I’ve never been into torrenting stuff but usually just do streaming via the usual sites (I usually use any site that fmhy recommends). However, I’ve noticed that most pirate streaming sites have much slower load rates and need a long time to buffer than commercial streaming sites. This often means that I cannot watch an episode in full but have to pause to buffer… As you can tell, I’m a total noob. What can I do to have a nicer experience streaming pirated content?
(And sure, that’s probably why people get into torrenting. I already got a raspberry pi that I intent to use for this, but I couldn’t find the energy to set it all up yet.)
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Install Video DownloadHelper for Firefox. Open whatever you want to watch and copy it’s url from Video DownloadHelper. Now, either open that url in mpv (might require yt-dlp) or download it (I’d also recommend yt-dlp for this, since DownloadHelper sometimes embeds watermarks) and watch wherever
Real Debrid has very high transfer speeds and it’s cheap
Many will recommend you use Stremio instead. You’ll probably want to use a VPN depending on your region though.
Or a debrid service
This is the way
Back when I was a streamer I used Kodi with the add-ons (I was in a subreddit where the current good ones got posted now and then) and had a Real Debrid account.
It was really convenient, maybe give it a go with your Pi. There’s an OS you can bang on it (is it openelec? Libre-elec? Something like that) and just plug it into your TV. You’ll have to work out controlling it in a convenient way, I have a little keyboard about the size of a remote with a usb dongle. It’s got a little touchpad for the mouse and cost me fuck all on Amazon.
You do have to pay for Real Debrid but it’s totally worth the price and will get you used to paying for piracy.
So the cycle goes:
Install Kodi and play with the free streams and think it’s pretty great, get frustrated because you can’t watch that one thing, finally bite the bullet and get a month of Real Debrid, tell your friends how ace Real Debrid is.
Just skip that and get Real Debrid once you have your Pi set up.
So my first thought is: Download the entire file BEFORE watching it. This ensures that you won’t have to buffer while watching and it’ll run 100% smoothly.
Downloading files isn’t very difficult generally; just go to some (torrenting) website, copy the magnet or download the torrent and import it into your torrent client.
When you have your .mp4, .mkv, .whatever file, you can simply click on it and play it on your preferred media player (such as VLC). However, you may want to watch it on some other device… Easy solution (for TVs) is just connect your laptop to your TV with an HDMI cable, duplicate your screen and start watching.
But if you actually want to stream, you’ll have to tread into the self-hosting zone. Meaning that you run a media server that hosts all your content and your devices (whether it’s a TV, android phone, iPhone, whatever) can access and play the content from your server.
This is a very, very big topic that I won’t cover in a single comment. I will point you in the right direction and mention Jellyfin; Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server that you can set up to manage and stream your files with
