ directory, and all my shows in series/{Show Name}/{season XX boxset}/. Plex recognized everything fine, and now Jellyfin does as well after ditching Plex (because Plex don’t give af about their users, as I’ve noticed, story for another time).
I’m surprised Usenet content is mostly just H.264. sounds a bit behind the times.
Anyway, filled one 4 TB recently which is like ten years old, recently been getting closer and closer to filling a 10 TB drive, and got a completely unused 24 TB drive waiting to be installed. Bought while storage was still cheap. 😅 Should be set for the coming years.
That together with the top speeds of my tracker, and free price, hard to beat unless you’re worried about your ISP cracking down on you (which I’m not really as I’m based east of the pond).
I think I’ll hold off on Usenet for the time being.
I appreciate all the advice! 🌹