Woefully Inept
Karazhan Raider
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Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success
- Thread starter Alkorin
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Sickbeard + Newsgroups (the latter is about $6/month for 50mbit down) make it just too convenient to download tv shows. Everything is automated and maybe 30 minutes after a show airs, I get an email that it's ready for viewing on my Boxee. I still have Amazon Prime, mostly for the shipping... but I do watch some of their original content (Alpha House and Mozart in the Jungle are fantastic -- Betas was great, too, but got cancelled). Also nice for catching up on older shows.
Depends on the newsgroup, I suppose. Mine has 1000+ days of data retention, so anything that was uploaded in the last 3 years is fine. Popular movies get re-uploaded much more frequently.
radditsu
Silver Knight of the Realm
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Welp I dropped to the basic channels and of course Netflix. The only thing I really give a crap about is zombifying my sons with Nick jr. while me and the wife clean up and cook, and football. However we are considering moving way before the next season starts, so we have time to pick the best option in the new area, since where we move to does not have U verse.
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Who are you with? Might look into this. I would rather not torrent if I can grab from a newsgroup instead, and I'm not gonna go nuts over a few more bucks per month.
Crone
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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I have easynews, unlimited for $10/month. The retention is kinda a gimmick, because yes, it's possible to get something that's 3 years old, but good luck getting any newer TV show past 1 day.
DMCA notices are extremely rampant on all newsgroups, and so stuff gets taken down all the time. What that means is, you'll see it on a search, but it'll fail.
Remember along with newsgroups you need to find a site to get nzbs from. This has been difficult since NZB Matrix got shut down.
I use Tweaknews, which is based in the Netherlands:Home | TweakNews(edit: unlimited starts at 2.50 Euro/month, but that's with a 1Mbit connection -- who's got the patience for that...)
They send me renewal offers with substantial discounts (20-30%), so it might be worth signing up for the free trial and see if you get those offers as well when the trial expires. Otherwise, sign up for one month and you should get them at the end. They don't do auto-renewals.
Haven't had problems downloading shows that have been posted for a few months (recently started watching Person of Interest, for example, and got all 4 seasons). For some of the older stuff, you may have to try multiple NZBs. I've had good success withOZnzb - The Best NZB Indexer - search and download NZB files.as my search engine for NZBs (and SickBeard can hook into their API for a one-time fee of like $10, at which point everything is automated).
edit: I also useWelcome to chica NZBs-- I don't actually know if they're any better, but SickBeard hooks into that, too, for a one-time $10 fee to get premium access. Figured it's worth having a backup (and I got this one first). However, they're not open to registration, though you can get an invite if you paypal them $10. I don't know if this automatically gives you Premium access.
They send me renewal offers with substantial discounts (20-30%), so it might be worth signing up for the free trial and see if you get those offers as well when the trial expires. Otherwise, sign up for one month and you should get them at the end. They don't do auto-renewals.
Haven't had problems downloading shows that have been posted for a few months (recently started watching Person of Interest, for example, and got all 4 seasons). For some of the older stuff, you may have to try multiple NZBs. I've had good success withOZnzb - The Best NZB Indexer - search and download NZB files.as my search engine for NZBs (and SickBeard can hook into their API for a one-time fee of like $10, at which point everything is automated).
edit: I also useWelcome to chica NZBs-- I don't actually know if they're any better, but SickBeard hooks into that, too, for a one-time $10 fee to get premium access. Figured it's worth having a backup (and I got this one first). However, they're not open to registration, though you can get an invite if you paypal them $10. I don't know if this automatically gives you Premium access.
Crone
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Because it's cheap, and while torrents can sort of be automated, the complete automation you get from Sickbeard is well worth the small price. Plus, I don't have to fuck with ratios, etc.
Void
BAU BAU
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I don't care what people choose to do, but it literally takes me 15 seconds or less per TV episode to put it in its "final resting place" so to speak. With torrents, that is. And it could easily be modified to be completely hands free just like newsgroups I believe.
An RSS feed informs my seedbox it has a show to download, then the seedbox makes a copy and puts it in my Dropbox, which then syncs with my home computer. I typically have my Dropbox sync folder and my TV folder open, so I drag it into the series folder, maximize tinyMediaManager, and a couple of clicks later it is scraped and renamed. The only way it could be faster (for me) is if I or the creator of tMM wrote a script to mimic the specific selections I use.
And from what I understand, I could probably just use Sickbeard and point it at my Dropbox folder and have it automatically do the renaming for me whenever a file shows up in there, negating any benefit newsgroups might have over torrents then, but I sort of like seeing which new shows are available as they come in.
An RSS feed informs my seedbox it has a show to download, then the seedbox makes a copy and puts it in my Dropbox, which then syncs with my home computer. I typically have my Dropbox sync folder and my TV folder open, so I drag it into the series folder, maximize tinyMediaManager, and a couple of clicks later it is scraped and renamed. The only way it could be faster (for me) is if I or the creator of tMM wrote a script to mimic the specific selections I use.
And from what I understand, I could probably just use Sickbeard and point it at my Dropbox folder and have it automatically do the renaming for me whenever a file shows up in there, negating any benefit newsgroups might have over torrents then, but I sort of like seeing which new shows are available as they come in.
The issue is that you have to maintain two copies of the file until your ratio is finalized.
My Synology back in California is automatically downloading all shows for me and my wife. I am in North Carolina and it would be a royal pain in the ass to manually have to do everything every night. It updates to her XBMC HTPC that she knows how to use and all she has to do is look at recently updated TV shows and hit play.
My Synology back in California is automatically downloading all shows for me and my wife. I am in North Carolina and it would be a royal pain in the ass to manually have to do everything every night. It updates to her XBMC HTPC that she knows how to use and all she has to do is look at recently updated TV shows and hit play.
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I have my movie and TV downloading completely automated using torrents through sickrage and couch potato. You can set it up to move/rename your downloads, seed to a certain ratio/time, etc. I don't see any reason to use newsgroups unless you just simply cannot handle keeping a ratio.
I could swap to this if I wanted to but I am already built in with newsgroups so until that breaks completely why do it?
No ratios to keep track of and everything is encrypted with SSL. Worth like $7/month to me...
Otherwise, if I downloaded an older movie (15GB for the Bluray) that nobody else wanted, it'd be a pain to maintain a useful ratio. Similarly, 4 season of Person of Interest at 2GB/episode (for the 1080p rips) would set me back over 150GB.
I know a lot of people that bring up the cost of newsgroups that pay for a seedbox and a VPN which baffles me.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I use the SSL version trackers too over IPT / BTN. Any file on IPT over 8GB in size is "freeleach" and I only ever download BluRay quality movies in 1080p, so that is pretty much every single download. I have entire BR season rips of TV series too and on BTN, it has nothing to do with actual upload seed ratio vs time seeded. (Single episode = 3 days / full Season Rip = 1 week?) It takes an extra kind of special to fuck up ratios on these sites.