Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.
Lol expect MORE and MORE hikes. They know how much money you have, they want it all and they will not stop raising the cost because y’all keep paying it.
Yep, it feels like we’re about to see the second wave of piracy, and more and more people are going to dust off their jolly Rogers. $80 was worth it for the catalog, but the price hike is completely unjustifiable. I’ve already canceled my sub, and I’m betting there will be plenty who do the same. A 75% increase is egregious.
About to see? My friend, we never stopped. Especially now, more people have started to look into self hosting.
I never stopped once I saw that the shit you pay for is not even yours anymore. Unless it’s indie games, I just straight up download the game. Could care less about online gaming. (Thx ftp)
Can you point me in the right direction of where to start? My last adventures of file sharing ended with Napster and Limewire.
Well theoretically…
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get a vpn
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deluge (others will pile in with apps no doubt)
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go to https://privacysavvy.com/security/torrents/best-torrent-sites/
Once you get your feet back under yourself, you can start looking at usenet and such
Oh wow Usenet is still a good spot? That brings back good memories of sailing the seas.
Right Usenet and IRC all memory lane. Lol.
I agree with this guy.
Look into usenet, sabnzbd (or nzbget) and the ***arr programs.
Cost you a max $10/month, depending on how serious you are at hoarding, and how far back you want to go.
If I were to do such a thing I would find myself quite happily served by the above without the need for a usenet acct, but of course this is an entirely theoretical discussion from the comfort of armchairs so reality may differ for various parties puffs pipe
You don’t even need a vpn, just pirate the shit
eh, depends on your country. VPNs are worth the arse coverage.
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https://rentry.org/megathread good megathread from r/piracy
You may be looking for ‘Free Media. Heck Yeah’.
This is what I’m talking about. Welcome to the seven seas matey!
I thought this community had a megathread pinned with info answering exactly that?
Naw, lots of us stopped when Netflix streaming came in full swing.
Anime was still not big when Netflix came in. Foreign movies were also not available yet either. Programs, music, and all that stuff was still hard to get if it was not distributed by a US company.
Yeah, but I didn’t care about any of that.
Disney made a movie called Crater that was removed from their catalog after just two weeks. It is only available via piracy.
I haven’t watched it because that would be illegal, but it’s almost like they want us to pirate. Heck, I would never have heard about Final Space if the animator hadn’t raised a stink after it got removed from the WB catalog.
It is only available via piracy.
You can stream it on Amazon. Disney sucks, but there’s no need to spread misinformation to make that point.
For a while it did disappear. It only recently popped up on Amazon
To be honest I didn’t look
Final Space also won’t be available anywhere, forever.
And yet somehow I remember watching the entire thing. Must be a Mengele Effect.
“SHIVER ME TIMBERS, THAR BE SOME BULLSHIT”
…Second? We’ve had like, 4 or 5 waves by now since the Internet started.
And a bunch of waves before the internet too! In hindsight dubbing media duplication “piracy” in the middle of a romanticization of the golden age of sail was probably a bad call for the media execs.
Yo ho fiddle dee dee! It’s a pirate life for me!
They’ll just keep hiking it until the profit curve dips.
This is exactly why publicly funded media is essential to a healthy media market.
And reasonable copyright laws on IP
Ha, good one.
Seriously. What is it going to take to get people to cancel? Stop paying overpriced fees until they bring them back down to cost that’s worth it. Otherwise they’ll just keep getting scammed and never stop. I just don’t get it. Don’t they understand how economics work or something? Or do they feel like they HAVE to have it?
I just cancelled my subscription. Would’ve cancelled it ages ago if it wasn’t for my wife, but it’s time for me to set sail on the high seas again
Not me. Cancelled my subscription.
Streaming platforms are all joining in on the enshitification process.
Soon, people will join one service for one month then switch to the next.
After that, they will all begin contracts to “lock in the price.” Possibly in bundle agreements with multiple providers.
That’s when the full transition to $120+ cable costs returns, but in streaming format.
Except for dropout, that one’s worth every penny.
Never canceling that. I’d rather rewatch anything d20 over anything on netflix.
My wife and I have rewatched all of game changer at least 3 times. It’s easily the best $45 I spend each year.
