Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.

But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn't, you'd be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.

Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it's just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.

For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.

My family still has netflix so I use that sometimes. But... most of the time I'll download from a few places for movies:

1. rarbg, though the original went down I found a new one at https://therarbg.com/
2. yts, again the original went down but I've been using https://yts.mx/ which is fantastic.
3. stremio. set it up with some plugins and it's pretty useful.
4. this one is a little weird but https://databasegdriveplayer.xyz/player.php?imdb= I have a browser extension to pop up the relevant link on the imdb page, so I can just click that. not always best quality, but for some rarer titles it really does end up helping.

for client I've always really used transmission. it's small, comfy, works.

If I actually cared about watching stuff, I probably would be to. Right now all of my entertainment is YouTube/Twitch with AdBlock, so kind of pirating? Maybe when I actually bring a girl home I'll pirate something to watch if I can't just steal my parents Netflix login still lol. I have zero intentions of ever subscribing to streaming services.

I'm using Qbittorrent and LimeTorrents.

This is why i pay for spotify, because it's so much easier than downloading and hosting music. The music industry got it right. Sign up with any music service and you'll get likely the same or very similar music libraries. But with TV and movies, there's all this fucking exclusive shit. They can eat shit if they think I'm gonna pay more for streaming than fucking cable/pay TV. Fuck that shit.

It's so bad, that I've gone almost a decade without watching a movie outside of public television.

I prefer much more to pay for Real Debrid even when their servers are not as perfect as Netflix or alike, they are cheaper and have all the content that you'd normally want to see.

If you want to share those downloads in an easy netflix-like way you should consider a small homeserver with Jellyfin. Even a newer raspberry pi is strong enough for streaming to 2 or maybe 3 people at the same time, unless files need transcoding to different codecs.

I was mainly torrenting before Netflix but ever since NF has gone to hell I've been on the lookout for a more family-friendly way to stream. After trying out a few options (Kodi, fmovies, Stremio etc) I've found that nothing beats the Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid method. You do have to pay subscription for Real Debrid but it's really cheap and not compulsory.

Deluge leaks your ip address if you use a VPN, I use QBittorrent for this reason.