Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

nix allows for flakes which are 100% reproducible (ie. you copy paste a flake it would do the intended stuff only) , this make me realize that now we can have flakes for games like do you want inscryption , sure add this flake and this would install all dependencies and lutris etc. and you just have to link us to the gog-games.to / fitgirl-repack / dodi-repack variant (preferrably , gog-games.to since you can verify it with gog) (i have picked only the goat of gaming piracy from megathread) , imo this can give huge boost to gaming in linux and wine is literally really close to giving native performance and you wont even see the difference

the same logic can be applied to ms excel , powerpoint etc. but i dont see the point after using libreoffice (literally the best thing ever)

Is this something in the metadata of the file?

or even pseudo-incriminated for attempting to maintain our own life.

It seems so stupid that I'm like a suspect for wanting an exchange of information without dropping my pants and bending over. No, I don't want cookies. Yes I want to read the article but no, I don't want to "sign up."

It makes me feel like being a f*cking hermit. But I prefer to pirate. Even though I'm not that good at it. Screw them. I got two private trackers, a VPN, and I hope that's enough.

I am officially an old person, as I have subscribed to a magazine. It’s niche, but it’s been around a long time, and having enjoyed a lot of issues in my childhood that were given to me for free, I feel I should give back.

I’m wondering if there are precautions I should take. Can any sort of copy protection be put into PDFs that I should strip out? If I share them as a torrent, should I be worried that the publisher can tell where they came from?

I'm happy to adopt a new podcast app if it has sponsorblock natively or through a plug-in. Otherwise let me know if there's some other way to make it work. I don't see why it wouldn't work as all of the segments tagged for skipping are crowdsourced which would also work for Podcasts.

🏴‍☠️ AHOY fellow pirates and happy new pirate year to all! ARRR! 🏴‍☠️

Welcome to the first edition of yearly scene releases stats for 2023. I've already posted this to the piracy subreddit and now here.

Are you guys interested in these kind of stats? I already provide some other (game related) reddit communitites with stats and thought it could be also interesting for more general statistics about all piracy sections. Please let me know if you have ideas about interesting stats, I'll see if I can make it happen.

Enjoy the numbers!

• What is "The Scene"?
• What is a "PreDB"?
• What does "Nuked" mean?

TOTAL SCENE RELEASES BY SECTION

I have a total of 77 sections in my PreDB. The sections in here are combined for a better overview. Numbers in brackets show the change to the values relative to the previous year.

Total: 697.070 scene releases in 2023

So, biggest increases to 2022 would be FLAC music releases, EBOOK's, ANiME, GAMES (PC) and MOViES (HD). Huge losses on ABOOK's, BOOKWARE and TV (SD). The APPS section may be faulty for 2022, have to check the data.

TOP 20 GROUPS WITH MOST RELEASES

The sections in here are combined for a better overview, same as above.

TOP 20 MOST NUKED GROUPS

MOST NUKED SECTIONS

MOST NUKED SECTIONS

ACCUMULATED RELEASE SIZE FOR 2023

From the 697.070 scene releases, 454.037 of them have file + size information.

They total to: 754.73 TB (754.729.230 MB) in 8.3 million files (8.280.197).

No idea about the size of the missing information, so the real value should be much higher.

NOTES

• Only Scene Release Groups, no p2p or individuals.
• Powered by predb.net

HELP!!!

I have three situations, all would be very helpful if I could manually update the mappings of individual files or albums. If this is the wrong sub/community, can you point me in the right directions?

1. I have an album that i accidentally mapped to the wrong artist/album combination and now it won't let me change it because I also tagged it, even renaming doesn't help.
2. I have an album where the 1st and 6th song switched during the mapping/renaming/tagging process and now, even if I rename the files and retag them manually using id3, both lidarr and plex think they're the wrong track
3. I have an album that's not only a standalone album, but also a disc in a box set, I'd rather have it as part of the box set, but can't figure out how to unmap/remap the album to move it to under the box set, when I have the rest of the box set already set up properly

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

I apologize if this video has already been posted here. I did a rudimentary look through the posts of the past few days and couldn't see it.

Ahoy! I would like to be able to browse movies in Kodi and directly add them to Radarr.

Currently I'm using the TheMovieDb Helper Add-On in Kodi for browsing movies, and then add them to the Trakt Watchlist. In Radarr I'm monitoring the Watchlist and automatically add the movies that way.

Is there a better way to do this?
For example, can I configure/use some special player in TheMovieDb Helper for adding the movies directly to Radarr or Ombi when I clilck Play? Or is there an other Add-on that does something like that out of the box?

UPDATE:

I'm working on a plugin that can be used as a player for TheMovieDb Helper. But instead of actually playing anything, it uses the information to add the movie/show to Radar/Sonarr via the API.

The PoC was successful, now I have to put everything neatly together.

I'll create a new post once the first version is out.

