I don't really understand why everyone's telling you about torrents when you don't need them to watch movies. Like, it's nice if you want Blu Ray quality or have bad internet or something, but you don't need to download stuff unless you really want to. I just use uBlock Origin with Firefox and one of a few streaming sites. You can find a list here: https://wiki.dbzer0.com/piracy/megathread/movies-and-tv/ (Scroll down to streaming and try one out.) It works on mobile, too.
Sometimes you'll have to check multiple sites to find older, more obscure things, but for the most part they only really differ in their UI. Some anime sites even have options to skip the intro/outro and autoplay the next episode.
So while everyone is telling you what to use. Let me tell you about how to behave as a pirate, least suggestively, not strictly. You need to not be a blip on the radar. Well how's that? You don't download gigs and gigs of data in a single day, you have to be a little more spread than that. Because even if you're safe under VPN and everything, if an ISP thinks you're being suspicious at any degree, they're gonna look into it.
I make sure I don't download more than I can chew and since I'm on a data cap of 350GB a month, it helps me enforce this. I've been at it for well over 25+ years so by this point, I've about acquired a lot of what I wanted so I'm in a little of my winding down period.
Try not to listen to the pirates that just boast about themselves and their habits, they're doing things you don't know about and are probably above your skill since obviously you claim to be very new at this.
I've been pirating for decades and never gave af how much I download in a day. Several hundred gigs on a weekend isn't unusual. Never got an ISP letter or had any issues, because I use private trackers.
There are two schools of thought, and one of them is insanely wrong.
The current preferred method (by youngins) for pirating is by using a VPN provider to "hide" your torrent traffic, which is generally valid, but it's not a silver bullet and it's a wrong way to think.
The other is to use a seedbox, which is a remote server hosted in a country that doesn't recognize piracy as a crime to begin with...
The choice is clear. Especially when you consider to get a good private VPN you'll have to pay $5-10/mo. You may as well pay $5-10/mo to commit a crime where no one thinks its a crime, then you never have to worry about it. Using a VPN you can still get caught, it's just exceptionally rare because conditions have to line up perfectly. But what if your VPN is down, and you accidentally begin a download? You willing to get a $100,000 fine for that?
Question out of curiosity, do you then keep stuff on the seedbox only or do you download to your local hard drive in your country? Because that download would still be illegal or wouldn't it? Just if we are talking about legality of things, everything else set aside.
AND use at least an adblocker, and even more important, something like noscript where you can see what the website is trying to load onto you. Ublock origin lets through an ungodly amount of crap on those streaming sites.
I'm checking out the free version of Proton VPN now after paying for PIN for a while. Haven't used it to torrent or anything yet. Just trying to run most the time now for increased security in this new era. Are unpaid versions less secure? I'm not so much worried about the price. Just checking out something different.
If you're using windows, make sure you set it to show file extensions. Watch out for files with a double extension such as "mkv.exe". That's guaranteed to be malware. Don't open any link, bat or com files either.
VPN (always) and QBittorent. After starting your VPN, go into the Preferences > advanced settings> Optional IP to bind to > pull down the menu and find your current VPN's IP address and select it. Protected, even if your VPN goes down. You can add torrent search engines to QBittorent under the Search feature.
ipleak.net to confirm your VPN is not leaking your IP too. Add the magnet/torrent link option and keep that page open. Your client will connect and will show what ip address is being exposed to peers.
I would recommend Mullvad over Proton. Proton's CEO is problematic and a bit of a wild card. They also have proven that they care more about money than privacy. They want to be a Google ecosystem and constantly push more product on you. Someone else mentioned this and it's a good thing to live by: if a company's service is free, you are the product. When it comes to being an application that has full control and insight into your network traffic, no thanks.
Mullvad is disgustingly cheap, costing only $5/month. I've been using Mullvad for 15 years now, and it's always been $5/month. You get DAITA plus a whole host of other necessary sailing accoutrements. They have one of the best track records in terms of not shoving marketing bullshit down your throat and being true to what their website and documentation says. The only limitation in terms of network usage is that you can only have 5 devices tied to a single account. It's mega easy to remove a device to free up a slot, though.
Yes, the search is great for starting out!
But i think you need to add the python-search plugins first, right? Not that its hard to do but it is something that needs to be done first
You will want to find a proper torrent site, this is not going to be easy considering you’re new to this. Using public sites you get a world of other problems such as malware.
Getting a seed box is an option, then you can install a media server like Jellyfin. But a lot of reputable seed boxes don’t allow public trackers.
Unless you're Canadian, then you can just raw dawg pirate whatever with no repercussion. IP cannot be associated to an identity here. At worst you get cease and desists notices emailed to you by your ISP but you can ignore them, ISPs are obligated to forward these. Especially notices from companies outside of Canada.
It all depends on where you live, in Poland they don't care unless you're pirating polish productions. Then the fist of God crushes you. Allegedly
On windows, I used Mullvad VPN and Qbittorrent. The settings suggested by Rodneyck are also what I used for qbittorrent.
And a tip: if you notice qbittorrent is not downloading your torrents but has lots of seeders and your VPN is connected... try restarting qbittorrent (right click the tray icon and quit) and it should start downloading.