Considering they’re the one who pushed for decades to extend the Copyright period from the original 20 years to “Death of Author + 75 years” (so, around 125+ years), making the entering in our lifetime into the Public Domain of any of the cultural elements we grew up in pretty much de facto impossible, thus breaking the quid-pro-quo of Copyright Legislation, I’m surprised that anybody here sees the Disney Corporation as anything but Evil.
These people did more damage to freedom in modern society (as Copyright also affects things like Software) than anybody else.
I’m doing my part in opting out of copyright because fuck capitalism
I’d be publishing written works in the public domain but I like to be attributed, so copyleft will do for now, it’s catchy
Agreed
Honestly till death of auther I can at least understand as many creators like to make characters a part of their identity and after death they are dead how are they going to profit from the ip and what about the fans who I’m most cases can no longer enjoy new content and after saying all of that I probably only think that because of the ip culture created by the legal environment created by Disney
I think it should be a flat number of years like 20 years, giving the author plenty of time to exclusively control his IP and then afterwards they can still profit because they can still make things from the same IP and sell them to people knowing that they were the founder of the IP.
I feel like the death of the author clause gives a perverse incentive to murder the author so that their IP becomes public domain sooner.
Honestly considering where we are 40 years would probably be a good transition on the way to 20 considering how much corporations today like their 80s ips so making everything made before the 80s public domain could allow a actual proposal like this to not get shot down by corporations like Disney you do bring up a good point with the perverse incentive
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Just built a 50TB Plex server, get fucked mouse
I guess it wasn’t about the price for you then
It’s the principal of the matter. Plus it’s fun. Get fucked mouse!
over time it probably balances out
Same here. So much better than any streaming service. There’s a small initial cost to get started but it’s worth every penny.
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ECC RAM is only necessary for people doing financial-related work.
If a video has a bitflip that is not corrected in software, ooooo 1 pixel will be a slightly different shade or hue or one subtitle letter will be wrong worst case.
Billing, payment processing, virtual currency storage, a flipped bit could be thousands of dollars, but those systems will have multiple verifiable redundancies in place, unlike the 90s when people like to quote that ECC RAM is essential.
Also 100% uptime servers like enterprise storage servers where customer data integrity is high priority.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Nearly every problem (1 million times more likely) is caused by software instability and bugs, with some being due to hard drive bit rot or hardware failures which ECC won’t fix anyway.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Not server-related, but an instance where an inexplicable bit flip caused a stir is Super Mario 64 speedrunning. There is a level that is notoriously slow to navigate and during a playthrough a community member “discovered” a skip that warps you about halfway through the level. There is a video of it happening on live stream, but to this day someone has yet to reproduce the skip. Fiddling around with the game’s memory showed that the behavior happens when a single bit is flipped. All in all, it was likely a one-off error on the hardware that happened at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. The incident is known as the “TTC upwarp” and there is a $1000 bounty to claim if you can provide a working set of instructions to reproduce it on real hardware.
I mean, that was actually pretty cool to read about! Speedrunning community always does the most crazy things as far as hardware memory dumping and analyzing to drop time in a speed run. 😅 that is passion.
It did happen on a device from 1996 though where in the time, programming and error checking was so barebones and efficient that a single bit could really mess a lot of things up.
That’s why I specified a time period 😉. Originally bug were called bugs because literal bugs would get in the holes of punchcards and make programs not run. Not a problem anymore! In the same way, systems have implemented checksums and error checking such that it really isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of applications.
That’s why I specified a time period 😉
To be completely honest, I kinda did an oopsie because it completely slipped my mind that although it happened in 2020, the technology involved is indeed pre-millenium.
It’s before 2008, but a bit flip changed a Belgian election.
This is part of the reason I keep my servers in my basement.
For Plex? No. It’s running on a $150 Amazon minipc lol
What does that 50TB look like? I’m pushing up against 25 at this point but it’s shamefully all usb hdds plugged into a usb strip in a mini pc, and it’s less than ideal.
That’s filthy
Buy a NAS unit such as a Synology DS923+
Add 4 drives to it of equal size. One drive’s worth of space will be sacrificed for redundancy and they’ll all be combined into a single storage drive.
I have 4x 18TB drives giving me just under 50TB of usable storage. Any single drive can fail with no data loss, and I just replace it and keep going.
DS920+, not 923+
920+ has an Intel cpu, so has QSV hardware transcoding. 200fps 1080p transcoding on the fly is nice.
