Arrr

Over the years, for as long as I can remember, I have been into software and media piracy. From the days of making tape-to-tape cassette copies of music or ZX Spectrum games, to uploading shadow RAM applications on the BBC Micro, CD and DVD burning, Napster, Limewire, Kazza and finally on to BitTorrent. Not to mention all of the modded consoles I have owned and the huge list of cracked games on my new Quest 2 VR headset.

I remember leaving my modem connected overnight to download the first Eminem album, only to find that the phone line disconnected a few minutes after I went to bed. It’s amazing how connectivity has come so far that I can stream the entire album to my phone whilst in the middle of a field without batting an eyelid.

Services like Netflix made watching films and shows easy, but the proliferation of streaming options is driving me back to piracy. The initial low cost of entry to Netflix was amazing, but since other providers caught on, I am forced to pay for other streaming services to watch certain shows. They let us all into the garden, but are now building up the walls again.

My current setup for watching pirated films and shows is as follows:

• An Nvida Shield Pro connected to my TV and to the Internet via Ethernet. This allows me to run Android applications that let me stream shows and films. I have used the variations of Amazon Firestick devices too over the years, but the Shield blows them out of the water with it’s faster processor and more RAM. I can also run other streaming apps on this device too.
• Stremio or Kodi to stream shows and movies. I am quite new to Stremio, but as a dedicated streaming app, it works very well. The interface is easy to use and it is not as complicated as Kodi. I still use Kodi and the Ezra add-on to watch shows or films I can’t find via Stremio but that seldom happens. It seems that Stremio maintains their own lists of media you can stream whereas Kodi and Ezra scrapes the Internet for them in real time. Both of these apps allow for plugins or addons to improve how they work so they will only get better over time. Want to watch Japanese kids TV? You can through the IPTV section in Kodi, providing you have configured it correctly. Both of these apps can also be installed on Windows, Mac and Android devices. iOS is out of luck because of Apple’s strict rules on this sort of thing, although other apps are available that will do the same.
• A paid Real Debrid account. This was the game changer for me when using Kodi and Stremio. Over the years I have used Kodi, I was using it to streaming movies direct from websites that were either very slow, or very dodgy. By paying for a Real Debrid account and associating it with Kodi or through the Torrentio plugin for Stremio, you get access to stream 4k media as fast as your Internet connection can go. Real Debrid is a torrent caching service. So when you search for a movie in Kodi or Stremio, they both scrape torrent sites like The PirateBay to find torrents matching that film. They then query the Real Debrid API to find out which of those files are fully downloaded and cached on their servers. They display the list of available files and you choose which one to watch and the file is streamed direct from the Real Debrid servers. No waiting for torrent seeds or peers to kick in before you can watch something. Plus, the connection between the apps and the Real Debrid servers is HTTPS, so no VPN is needed to hide your dodgy traffic from your ISP. The result is that I can fire up Stremio, pick a film and start watching it in 4k HDR within seconds.

I still pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ but I can foresee a time when paying for these separate services will be replaced by the single Real Debrid payment, which is vastly cheaper.

But as with all things pirate related, you have to learn to adapt. Apps get shut down, services cancelled, developers prosecuted and users threatened by ISPs. But like the mythical hydra, as one head is cut off another grows to take it’s place. You just need to follow the right subreddits to know what to do next if and when it happens.