CerebralHawks

I think it depends on the ISP. There are a few small ones that do not GAF what you do. I’ve been told “we do not care what you download, we only care that you can.” There are a few big ones that are too big to care what people do on their network.

That said, you should always take precautions. A VPN is a good place to start.

I can see it. They got caught in your use of from, which isn’t even incorrect. Via would have been a better word, but from works here just as well.

They’re reading it as you’re talking about pirating content that is owned by (from) your ISP, not what you meant, which is talking about pirating content from behind or via or even using your ISP. I guess through would have worked, too.

But the difference between me and them is, while I realise another word would have worked better, I understood exactly what you meant and didn’t think it was an issue. Though I admit I thought the first thing… at first. Hey, it’s early.

YouTube is not doing good. I get flickering on Apple TV. On my Mac videos play without sound (computer isn’t muted) or they take way too long to load. Granted I don’t pay, but wow. Google is not doing so well.

I’m old school, I just get the subs and integrate them with MkvToolNix. I was always super picky about my files, so I’d go in there and change around what the active/enabled/default streams were, give the streams better names (e.g. Stereo, Surround 5.1, whatever was appropriate — I never included the language, since the tag handled that). I’d even use en-us or en-gb if it was specifically one or the other (e.g. James Bond, Harry Potter for the latter). I even insisted my subtitles be in English for English movies, and American English for American English movies. So like, the word “honor” in a Harry Potter movie would not fly with me, it must say “honour” because… that’s what the English specifically say. (Speaking of Harry Potter, no “Sorcerer’s Stone” bullshit in my library, I have the “Philosopher’s Stone” version because, of course I do. The first one was the only one with a regional title.)

So because of that, I can use Jellyfin and the subs work just fine.

I am familiar with Plex’s auto sub downloader. Despite owning a lifetime Plex Pass, it would put ads in the subtitles. That may be on the site’s end though, not Plex’s.

Still a Plex user, and I’m on a Mac, but all this shit works whether you’re a Windows user or a Mac user. Probably Linux, too. I tried Jellyfin recently. It’s fine if your clients are running Android, but they are just not there on Apple devices yet. My computer (M2 Pro) is plenty powerful enough to run both servers (servers use very little resources when not serving) but I just don’t see a need for Jellyfin in my rotation. I do root for the project though, I want it to succeed, so I’ll try it every year or so.

IMO the best way to do it is to acquire lossless (e.g. FLAC) and compress it yourself, if you want to. I use the MPEG4/AAC Low Complexity filter in fre:ac at 192kbps. Makes .m4a files about 10MB each. They sound great. AAC is supposed to be about twice as efficient as MP3 (and a looser license) but the files I make are about the size of MP3 320k files. Which tells me they’re about twice as good.

Apple gets associated with M4A/AAC a lot, but that’s just because they use it. I do use Apple hardware, but the same hardware runs MP3 without issue. The only issue I had with AAC was getting the old Winamp (2.x) to play it, back when we used Windows. But even then I found an input plugin and from there it was smooth sailing. It’s basically superior to MP3 in every way. (But for free licensing I think Ogg Vorbis will be a better fit.) (I also stream it via my Plex server, so if a device can’t play M4A — rare — Plex will transcode it.)

Anyway, I use Nyaa for a source (nyaa.si) but that is primarily Japanese/Asian media. That’s mostly what I listen to though. I do like some western rock from the 80s and 90s, but as the west stopped pushing rock music, I went where it was being pushed, which was Japan (and a lot of those guys sing in English, like ONE OK ROCK and Survive Said the Prophet — though, to be fair, 1OR is basically an American band now; while the guys were born/raised in Japan, they’ve lived in Los Angeles for years now, are signed to Fueled by Ramen, and they want to be more like Paramore and Fall Out Boy, which is fine, but it feels a bit disingenuous calling them Japanese rock in 2025).

I just downloaded MKBHD’s iPhone Air review, and it played perfectly. 1920p whatever that means (somewhere north of 1440p but not quite 2160p… or 2160p/4K but slightly letterboxed). AV1 (Ay-Vee-Wun, not Ay-Vee-Eye), 30fps… looks and sounds great.

Glad to see the community fixed it fast.

I use jdownloader2 which probably uses yt-dl on the back end. But it also downloads from a metric fuckton of other sites, too. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of downloaders. And it’s Java, so it runs just as well on my Mac as it did on Windows back when I used that. (Wish they had an official dark theme that was easy to set up though. I know how to do it manually but can’t be arsed.)