(The 923+ is software only)
Good point. I’m personally not doing any transcoding so it doesn’t affect me.
Chulaplex who started this thread was very clear that they were going to be using it for Plex, as such, transcoding is a very important aspect.
I ripped out all my portable drives, had to make a cable without the energy management line for inside a PC.
Big ATX case with 8 3.5’ bays, mobo with 6 Sata ports, last two ports will require a SATA-PCIe expansion card.
1x 4TB (shucked)
2x 6TB (shucked)
1x 8TB HDD
1x 16TB Ironwolf Pro
40TB across 5 bays, 1 left without expansion card, 2 more with the card, following that the 4TB will get dropped for a bigger drive.
I’ll likely be buying no less than 12TB per drive going forward, no RAID configuration yet.
Amazon has Chinese usb enclosures for $150, that’s what I’m using.
I love it. That works fine but if you want a weekend project consider doing something like this:
Buy a Fractal Define 7XL.
Shuck all those HDDs and put them in the case. Buy one more disk, as large or larger than the largest disk.
Buy 8GB RAM, cheap mobo, cheap Pentium gold CPU, and reasonably reliable power supply. Also buy either a SATA or HBA PCI adapter.
Install unRAID and Plex. Use that extra drive for parity. Now your data is protected if a drive fails. They also won’t get so hot, and speed will be much better. You also have lots of capacity for more drives.
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Fuck no
When I built my latest Plex server, I chose to put ECC RAM into it. But it was a pain getting all the hardware, due to the silly rules AMD has for ECC support and iGPU support in its chips.
What? Unless you’re running an actual commercial scale website, no, nobody needs ECC.
If you are planning to use zfs its worth a few extra bucks for ecc.
It can be far more than “a few extra bucks.” It’s not just buying more expensive ram, but you need a compatible motherboard and processor as well.
It can be. It doesn’t have to be. If ECC is too expensive I recommend avoiding ZFS.
Like ECC there’s little to no benefit for the average user to use ZFS.
I agree. I didn’t realize we were talking about average users. I thought we were talking about people building NAS.
This is rich coming from the company that literally wrote “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!”
It was the first thing that popped into my head, too.
I canceled last week. I paid to bundle hulu and Disney so I could lock in the year before the price hike. Hulu would never allow me to log in, I spent 7+ hours with tech support over the last month with them literally having me log in and out over and over without doing anything on their end. Never got logged in.
Several times they tried to sell me that I had to accept the ad tier or the one that included ESPN (which you know full well will get bigger cost spikes) despite promising I wouldn’t have to change plans.
I finally told them to cancel and refund the days. I haven’t pirated in over 4 years, because I finally make enough money and wanted to support content and have easy setup on products as my mom and daughter (outside of household) and my husband and son (in household) depend on me.
I started with a VPN and streaming this week. I will be working on jellyfin in the next week. They could have had my money, but they want to fuck around with my time, money, and content. I’m pissed and done.
I built out the whole stack: clients use jellyfin to watch media and ombi to request it (a friend uses overseerr which seems good too). Internally I’m using sonarr/radarr to manage the library, prowlarr to handle requests, sabnzbd and transmission to download stuff. Altogether this almost completely automates media request and acquisition.
It took a bit of figuring out docker, reverse proxy (using nginx proxy manager), DNS… I got it working though. Someone who has already done networking would find this much simpler but it was new to me.
It’s dangerous because I didn’t know when to stop lol. I started up some game servers for friends, wrote a borg backup script to periodically save all my configs (and game saves) to two cloud storage services, then started spooling up more services…
What do you use for cloud storage?
I’ve been kind of rotating services. I am saving <1gb of configs, game saves, and various other small files. I used Backblaze and AWS cold storage for a bit but that seemed totally overkill, so I started trying out regular consumer stuff and it’s all the same really (for this purpose). OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox… I figured keeping local backups on a different device, and then sending two out to different cloud storage platforms was enough. I backup once a day and keep two weeks worth of backups remote, and one month local. I also manually send a biweekly backup to a friend, and I store his. That’s when I restart the server, do updates, and if I’m unlucky spend a weekend trying to fix whatever broke lol.
Oooh, need to find me a NAS buddy. I’ve been getting into using syncthing lately, I’ve learned that it can encrypt your files before syncing them so that the remote storage never actually knows what’s in them. Still probably need to trust the other end, though.
