I'm not a fan of torrenting and haven't bothered with them in like, geez, I think 16 some odd years. I like DDLs and I like more convenient options. I don't want to bother being an easy target, I don't want to mess with protocols, timing and any other hassle just to torrent. I am done with those days.

[–] remon@ani.social 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I feel the exact opposite. Going back to torrents made everything so much easier. Especially for anime which has a very active torrent community.

I start the VPN, I start the torrent client, I go on the anime-cat website and a few minutes later I can watch the episode(s). And not even using any of the *arr tools.

The biggest hurdle is really just the VPN, because it costs money (but might even be optional depending on your jurisdiction).

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

Yeah, like I can almost understand the “torrenting is too hard” argument if you’re just going to pay for the official streams but once you want to download them just grab one of the copies that someone already did (and potentially improved)

[–] alakey@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago

Start watching, turn on this extension, let it buffer the video, then save it.

[–] remon@ani.social 11 points 4 hours ago

I used to do this with a combination of yt-dlp and scraping the media links + wget, but it was quite the hassle. It's much easier to just torrent it.

Then you can setup a plex or jellyfin server to organise the torrents and ditch those unreliable free streaming sites for good.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 9 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Personally I don't bother with streaming them, I just have a sonarr instance for anime with qbittorrent with network restricted to VPN, and jellyfin for playback. Automatically grabs, so no having to do any manual setup aside from adding the series to the list, and auto-upgrade to the quality you want.

You may be able to use yt-dlp depending on the site though.

[–] Pyrixas@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

How does one use this yt-dlp I've heard about?

Because my assumption immediately was it was for YouTube, but I quickly searched it to find it can support 'thousands' of websites.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 8 points 3 hours ago

There are GUI tools, but I use the CLI.

https://www.ytdlp.org/ will give you the full docs, but the simplest and easiest command is just to download at the highest quality with:

yt-dlp "https://whateveryouwanttodownload.com/streamingurl"

Whether it works with whatever streaming site you're using I couldnt say, but its a great tool.

[–] Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 2 points 2 hours ago

As others said, there are some good GUI if the command line is a bit too hard for you as it was for me. I use Parabolic and so far it's working like a charm (i only do officials video sites though, don't know for streaming services)

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 hours ago

The stream detector addon often makes it easy to grab the media.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hls-stream-detector/