Sorry this feels like it should be obvious but I'm researching the best method to archive links mostly for personal use and potentially sending articles to my e-reader via Pocket which requires a URL.

Title...

From the article:

When we went to our seats, the wait staff let us know that despite the fact that the previews were playing, we wouldn’t know until the movie actually started whether we could see the film or not. If it didn’t work, the screen would just turn black. Luckily, the film went through without a hitch.

tabula rasa registration is open

:::

It's just tba

And fuck. I really miss plex. I've had Netflix and Hulu forever as family won't let me cancel. Decided to sign up to Paramount + for some Trek. Twice in lower decks it didn't save my watched episodes. Doesn't mark episode as watched if you exit during the credits. And multiple playback issues.

Wanted to add no ad Disney to the Hulu for some Doctor Who. Only the add supported is available through Hulu. So I'd have to cancel, wait for the month to end and sign up via Disney. Deal with ads or pay almost double the duo plan costs, or include ESPN, and honestly fuck sports.

What is so difficult about just providing a decent service for a fair price? Why is plex like a decade ahead of the streaming UI's? I'm trying to give you fucks money and you're making it extremely difficult.

...I just accidentally downloaded my entire watch history from the beginning of time. Stopped it by hitting airplane mode. It was at 1750+ and growing.

Oops.

EDIT: Thank you so much everyone! There's so much help for me here, and I'll recommend anyone with similar question as me to read the comments

Basically title.

I have the DVDs and I have the hardware to burn them to my PC.

But the file size is too much. What software would be ideal to get the best quality with the lowest file size?

I'm going for file sizes per movie at around 2-3gb max.

I tried fre:ac but got an error from cddb when trying to connect to the database. Looking to rip to both FLAC and to Opus. Ideally with the latest codec updates.

Any recommendations?

So I was looking into getting port forwarding set up and I realized just how closed-off the internet has gotten since the early days. It's concerning. It used to be you would buy your own router and connect it to the internet, and that router would control port-forwarding and what-have-you.

Now, your ISP provides your router, which runs their firmware, which (in my case) doesn't even have the option to enable port forwarding.

It gets worse - because ISPs are choosing NATs over IPv6, so even if you install a custom firmware on your router without it getting blacklisted by your ISP, you still can't expose your server to the internet because the NAT refuses to forward traffic your way. They even devise special NAT schemes like symmetric NAT to thwart hole punching.

Basically this all means that I have to purchase my web hosting separately. Or relay all the traffic through an unnecessary third party, introducing a point of failure.

It's frustrating.

I like to control my stuff. I don't like to depend on other people or be in a position where I have to trust someone not to fuck with my shit. Like, if the only thing outside my apartment that mattered to my website was a DNS record, I'd be really happy with that.

Edit: TIL ISPs in the US don't have NATs

Edit 2: OMG so much advice. My knowledge about computers is SO clearly outdated, I have a lot of things to read up on.

Edit 3: There's definitely a CGNAT involved since the WAN ip in the router config is not the same as the one I get when I use a website that echos my IP address. Far as I can tell ~~my devices don't get unique IPv6 addresses either~~. (funnily enough, if I check my IP address on my phone using roaming data, there's no IPv6 address at all). It's a router/modem combo, at least I think since there's only one device in my apartment (maybe there's a modem managing the whole complex or something?). And it doesn't have a bridge mode, except for OTT. Might try plugging my own router into it, but it feels like a waste of time and money from what I'm seeing. Probably best to just host services over a VPN or smth.

Edit 4: Devices do get unique IPv6 addresses, but it's moot since I can't do anything but ping them. I guess it wouldn't be port forwarding but something else that I would have to do that my router doesn't support

I want to be able to type yt-dlp [url] and have it automatically use --sponsorblock-remove CATS to remove sponsored section from the download file without having to type --sponsorblock-remove CATS everytime. Is this possible within yt-dlp?

enabling --write-subs, --write-thumbnail, by default for subtitles and thumbnails would also be convenient

I got the mOnkrus "Master Collection 2024" and I cannot use Premiere Pro or After Effects without getting that "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application."

However, I also installed Photoshop, Media Encoder, Audition, and Illustrator and they all work fine

I tried a few things like running these on cmd:

for %i in (%windir%\system32*.dll) do regsvr32.exe /s %i

for %i in (%windir%\system32*.ocx) do regsvr32.exe /s %i

as mentioned in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/g9o4iw/suddenly_got_error_0xc0000142_whenever_opening/

I also just tried running as administrator, deleting and reinstalling just those two apps (Premiere Pro and After Effects), and running in compatibility mode - nothing worked

In another post I saw someone said " My problem was that i had the letter ß in my game path which messed things up.Changing that has fixed the problem" but I have no idea what that means, and that person was referring to a cracked video game, not anything adobe related so I don't know if it's relevant