That sucks. Tech support can be so annoying sometimes. I’m dealing with it too, although in a very different area. I wish they made it at least easy to give them money.
Good luck with Jellyfin and the other things you’ll be doing.
You’ll continue to enjoy 12 months for the price of 20.
It’s already been cancelled. 🏴☠️
I’m not defending them, but this was clearly always the plan. It was obvious they intended to enter the market just under competitor prices to establish a foothold and then later charge more and reset the industry standard in doing so.
Again, I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, because it does, but this was clearly the Disney+ game plan since day 1
Disney’s desperation is showing—just look at their stock price the past 2 years… down 50%
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t raise their subscription fees sooner. Unfortunately for them it’s a double edged sword, which will cause a lot of people to cancel and quite possibly harm them in the long run.
Meh, might not hurt them, obviously their suits don’t think so.
What they’re trying to do is convert or lose low-value customers and make high-value customers and save bandwidth at the same time. Fewer high-value customers also has an impact on support costs.
I did the same with my little computer support business. Doubled prices and kept the solid customers.
I straight steal my media, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Actually, I’m a little stunned that anyone pays for this bullshit in the first place.
I did the same with my little computer support business. Doubled prices and kept the solid customers.
Who may now seek cheaper alternatives.
And they are free to do so! Why do I want small-time, bitchy customers who won’t, or can’t, pay? Let someone else coming up in the world take them on. I did my time, they can do theirs.
Pick one:
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A restaurant that charges $10 per burger, at a cost of $3 per burger.
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A restaurant that charges $5 per burger, at a cost of $3 per burger.
Capitalism is common sense!
CAVEAT: When decoupled from a sense of the greater good. Which is sometimes called morality.
Anyone who calls any customer “bitchy” for not staying after raising prices deserves to jump off a cliff.
If he meant exactly what you said, I agree. But, there is an alternate interpretation of what the guy was saying:
You tend to get different kinds of customers with different price ranges. The ones who can afford to spend money generally don’t give a crap about what you’re billing them for, and they just want the work done properly.
The ones who aim to get a “good deal” tend to be less hands-off and more critical about the work done/supplies used and billed for. Frugal customers take extra time and sanity to field questions/suggestions, and sometimes, it’s just not worth dealing with.
If raising his fee filters out the latter category, it’s hard to blame him. I wouldn’t want to deal with penny-pinchers either, and simply being more expensive than the competition is an effective deterrent.
^ This is exactly what I meant.
Frugal customers take extra time and sanity to field questions/suggestions, and sometimes, it’s just not worth dealing with.
And if this is a problem for you, maybe you don’t deserve to be in business.
All businesses have cheap customers that you bend over backwards for but they still leave a bad review. Those types hurt businesses and force strategies to not have cheap customers.
Or raise prices and don’t deal with them. Guy didn’t say he was hurting from raising prices. Man some of you guys seem to think everything should be free, wonder if you practice what you preach and work for free.
The 2nd option, as a consumer lol.
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Disney has for the last few decades positioned itself as a premium product at a premium price (think the entry costs for theme parks, cruises, etc.) much the same way Apple has. They clearly think their content is worth the premium, so they’re going for it.
Also, a lot of their best films are going public domain in the coming years, so they need to maintain and grow their revenue stream somehow.
Shedding ABC, eliminating physical media, and increasing streaming prices makes total sense if you think the way they do.
Well, I’m glad they’ve decided to make it an easy choice to sail the salty seas again!
It was always an easy choice.
Only suckers pay for things they can get for free.
For Disney stuff? Why waste your time? Even free is too much to pay for their output.
Yeah. All the good stuff Disney did was released decades ago.
We canceled our yearly subscription in August. Haven’t missed any of the content. I mean I’ve seen what I wanted to regardless. Just not from there.
We did that. Got Disney and spent months binging all the Marvell and Star Wars content then cancelled. There was little else to see for us.
A year later so many new programs came out so we re subscribed but found all the new Star Wars sad. Not sure when we might ever go back.
The Mandalorian had overall been excellent. Really enjoyed that series. Absolutely hated the way they dumped off a good portion of it in the center of book of boba fett. Was not as thrilled with book of boba fett. But it wasn’t horrible. It just didn’t have the hook that the Mandalorian did. Not watched any of the new series yet. But yeah they’re just really wasn’t enough to justify its existence. It could have just as easily been put on hulu. After all they have such a large investment in that too.
