Streaming through webpages just isn't that great for how I consume video.

EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.

THANK YOU <3.

I didn't know! I was aware that I could open video streams (the old-school kind) in VLC, but I never realized it can pull a stream from YouTube video link. I see now it works great, though the video quality option is not obviously available. It can be set here:

http://www.techverse.net/play-youtube-videos-vlc-media-playe...

From the page, under disadvantages of streaming YouTube through VLC:

  Disadvantage
     No annotations.

I absolutely hate streaming videos in the browser. It's a stupid idea. Everyone uses a different player, half of them can't handle rewinding or skipping forward, and all of them are total resource hogs. There are things that really shouldn't be done with web technologies. Like spreadsheets, or video players. They work best if made native.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

Ugh, I hate them. Specially when they aren't set to last a specific time and are there the whole video. I instantly deactivate them when I see them.

And with a bit of extra work (very little, really) you can have a ridiculously nice torrenting setup. I can just add a movie to my IMDb watchlist and it will be on my TV in 15 minutes. And 10GB+ h264 Blu-ray encodes are much better quality than Netflix streaming (I can't vouch for their 4k streams, but I reckon they're still much lower bitrate).

I'm uploading 2 torrents right now at almost a megabit and my internet is just fine.

When there are good seeders I can pull 8 down. Most movies and shows are done in minutes.

No noticeable degradation to browsing speed, when a large file finishes there can be a little slowdown, but that's a different thing.

Streaming allows for instant start and adaptive bandwidth. Downloading means you can play it in whatever way you want, watch just the scenes you like, etc.

Netflix has a great UI for simple watching or you can use a full featured player and tweak lots of settings.

Also there are plenty of ways to play anything on a TV (smart tv with usb drive, network share, chromecast, htpc software, dlna) and you can use settings in your torrent client to limit the download speed if necessary. Some clients even let you torrent the file sequentially so you can start playing/streaming it before it's all finished.

1. QOS on the router, set a lower priority for the ports torrents use 2. Set a bandwidth limit in your torrent client 3. Use a queue / batch system to have them download at 3AM or whatever.

Or, you can just get a seedbox or VPS with a decent connection close enough to you that you can stream off it. The torrent will be done near instantaneously, and you'll be able to stream in higher quality than Netflix. You can stream full 1080P MKVs at <20Mbps.

Use private trackers as they're much better seeded, as well as the more obvious benefits.

You may have results like this, but I would guess that you're in the minority.

For me personally, well seeded 6-8GB movie takes an hour at most, usually less. I can still play online games, watch other streams online, browse, etc. and with other people using the same internet connection in the house doing the same things, and not have any noticeable slowdown. Full 1080p with AAC or DTS audio seems like higher quality to me than what Netflix provides.

The only upside Netflix has is the instant streaming, but if you're patient and can wait a bit for some downloads, or maybe run them at night or while at work, then this is a non-issue. Also you can just connect a TV to your computer.

Expect more of that in the future.

Same goes for mpv. DRMed distributors (like Netflix) and their players are just a major usability handicap. Let the age of legal DRM-free video begin (because pirates have been enjoying it for years already). One can hope.

If that works for you then great, but there's obviously much more control available when you have the full file and your own player.

Well, at least I do on occasion. When the kids are watching Netflix cartoons on the living room TV, I can just open up Firefox and watch another show on my (Linux) PC.

I suspect most people won't use it, but I'm glad to have this option.

I watch Netflix exclusively through their website — either on TV with my HTPC (Kodi with Chrome fullscreen) or on my computer. I don't own any devices that can run their Android or IOS apps.

When I don't just plug the damn laptop in, I tend to just connect through VPN and despite the fact that it slows my connection down considerably, I can stream any of the shows I've paid for through Popcorn Time or any other streaming torrent client. A typical hour-long episode is usually finished downloading within the first few minutes of the show and it's all accessible in a single interface.

My personal dream is that Comcast or one of these awful companies decides that they need to do a better job of pleasing customers and starts offering a legal PopcornTime/Netflix-style web interface to browse and stream all of the content you're already paying for. That is something I would actually want to subscribe to.

Instead I pay, rarely torrent anything I don't have legal access to, and stream/download illegally just because it's easier and works better. I haven't gone as far as some friends who set up auto-downloaders for usenet or torrents so they always have the latest episodes sitting on their NAS as soon as they go up. But I've considered it.

it's called greedy ISP

You can use a VPN service and tunnel all your traffic through that.

You can use a seedbox, which is basically your torrent client running on a virtual machine or shared machine in a data centre. The P2P stuff doesn't come to or from your home IP. And it all happens at data centre speed.

