How do ya'll obtain/store your media?

[saint]

I was wondering this since we got a community here that (I'm guessing) is largely anti-streaming. Personally I've never had a Netflix account in my life, and have been torrenting for more than half my life, so that's my go-to. A couple years ago I bought a cheap used 12TB HDD and got back into private trackers, and now I'm in all the best sites so I have access to the highest quality of anything I want to watch. When I was younger I would just download the first shitty movie rip off of Piratebay whenever I wanted to watch anything so it's a huge step-up from that.

Before I got back into torrenting recently, for TV shows/movies I would usually use an "illegal" streaming site like Fmovies, but after they took that down there's been a huge quality drop in just using websites to watch anything, at least from what I've experienced. So public torrent sites are a good option, but if you want to watch something the minute it drops, and/or are scared about getting in trouble with your ISP (you could just use a VPN though), private ones are better.

For anime I still use good old Nyaa though, unless it's an old show and I want a good encode of it that has more than 1 seeder I use Animebytes. There's also a hard to get into Chinese torrent site that has untouched raw Blu-ray discs and DVD isos of anime, but I barely use it. Except for one time to download the Italian DVD release of Toradora for a rewatch, because the US release's quality was way worse. And I didn't really need subs anyway.

For games, anything new that I don't feel like paying for I just use the IGG games site. It's basically Steam but the games are all 100% off. Obviously there are times where I do buy games on Steam but I barely use it because I don't really play newer games. For anything retro, usually I either grab from my own archive of game sets, or find a set on archive.org and try to download the specific game I want (like PS1 for example, I don't have it mirrored locally because it takes up too much space). Sometimes the archive.org sets get removed, and if that happens usually it's still viable to search Google for a specific old game to download. There was also Myrient which was a pretty nice way to download things but it's gone now, and someone made a backup called "Minerva archive" but all the sets are just really big torrent files instead of DDL so it's kind of annoying if you just want to download one game lol.

For H-games specifically there are some sites I use, but I would recommend supporting creators of those if you can. DLsite is pretty annoying to buy stuff from though, I remember in the past I ended up having to buy a "BitCash" card from play-asia and using that to buy something off of there. I wonder if Amlux has experience with these since he used to live in Japan? apparently they sell those at konbinis. Btw, fuck buying H-manga off of DLsite and similar sites, the DRM on those is awful. I just use Exhentai for anything like that. Exhentai is also fun if you play the hentaiverse game on the site, you can actually get perks that help you with downloading stuff from the site. Also with manga in general I still just use sites to read online, with a phone app the quality isn't much different from having it downloaded, and sorting all that shit locally is a pain.

For books I just use Anna's Archive, in the past I've used libgen, which I think is just a part of that site now when you search. There is a private torrent site that is good for audiobooks, but my account was disabled for inactivity and I'm too lazy to ask in the IRC for it back. I also just don't like audiobooks, I can't really focus when listening to them.

I don't really listen to music but I know Soulseek is pretty good and I can't see why you'd need anything else unless you're one of those people who thinks something is missing when the audio is mp3 and not FLAC. And I think there's a lot of FLACs on there anyway. Otherwise there's private trackers for that.

Also, most private trackers prohibit offering invites on a "public site" which I guess this qualifies as, but I'm willing to give a couple invites to the ones that don't have that rule that I have invites on:

Spoiler

Torrentleech (general tracker)
IPTorrents (general tracker but kinda like shittier Torrentleech)
MTeam (Chinese general tracker, has a "noob" test you need to pass which involves getting a certain amount of upload or something)
Oldtoons (Western cartoon tracker, also has some anime)
AvistaZ ("Asian" content tracker, has a lot of non-anime Japanese stuff, guessing some people here already have accounts)

(just PM me your email only if you've never had an account before on the specific site you want an invite to, also if you don't already know how the ratio system works on these kinds of sites please don't bother)

[Amlux]

DLsite is pretty annoying to buy stuff from though, I remember in the past I ended up having to buy a "BitCash" card from play-asia and using that to buy something off of there. I wonder if Amlux has experience with these since he used to live in Japan? apparently they sell those at konbinis.

I have very slight experience. I never used anything for DLSite but my credit card since this was before the great Visa/Mastercard cuckening. I don't remember grabbing much of record though, just a few doujin games. I actually bought Rosenkreuzstilette and Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel from DLSite and I remember them being good purchases with pretty much no DRM. No BitCash experience.

