this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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qBittorrent is probably the best torrent client for Windows
~~Mullvad is a relatively cheap and trustworthy VPN provider~~ (they unfortunately removed port forwarding, which is important for torrenting)
AirVPN and Proton VPN are trustworthy VPN providers that support port forwarding
Servarr is the way to go if you want to set up a server that automates everything for you
Jellyfin is the best media server, far ahead of Plex and fully FOSS
FMHY and the Champagne Piracy Wiki have lots of valuable information
A bit of topic but why the hell does the champagne wiki reccomend Edge as a browser citing it's AI capabilities? Is this copied directly from MS marketing material?
Edit: I am starting to read through it and there Is so much bad, outdated and just wrong information there:
I don't really want to continue beyond before-you-begin
Edit2: Uh why is there an extensive article on how to deal with addiction and how to do meditation in the piracy section?
I don't think I should continue any further
Edit3: you can contribute to the wiki by sending markdown files in a discord channel. Wikipedia should switch to this model as well imo
But Mullvad dropped port-forwarding which is relevant in the context of torrenting.
God dammit
I keep forgetting that. I didn't really notice it, since I use a seedbox anyway, but that might be a little to much for a new user.
Why is port forwarding important? I have my torrent server running, downloading and uploading perfectly fine. Is port forwarding needed for like something else besides general down/uploading?
To my understanding, it works like this: your client talks to the torrent tracker, then it sends you the data about seeders and leechers. Then your client tries to connect to them, but if neither you nor the other peer have port forwarding, you cannot connect to each other. This is not a problem for popular torrents with lots of peers, but when there are not so many it can be a problem because the other peers might as well not have port forwarding, so peers cannot connect to each other and the torrent will eventually die.
That's why it is recommended to use a VPN with port forwarding. When not using a VPN, if your router supports uPnP you are already port forwarded (with the default settings in qbittorrent).
Thank you! I did some reading and that's also how I understand it: at least one peer has to have port forwarding enabled / listen on a port for two peers to connect. Also I found out about "Hole punching" or "NAT punching" where a middleman server is used to open up ports on two peers that do not have ports forwarded yet to allow them to talk to each other directly. This is also used in BitTorrent. And also explains why it works without explicit port forwarding enabled.
Why is port forwarding important? Sorry if it's a dumb question, lol.
Also Gluetun if you want to run qbittorrent in docker with a tun interface.
"far ahead of Plex"
I love and use jelly fin but let's not lie here.
It does VPN?
Sorry I meant to say torrent client
Please could you elaborate about how qbittorent is a good VPN and why is port forwarding important for torrenting ? I'm kind of confused about those statement…
I’m fairly positive they meant “qbittorrent is a good torrent client” instead of “VPN”
As far as port forwarding, I know it’s important for seeding but I don’t know why.
It's a poor analogy, but imagine a public IP like a hotel, there can be lots of guests (clients) at this hotel. Hotel policy is they won't let any outsiders in unless you know the room number (port) of the person you're trying to reach.
Imagine you and a friend are staying in separate hotels and want to give each other copies of your favorite Linux .ISOs, but neither of you knows the other's room number - you show up at the hotel and the front desk tells you to pound sand because you don't have their room number.
As long as one of you knows the other's room number though, you can meet.
Torrenting without port forwarding means you can only trade your favorite .ISOs with people who have port forwarding enabled (sharing their room number to the tracker), which makes you less effective of a seeder. Enabling port forwarding allows you to share with anyone (sharing your room number with the tracker).
I was incredibly stupid when writing this comment. I meant torrent client. Fixed it.
You can't say jellyfin is far ahead of plex when it doesn't have nearly as many clients as plex does. I'll agree that in the free tier jellyfin is better, but as of now it's not as fully featured as plex pro. Even non pro plex just makes it easier to share outside your home too.
which platform that you use to consume media is missing a jellyfin client? there are a lot of jellyfin clients: https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/all
Hmm looks like they have a WebOS client now. Personally that covers my personal use case since the family that I share plex with just has rokus and apple tv
What about stremio. Isn't that foss as well?
I know sharing is caring but it should be said that if you dont plan on seeding anyway, mullvad is perfectly fine for torrenting.
I also think its worth mentioning that proton only supports ephemeral remote port forwarding which is objectively worse then airvpns implementation, if port forwarding is super important to you.