gila

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

2 simultaneous sessions on different devices/IP’s = inconsequential. A 3rd simultaneous session = auth tokens revoked on all authorised devices, and you get a warning that lasts for 1 week. If 3 simultaneous sessions occur again within that time then your account gets removed.

I’m mostly only using CCWGTV, both the original 4k model and the budget 1080p one. Neither have performance issues for me (except before filtering out 4k releases on the 1080p model)

I’m just aiming for the simplest/smoothest experience as possible, not so much for myself but so that I can mail it out to my mum who lives out in the bush and just tell her to enter her wifi password and open kodi. She’s able to manage from there without having to worry about hdr/dv content compatibility with her display, or default audio language/subtitle display etc.

In kodi you can edit settings.xml for IPTV Simple Client addon to point playlist items to a given category in Seren, make a playlist linking to those categories a favourite, and configure Kodi to open to the favourites menu on launch. That way she has a fully on-rails and custom experience based on her preferences from the point that she runs it.

I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc

Pay for real-debrid and set up a kodi addon like Seren on a streaming box. You’ll get an equivalent experience to paid/official streaming platforms without having to pay for them all, including browsing popular shows without having to download them ahead of time or manage a home server. It’s still torrenting under the hood, just a lot more convenient

Well at least we get ours back when we geoblock them from watching the AFL/NRL grand final. Right? Oh, no one watches it? Oh.

You sound like you aren’t from Australia! Vast majority of geoblocking is for free content actually (selectively free, that is). Things like Netflix US having different titles to Canada isn’t really geoblocking, unless it’s for a Netflix Original (not aware of any such cases)

Look for a dvdrip. At the time the episodes were originally aired they would pre on p2p sites as like 35mb .avi’s in 240p, you don’t want that

If you pirated the album, presumably it is free of any DRM. In this case the most that itunes could infer is that you didn’t buy it from the itunes store, which isn’t the same thing as inferring that you pirated it. So it’s safe to assume whatever you’re experiencing isn’t an antipiracy measure, but either a bug or some issue with the album rip you downloaded. Without knowing the source I’d lean toward the latter, because lossy transcodes, bad rips and bad tags are commonplace in many places where pirated music is available.

Feels like you’re describing growing out of p2p

I used to download stuff from XDCC bots on IRC. That was even weirder than Usenet, you’d send the bot a specific chat command for it to serve you a file.

I feel like ‘my own home streaming service’ is effectively what I have in comparison to those days.

No problem, I was drunk waiting for the train home so not very well written response but I’ll always jump on the opportunity to recommend this method to someone. There’s no downsides I can think of, just make sure to set your audio language / subtitle defaults in the Kodi settings (not addon settings)

It does have the general drawbacks of the scene such as different subtitle formats for different releases / tv networks, e.g. conflicts between English and English (SDH). You can install the opensubtitles addon to resolve this same like with Plex

I’ve used real-debrid in conjunction with the seren add-on for Kodi for years. I have the same setup on all my PCs, my phone, my Chromecast. I would say it works identically on everything but I had playback issues using the Kodi app on my Xbox (well documented issue related to that system)

1. No, you just scrape the debrid cache on demand upon selecting an episode/movie, as long as someone has already cached that release it’ll just start streaming. If not, you can add it to the cache inside the add-on, rescrape and try again
2. There’s no encoding happening, it’s just direct streaming whatever release you selected. For release of duplicate titles when you search it will show the IMDb/tvdb thumbnail and you just choose the one that looks right. The only releases that weren’t exactly what I was looking for was when Barbie just came out and some cam rips were floating around, the first result I scraped was for the animated Barbie Netflix series. No porn, I’m confident enough of that to have set this method up for my mother also.
3. Sounds redundant. If you wanna try this method for ease of use, a simple netflix-esque experience for any content, there is no comparison. If you wanna spend time watching your logs auto scrape the episode you’re waiting to drop, this isn’t the method. The only mechanism needed for routing your search to a matching file in the debrid cache is scraping a magnet link (via a search, or trakt recommendations etc) which matches a file previously cached on the server. “It just works”
4. Not if you’re using a standard implementation with A4kScrapers. Google how to set up seren on Kodi. You may run into some P2P release for older stuff, for most people this is totally fine

All in all as someone that has pirated music, tv shows and movies for several decades now it actually aggravates me how user-unfriendly the Plex/emby/jellyfin experience really is. I can certainly understand people getting enthusiastic about a new hobby of library management, but that shit gets old and I just want to watch my shows. The only reason I can imagine why people don’t do this is because it costs money. I struggle to imagine how these same people aren’t already paying money for tv/movie content and getting way less value/$ to boot.

As a honourable mention I authd this setup on my mother’s Chromecast to my real-debrid account, and we have no issues both using it simultaneously. However, one time when I was downloading a torrent using the debrid on my PC with VPN, while streaming on my TV without VPN, and my mother also simultaneously streaming in a different city, it booted us all off and I had to reauth. No issues since, mum calls it the dodgy box

Seems as safe as mostly any public torrent site to me. Use ublock and it should be fine, provided you aren’t downloading and running a random .exe labelled as Avatar 3 or something

Here’s the link to the episodes on bilibili, my VPN doesn’t have any China endpoint so they’re blocked: https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ep748347

Had a look in my usual areas and found listings but no sources. Listings were only added recently though (11/30/23) so maybe international distribution is being organised.

Oh, so they’re aware the stated actions would have no impact on VPN accessibility beyond potentially restricting India endpoints?

Either that or they’re planning to play server whack-a-mole with overseas private companies whom themselves have no control over access from India

Edit: or it’s just a non-statement to misdirect

That statement just screams “I don’t understand how the internet works”