Technology

I'm doing my part!

My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i've got left at this point is netflix and spotify.

Netflix pricing almost has me there.

Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹

There are barely any real fansubs left. Most are Crunchyroll, Netflix or Funimation restyled and maybe retimed plus checked if they spent a lot of time on it.

That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.

And still can't offer the full catalog in my country

I cancelled it because I forgot I had it a few days ago. This is merely coincidence to me but nice coincidence.

Kind of miss how much effort went into fan subs, with notes explaining things that didn't exactly translate without context...

Honestly, piracy is easier than it ever has been. You can automate torrents or usenet downloads with the *arr suite. There’s a bit of a learning curve to get it set up… But once it’s running, it’s basically just “add show to your watchlist” and ~15 minutes later it shows up on your media list with full metadata, subtitles, etc ready to go.

Plenty of people will suggest stremio, which is… Contentious. It works for streaming by downloading a torrent to cache. After you watch it, stremio automatically deletes the cache. So in day to day operation, it uses very little hard drive space and primarily relies on your internet speed and properly seeded torrents. But that latter part is the problem… Since it deletes the cache, it isn’t actually seeding anything in return. If everyone used stremio, nobody would actually be able to use it, because none of the torrents would be seeded. It’s a sort of mass prisoner’s dilemma.

Technically, you can set stremio to keep a rolling cache of {x} size, and it will hold onto the torrents until you start to download something new and it needs that space. But very few people will expect to hit a 1.0 ratio, even with a decently sized cache.

Oh they do remember. They fondly remember those early years piggybacking on strangers goodwill before laughing all the way to the bank.