Do not waste your time watching Kenobi. That show was just awful. Ahsoka was pretty good if you watched rebels, otherwise it was simply meh. And, generally unpopular opinion, Andor was terrible, and took me 2 separate attempts just to get through it. Hell, if you haven’t seen season 3 of mando, even that can honestly be skipped. The Star Wars content overall, hasn’t been awesome beyond Mando S1+2.
Hard disagree on Andor. That’s the best show Disney Plus has created.
Hence why I said it’d be an unpopular take, and knew I’d be downvoted, even though that show was immensely boring. There were cool parts, like the ship battle with the German dude, or the fact that Andy serkis is now officially 2 characters in the Star Wars universe. But overall I felt like the plot was severely lacking a good pace, and the acting was only so so. Plus, they never got me to actually like Andor as a character, so that dragged the show way down for me. But hey, different people can have different opinions. It’s why the Taylor swift movie made 100 million yet I’m not a big fan of hers either.
Ahsoka was pretty good if you watched rebels, otherwise it was simply meh
I come with a bias of having watched Rebels.
I still found the Ashoka story to he meh. And I thought that Rosario’s and Natasha’s acting fell short of what I’m used to seeing out of them. They felt restrained, especially when together.
That aside, the visuals and soundscape (music and effects) were outstanding, I was absolutely blown away. The fight sequences were well coriagraphed and well differentiated between all the different combatants. I also found the acting out of the remainder of the cast was very solid.
I’m still not sure how I fell about the night sisters getting there lore tired up with the spinners/norns/fates; but perhaps that the trope repeated in so many cultures is what makes it such a good story telling tool.
I support that take. The unique fighting styles were indeed quite awesome, especially between Baylan and Ahsoka. It didn’t help my review that I just saw the Honest trailer for the show, and they hit a lot of points that bugged me. Like Thrawns dad gut that they tried so hard to hide, but failed. The night sisters take was odd, and I feel like they falsely teased that the inquisitor with the mask (Rakan?), or the gold faced stormtrooper were going to be someone special. But that was likely me reading too much into YouTuber theories.
Hi, I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m changing the annual piracy subscription from nothing to 0 on the 31st of October. If you carry on then you’ll end up exactly where you’re headed. Thanks and have fun.
When streaming first came in I finally stopped pirating and felt a little bit better about myself. A couple years passed and I’m back to pirating, even built a Plex media server in the meantime.
You can just stream things for free.
cheers
Your local library has a copy of every kids Disney movie you could possibly want. No need to pay em for access to something your tax dollars pay for. And if you wanna go below board: just rip em and keep em forever.
What physical media do they have available?
Back when netflix first started, I subscribed to the 4 dvd plan. I’d rip and burn a copy of every movie that came through the house (if we liked it, that is). I was one of the few friends that had a DVD-R drive, and would make copies on request.
I still have an old case logic disk book completely filled with burnt dvds. I just built my first computer that doesn’t have a removable-disk drive, and with that, I no longer have any way to play dvds/blu-rays. Not one disc player in the whole house.
I built my last computer during the pandemic, and put in a blu-ray writer (obviously DVD and CD backwards compatible) just for legacy purposes. It was actually hard to find a case with a 5.25" front bay. In two years I haven’t used it once.
It’s a shame - digital media DRM is going to escalate quickly once there is no physical media sold, since all our PCs have TPM chips now, so this may not turn out well for us - but I’ve accepted it’s inevitable at this point.
You can also stream all of them for free here: https://fmoviesz.to/
Just make sure you have uBlock Origin installed.
Not sure why the top voted comments are always stupid advice like “libraries” or “plex servers.”
We’ve had the solutions to these problems right in front of us for years. All we need to do is realize them.
Use your brain, not your wallet.
Cause they aren’t the random shady website you posted and your tax dollars pay for the library, so you might as well use it!
A fool is born every minute.
your tax dollars pay for the library
Lol, what?
That’s because more than 75% of the people affected keep paying. The results for Disney are Immediate savings on resources (less people streaming) and they still increase profits.
Yeah. People are disappointing.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
It actually is impressive how trained people are
Yarr intensifies