If you use a private tracker, a seedbox is the way to go because you can leave it constantly seeding 24/7 at high speed so you build an amazing ratio.

You can pick up a seedbox with 700GB storage, 1Gb/s download, and 50Mb/s upload (both speed limited, but unlimited total) for less than a fancy coffee a week. Plex integration, OpenVPN connections included (so you can bypass any ISP-level filters), encrypted FTP etc.

There are other higher end packages with stupidly fast upload, but SB-50 is vastly faster than my linespeed anyway.

They do week trials for a couple of quid.

There's a slight learning curve, but as you're on HN, I doubt you'll struggle with the basics. And you will pick up the cool extras.

Do check out the VPN (iirc) tab, for creating OpenVPN accounts.

The only app thingy I used was Plex, and it worked flawlessly.

Ferral Hosting's seedbox hosting was fine, but it had a steeper learning curve and didn't give me anything compelling over SeedboxCo.

Then they look up the IPs, see that 123.456.78.90 was connected through a Comcast account. They send a big pile of requests to Comcast with all of the Comcast IPs and ask "hey, who had the IP 123.456.78.90 on January 14th, 2016 at 4:50pm?"

Not sure how often they actually bother suing actual users these days but either way, the ISP got the complaint and turns around and sends you a letter saying "hey, stop downloading tv shows and movies over torrents or we will have to cut off your service."

I'm sure the details of how this works change and are more complex but that's the essence. Even if you aren't sued, your ISP will cut you off if you keep torrenting stuff and generating complaints from rights holders.

Said isp has been "only show in town" for serious internet access for some time so thankfully that is starting to change so a move might be on the cards.

A rights-holder watches a torrent swarm for one of their copyrighted works and records the IP of people who are sharing it.

They then contact your ISP (just asking nicely) telling them what they saw. The ISP will usually send you a warning or two before cutting off your service.

Alternatively the rights holder can get a judge to issue a subpoena obligating the ISP to give up your name.

So, since no one is watching Ubuntu swarms and reporting the uploaders, that's not really a concern.

And the police doesn't make those request so lightly... they would need to know you actually uploaded and shared a tons of movies/copyrighted material linking to them on some public accessible site to even think about asking a judge permission to investigate further.

1. use a decent client (transmission. the windows version in confusing to find but works fine)

2. require encryption (default usually is prefer encryption)

3. don't be a retard and download cam from movies releasing today. it will suck and mpaa is probably the one seeing it.

4. if you limit to few torrents at a time and limit upload and download your isp will not bother sending your logs to the mafiaa

1. The client you use doesn't matter a bit.

2. Encrypting the traffic helps if an ISP is actively looking for torrenting, but they rarely do this. In fact, I suspect residential ISPs (Time Warner, Verizon, Comcast) absolutely never do this; university and corporate network administrators might. In part because it's very time and effort consuming for them, but mostly because lots of people torrent perfectly legal things. People get caught because the MPAA, and other organizations, contract firms to write scripts and bots to crawl sites and hunt for as many trackers as possible, then monitor trackers and record all peers observed if they find a file that matches content they own. Encryption won't do anything there. You can't encrypt your IP address from a peer, obviously.

3. When you do it makes little difference. Your odds of getting caught may be a little higher in the first few days, but many people still get caught several years later. The cost of keeping these scripts on these trackers is merely the cost of a little bandwidth and electricity for them. They have no reason not to sit on a tracker forever.

4. You have it completely backwards. It's the "mafiaa" who send the logs of what they found to your ISP. Then your ISP notifies you of the report they received. They don't require any info from the ISP (unless they decide to later file a lawsuit and want the subscriber's personal information). The burden of proof is on them to give what they have to your ISP.

I've dealt with many of these cases from the perspective of the ISP. None of these are secrets. Using a VPN to do something illegal is not remotely "tinfoil hat".

Just use a VPN or a tracker you're reasonably sure their bots can't find. That's it. It's easy. When you torrent, your goal is to hide from other peers of the torrent, not to hide from your ISP.

I also believe that in the US, it's technically illegal for ISPs to do this.

http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttl...

In a nutshell, you pay $30-40/year for a VPN account and when you feel like doing something you don't want easily tracked (like joining a torrent swarm) you enable the VPN and route all traffic through their servers.

But you are what's known as a cord cutter. No cable (or satellite) TV package, just an Internet connection.

Netflix wants you, but they want everyone.

Doesn't Amazon use Flash?

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-starts-rolling-out-html5...

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

I saw the series in Ubuntu, and it was nice, fullscreen, no issues at all. And I'm sure there's no Silverlight in Ubuntu.

That threw me for a second. "What would DHCP have to do with HDMI?". Clearly you must have meant HDCP, which I suspect is what the GP was referring to.