drunkensailor

thanks for that link, that is super helpful. only thing it is really missing for me is their stance on vpn but is very good for noting the ratio stuff

Thanks, man this was really helpful and I appreciate it

Usenet is great

In your own experiences, how does it stack up vs public torrent tracking sites in terms of available pirate content? I realize that depending on the content type and which indexer(s), it will probably vary a bit, but any rough idea is probably better than my total cluelessness on usenet content availability that I have now lol. Just looking for somebody’s rough guess of general availability on usenet vs on sites like torrentgalaxy, eztv, tpb, 1337x, solidtorrents, etc if it tends to be better, worse, or about the same.

I’d recommend signing up for the NZBGeek

To test this out, would I also need to find a usenet provider that has a free trial or I can preview with the indexer only? I’m assuming I could just plug it into sonarr / qbittorrent feeds and search from those but if you use other (better?) tools for viewing/searching the index results, might I know what those are?

thanks. i know i how to use mediainfo tool. no clue how to convert from a x264/x265 command to an ffmpeg one tho

Very good comment. That said, for this part

Figure out how to encode and compress video so that it still looks good, you can still find some old scene rule nfo’s to have a better idea on what settings to use to encode. I use a gui called qvs to do encodes, theres also another one called staxrip, you can also learn how to just use command line arguments and just use x264 or x265 from the command line.

I’m wondering if anyone might have any ffmpeg one-liners that are pretty decent for converting larger mkv’s from makemkv or similar down to a more reasonable size for archiving. Basically looking to get something similar to the old ION10 / ION265 encodes from RARBG if that helps (720p or 1080p w 8- to 10-bit depth using x264 or x265).

Even better if someone’s got a link to a github or similar page with a few different tried and tested presets to study.

not OP but nice guide. thanks man

Ive only done a handful in linux. mostly i use repacked gog stuff cuz its easy and i don’t have to deal with cracks. so easy that sometimes i end up legit buying to support the devs if the game is good.

lot of the time i also use firejail. haven’t run into many issues with it so far (i think there was one game where i disallowed net access but it wouldnt run until i granted it) and most stuff works same as without.

im not really into crypto … Monero / XMR is a privacy coin

thanks… same here. so much so that until you phrased it exactly that way, I hadn’t even put together that “Monero” == “XMR” and thought people were talking about 2 separate coins 😅

frugal usenet and Blocknews actually have a cash payment option on the website at checkout, if you are worried maybe ask them the track record for receiving it.

good to know, thanks

If you are doing VPN to, Mullvad takes cash but you do not need vpn for usenet.

already have a paid, no-log VPN that I torrent with. Mullvad looks awesome but probably won’t check it out til mine expires. my current one says my payment and connection info is separate. no way to verify that but at this point, i’ve been with them over a year and if they were lying, i would be well and truly fucked anyway lol

ok, XMR then. sorry, very new to crypto stuff. how do you get it anon? do you use site the other guy recommended? mine it? something else?

i heard somewhere that mining is hard unless you spend lot of money on hw but wasn’t sure if i could do something like that for smaller amounts like $100 every 6 months or something.