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Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

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Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#91
post #15

Dislike this kind of story appearing in HN. We're all well educated people with high earning potential who should be capable of buying movies, not using our talent to rip them off. I'd hate to see HN develop a bad reputation because of stuff like this.

The only viable way for me to purchase a large majority of shows my wife and I enjoy watching are to maintain a cable subscription, loaded with channels that I don't care about. I can't justify paying nearly $100 CAD / month. (We pay for Netflix, Spotify, and have used Google Play to buy episodes of certain shows)

You justify piracy because the legal method (having a cable subscription) is inconvenient?

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#93
post #85

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people worldwide have had their lives destroyed by this. For enjoying art. The War on the fans is immoral, hateful and wasteful. Those who enact it have stolen more from artists than anyone.

Hundreds of thousands destroyed ? I think you will have to back that up with some evidence.

The evidence is trivially googleable in every country and language.

Most commonly it is lost internet access or fines of only a few thousands.

A few thousand is beyond a lot of people, especially in this endless recession.

It can be confiscation of equipment and has led to loss of employment.

People have been jailed for it, faced years of uncertainty over extradition.

Parents, children, teachers, grandmothers, pretty much everyone knows someone who has had at least some trouble.

That is not to mention the technological stagnation, the denial of the blind the right to convert documents to speech, works unavailable in whole countries, the trumping of fair-use by DRM, the hours lost trying to convert media, the denial of access to publicly funded science.

The invasive anti-privacy laws, the time wasted fighting SOPA, PIPA, the clipper chip, &c.

Those who stood in court up faced legal destruction akin to Jammie Thomas, in every country.

The chilling effect on innovation & technological takeup.

Napster was the killer app that kickstarted broadband adoption in the UK, nevermore.

Kids who love music would get into coding - but music startups, even highly legitimate ones are a total no go - the monopolies are too entrenched and stupid.

New cultural forms, remix and mashup are outlawed - NWA's original wall of sound was a cultural dead end as licensing the thousands of samples is impossible.

A entire new form of black American music outlawed.

The loss of orphaned works and rare episodes.

The prosecution, hounding & subsequent death of Aaron Schwartz.

The harm cause by these monopolies is vast and unnecessary.

It could be solved overnight by a blanket license and collection agencies - just like it was for radio.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#95

This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined. Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have ac…

As self-righteous as it often sounds, this type of fight against consumerism really is admirable. That said, I think in way these types of tools actually help people to move in the direction that you're going (or have gone). Setting up x y and z streaming servers and downloading 38 movies at a time (because patience is a virtue) so you have a large on-demand catalogue isn't really less consumerist than having tools t…

I wasn't really advocating a huge library either. I think the idea I have is that there's not really a benefit to trying to 'optimize' watching movies.

I guess I see it in the same way as healthy eating, or something. I really bloody like cookies. They're super tasty. If I end up with pack of freshly baked cookies they're gone in a few hours. So why give myself that temptation?

What I actually want is the ability to do it. I think it's good for my mental health to have a treat every now and then, but not have it take over my life. So basically, it should be difficult, but not too difficult.

In a similar vein, downloading a YouTube video before watching it gives me that window of self control before there's more exciting stuff battering me in the face to continue.

I've been using computers and Internet since childhood - I'm not a luddite by any means. But I think it's far too easy nowadays to get caught in bad behaviour patterns because of the instantaneous nature. It takes active effort to digest deep topics.

I don't think I'm a pious enough person to be self righteous! Maybe I'd feel different if I were more financially secure and had more time for pure leisure? I don't know. :)

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#96
I know there are a lot of people saying the breaking the rarest first rule will be really bad for swarm health but it seems to me that with the rise of faster connections it seems reasonable that you can stream a torrent, keeping a reasonable buffer of a few blocks and then with any spare bandwidth download the torrent with a standard rarest first strategy and seed whilst doing so.

That said I think purely streaming is bad for torrenting and even though it will happen we should encourage something that is better for maintaining health of swarm.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#97

This looks like a way to break BitTorrent, as other posters have outlined. Streaming in general (apart from via a local server) frustrates me. The entire idea is simply a way of relinquishing control to an external body. Hard drives are not that expensive, and patience is a virtue. I'm very happy that youtube-dl exists, for example, because otherwise when Google disappears I'll lose a lot of useful material I have ac…

Streaming doesn't break bittorrent that easily. It's not optimal for the health of a torrent cloud, but practice has shown that it's not a major issue.

Plenty of torrent streaming apps, most notably Popcorn Time (http://popcorntime.sh and source code at https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop) has existed for a long time now.

Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#99
post #9

I'm deeply concerned about popularizing torrent streaming. A few leechers breaking "rarest-first" might not cause much harm. But if most leechers become streamers, torrents will lose their efficiency in distributing less-popular content. Transmission implemented a "streaming" feature once, that didn't actually stream. It just stopped fetching pieces "with the same rarity" randomly. They still got too much heat for ad…

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Re: Stream PirateBay movies directly from CLI

#100
post #77
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't count on it. The Netherlands is basically a state of the U.S. As far as I know many of the Popcorn Time authors were Dutch as well and they were threatened into taking it down too.

What a complete bullshit.

So you're saying Wessley is safe? Is that your opinion as a Dutch law expert? Maybe before making such dismissive comments you should consider that maybe Wessley is reading this and forming an opinion on whether this silly little github project will have any significant impact on his life.

Despite what many people associate The Netherlands with, we're not a liberal state. We're a democratic bureaucracy that leans heavily towards pleasing our trade partners and making sure the country is pleasant to live in for our citizens. That means we will extradite hackers, spy on our inner cities with cameras and force our ISP's to keep communication records of everyone.

Every once in a while citizens get pissed off and some policy is reversed or diminished, but usually they don't care enough. I'm not saying Wessley will be fined or worse, but just that should this small app draw the ire from whatever big publisher corporation, he definitely is not 'safe' just from being in The Netherlands.

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