this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
96 points (97.1% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54443 readers
261 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm in my first month of Usenet. I own several popular BluRay Movies but thought I'd save time ripping them manually and instead see what I could get off Usenet (NZBGeek + Eweka) now that my niece is visiting and needs entertainment.

I noticed a number of popular titles are consistently difficult to obtain ("aborted, cannot be completed"), even when live within only a few days, or even hours.

I assume this is a very vigilant DMCA takedown bot. How commonplace is this? And why does it only apply to some titles and not others?

Is it worth continuing with Usenet? I thought paying for content would ensure a certain "quality" of experience. So far, I'm a bit disappointed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm inexperienced with Usenet, but why is it better than torrenting?

I have 5-6 trackers which provides me basically everything I need and it sounds like Usenet might be similar in that regard.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The main benefit is that you don't need to use a VPN, so you get full download speeds. Also the availability and download speed isn't dependent on seeders, so more obscure content tends to survive longer on Usenet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's interesting about the life time. I've actually heard the opposite, where niche/old things can be easier to get from specific trackers vs Usenet because of their lack of popularity.

I suppose it's probably mostly about which websites you are a part of and if they specialize in specific content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

It really does depend, so I mainly was speaking from my personal experience. But this is also why using both is recommended for *aar, because then you get the best of both worlds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah, Usenet servers all have a maximum retention time, usually around 3000 days or something like that. Any articles older than the retention time of your server won’t exist for you to grab, but stuff is usually reuploaded frequently. With torrents a super niche thing requires someone seeding the content all the time for it to be consistently accessible, while Usenet requires someone to reupload it once every 5-10 years (barring takedowns) which imo is more consistently stable, but as the other poster said having both ensures your bases are covered. I personally don’t really torrent anything beyond oddball bbc2+ documentaries at this point though.