cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6240929
I’m a pretty heavy torrent user, running a media server complete with sonarr/radarr for automatic downloads. I download a lot, and have multiple TBs of upload on various private trackers. I’ve been torrenting forever, but I’ve always wondered about usenet. Over and over on this, and other, forums I see people saying that usenet is way better - but why?
I understand what it is overall, but what makes it better than traditional torrenting? In my mind, it’s always just seemed like a different means to the same end. I pay for a VPN and torrent for “free”, or I pay for usenet access and download directly from there. As someone who’s “snobby” around the quality of the stuff I torrent, does usenet provide an advantage there?
Usenet fans, I’d love to hear what makes you love it! I’m always open to trying new things, and if It really is better I’d love to know why! (Plus, maybe what providers/tools etc you recommend).
It works a lot smoother for me, though I do see signs of things changing with torrent stuff.
Usenet is much more consistent and works better with automation software like radarr and sonarr. It’s all scene naming so you are less likely to pickup something joe blow made poorly. It is also much easier to find older things since you aren’t relying on active seeders.
It’s safer because it’s not illegal to download said files, just distribute them. Also no one cares about Usenet.
Never had a problem with quality, I have minimum and maximum quality settings configured for different profiles.
That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.
One piece of advice if you go usenet, for good performance you want two accounts. Your main account and a secondary account on a different backbone provider. There are a lot of resellers, so make sure the parents are different. This is because they get a ton of takedown notices, so you might get holes here and there in the rars. But you can usually pick those up from your secondary. The software handles this automatically but you need the accounts.
Usually your main is some kind of unlimited subscription and the backup is a block account where you pay for a chunk of data at a time, but you do you.
Since you mentioned it: Debrid has been serving this old pirate (used pretty much everything from IRC dl bots and the original Napster) well. Torrenting is much too dangerous … and has been for a long time where I live. Maintaining a large library feels a bit like “been there, done that” and is cumbersome (even if well automated) with what little I’m watching these days. Streaming cached torrents from the debrid service of your choice via Kodi and the relevant addons is as painless (everything up to 4K works flawlessly, usually many sources available) as it gets while still having most content ready at my fingertips.
Thanks! Working better with the arrs is a sell for sure. I have my setup pretty well tuned for torrents, but still sometimes it can’t find something that meets my filters because it’s not named/categorized correctly.
Are you using Prowlarr? It allows you to use both Usenet and Torrent sources transparently with the Arrs. Works really well for me and you get good performance stats of each source.
Just a correction on this point. With a debrid service, it’s not actually torrent-based – not in the sense that at any point you’d be utilising any p2p traffic/mechanisms. It relies on torrenting activity in a different sense, in that what you download is encrypted DDL files from the debrid provider’s central cache, whose origin is in torrents. And if there’s no files meeting your search query stored already in the cache, but which are available through public trackers, then you’d request the service downloads the torrent to its cache. So at no point are you accessing peers. Worth noting that afaik, this is all for public trackers, not private.