Most of the other solutions I found were just about specific applications that weren't relevant to Adobe

The only thing that I can think would be causing this that I sort of ran into is that I did have an authentic version of all of this at one point and someone said that this error may be caused by old files from that - I still have project files from Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and probably something else, but Photoshop works fine even with those old project files and Premiere Pro doesn't so I feel like that isn't this issue (maybe it is and I need to delete them which is fine if that's the case, but I'd rather see if there are another other things to try since Photoshop seems to work fine with those files present)

After I tried everything above, I just searched random "Adobe, Creative Cloud, etc." keywords in the Windows search just to find any other files and I found some random ones (not from the mOnkrus installation) and deleted those for fun which also didn't work

Is there a way to guarantee that I deleted all the necessary old files I feel like I am just randomly searching here - I've heard people using CCleaner, is that a good idea? - I haven't used it so I am not sure if that would work for what I need it

Also just kind of creating this post for anyone else who has this problem to see what I've tried since there seemed to be a lot of others who couldn't find a solution as well - and if I do find a solution that works, I'll try and give an update

My concern is viruses and I was curious if you could force an internal hdd/external hdd to ONLY connect to the virtual machine in vmware and make is so that it doesn't connect to the host at all. I know that you can connect external drive to vmware but it will auto connect to the host if no vmware machine is running.

Obviously I have a VPN kill switch so VPN leaks shouldn't be an issue, but as I said my main concern is viruses and my ideal setup would probably be having external drive or an internal drive ONLY able to connect to a vmware virutal machine, but perhaps this can't be done? Or isn't the correct setup for safety?

I looked into seed boxes and tbh I would rather just seed torrents from my own machine and not pay for a service like that.

I mean perhaps the best setup is to have a completly seperate machine for torrenting purposes, but for me this is out of the budget right now..

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is unable to get a tight grip on live streaming piracy. The company sends out thousands of takedown notices to protect its live broadcasts but nearly a quarter of these remain unaddressed after an hour. UFC calls on online service providers to step up their game, which includes 'instantaneous' takedowns and putting a stop to repeat infringers.

The UFC has promoted mixed martial arts fights for three decades. Today, however, the company is also fighting a battle of its own against online piracy.

Unauthorized views of UFC events have taken off in recent years. The organization is trying to put a stop to these pirated livestreams, but that’s proving to be a drawn-out battle.

Last week, General Counsel Riché McKnight shared UFC’s concerns with lawmakers during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. While site-blocking discussions dominated the hearing, UFC’s comments are worth highlighting separately.

“Watch UFC Free”

McKnight’s testimony describes the piracy problem as widespread and costly. Pirated livestreams can get millions of views and these free alternatives result in lower subscriptions revenues.

The problem isn’t limited to people who record or stream UFC events on their phones. It regularly involves organized crime groups that tap into source signals and rebroadcasts them to profit from the advertising views they generate.

These people also brazenly advertise on social media platforms to attract viewers to their pirate websites, with slogans on social media sites such as “Watch UFC Free,” McKnight notes.

“[T]hey will then post those livestreams and recorded videos to those sites, and those videos will often collect hundreds of thousands or millions of views before they are taken down.”

“Expeditious”

According to UFC, several legislative hurdles prevent the company from being more efficient on the takedown front. They include the relatively ‘slow’ response time to DMCA takedown notices.

Under U.S. copyright law, online services are required to “expeditiously” respond to takedown notices if they want to keep their safe harbor protections. However, the law doesn’t define what the term expeditious entails.

“[Online services] often will claim to us that they are removing content expeditiously even when they allow a livestream to stay up for the entirety of a UFC event or remove recorded content days later,” Knight explains.

It can sometimes take hours or days before online services take action. This is a problem, since the value of UFC recordings and live streams diminishes quickly after the event is over.

The UFC calculated that for each event, it sends an average of 1,173 takedown requests for pirated livestreams and an additional 2,246 takedown requests for recorded content. 26% of the pirated livestreams remained online an hour after the takedown was sent. For recorded UFC content, 74% was still up after an hour.

Instant Takedowns

UFC suggests updating the legislative language to clarify the term “expeditious” as that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

“This issue can be easily remedied by adding a statutory definition to clarify what ‘expeditiously’ means for the purposes of determining whether OSPs are eligible for a safe harbor from liability based on the infringing conduct of their users.

“Specifically, we believe the law should be clear that, for live events specifically, ‘expeditiously’ means ‘instantaneously’ or ‘near instantaneously’,” McKnight adds.

Replacing it with ‘near instantaneously’ still doesn’t set a specific time limit, of course. But it does suggest that taking more than a day to process a livestreaming takedown notice is too long.

[..]

A copy of the full written testimony from UFC General Counsel Riché McKnight is available here (pdf)

I think I might cancel. I'm not watching ads and I'm not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don't know if I'd end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though....