I'm curious, where does anyone here go for untranslated raw manga scans? I love reading manga in Japanese but have trouble finding it (except for doujinshi on ExHentai obviously). I still have a working Japanese account with an online manga site called シーモア (CMOA), which I use on occasion. But honestly, dealing with the site is half the reason I procrastinate reading manga. The DRM is horrendous and won't even load on LibreWolf. The interface itself just sucks too... seems obviously made for smartphones.

Also, a quick reminder. Please don't post links to pirated materials on this site. You can discuss sites and so on but keep that stuff out of public eyes. Thanks.

I want to quickly give a shoutout to kitsuneko and Jimaku for those of us who like watching anime with Japanese subs. Though sometimes they are missing the weird, obscure crap that I love watching. Can link to these as subtitles alone are totally legal to share!

Lastly, I should just say that Yandex, especially the .ru URL, is probably the best search engine for finding any pirated shit online today. It's the closest to when you could just type "X album blogspot" or "X movie putlocker" and find whatever you wanted in an instant on Jewgle.

[saint]

I want to quickly give a shoutout to kitsuneko and Jimaku for those of us who like watching anime with Japanese subs. Though sometimes they are missing the weird, obscure crap that I love watching. Can link to these as subtitles alone are totally legal to share!

Oh yeah I totally forgot about those, I have all the subs from kitsunekko downloaded locally. Also, ironically for airing shows I ended up favoring Netflix rips if they exist instead of Crunchyroll since those have Japanese subs included

I'm curious, where does anyone here go for untranslated raw manga scans? I love reading manga in Japanese but have trouble finding it (except for doujinshi on ExHentai obviously).

Not sure, I don't really read manga that much these days. I've had this site called manga-zip (you can find the link/domain if you search) bookmarked for years and I think it still gets updated but the downloads are like rapidgator-type websites that have capped speeds and suck. There was a site called Mangareader you could read online and you could switch to the original Japanese but I guess it's gone now.
But honestly most raws are usually really bad quality from what I've found in the past and it's way better to read physical, but that's harder if you aren't in Japan and costs money so... I don't know.

[malformed_jill]

i also obtain everything that i need to through piracy, generally through nyaa or rom sites or sometimes archive dot org (i found some old japanese windows games there, though havent gotten around to playing them), and it's not generally, though i should probably make myself a bit more useful by getting myself a hdd for my pi and making a seedbox. mainly for more niche h-games that aren't regularly seeded, or just to archive more things in general.
on the other hand, if i have literally no way to get it in a cheapskate way, i'll probably buy a game out right. i've only used DL-SITE for buying daiakuji to try and read. i would have brought more venusblood stuff to make torrents for (the afterdays and dark chronicles content) but i Do Not Know how much of a hassle buying from there is now after all the visa and mastercard nazism. i don't particularly buy into modern games so there's not much worth to looking for those
books are also the other thing i sometimes buy, or "borrow" physically, unsurprisingly there's still some stuff that needs to be digitized. otherwise libgen and annas, or i just steal documents from random sites. i also siphon from soulseek accounts, and i've probably been blocked by a bunch of people there (i was usually using a phone client). sometimes the stuff you download from there can be pretty low quality or weirdly encoded, but it's usually pretty reliable for almost anything, even niche albums i find when i used to search through discogs lists.
i should also talk about music production stuff too, there's a really cool russian site (also good for other vidya) which ended up being a godsend for downloading all of the cool plugins video game and other music artists used when i was into that stuff.
since i don't watch video stuff much, i'm very sloppy when it comes to downloading that stuff, mainly western, so i end up going to any site that has a magnet.

as for storing them... i'm not too much of a storage autist, and with the way even hdd prices are going up, i dunno if i'll become more autistic about it. they're usually reliable, 2.5 satas which i connect with a usb adapter, and only one right now is being used for storing Some games. mainly fighting ones i can't play on loonix. anything else is usually on my main drive, and may be removed from my drive a few weeks later depending on how much i access or want to access it.

[Deoster]

I don't have much to add other than recommending rutracker if you can get past the Russian interface. There's a lot of quite obscure music on there in great quality. Movies and anime are hit-or-miss, because sometimes they'll be uploaded with *just* the Russian dub, but it's still worth looking and it's served me well for a while.

[Thricegreat]

Since I haven't found it here, I recommend DoujinStyle.com for Doujin music.

You can use SoulSeek as usual. But that website uses MediaFire for downloads which doesn't require JS. And it offers XFD links too. So that you can open them with mpv to check the tracks easily.

[drummyfish]

Since I've set up my doomsday RPI computer in the woods I became a little bit of a data hoarder, but somewhat different from other hoarders in that I limit myself with space a lot. I only have 32 GB SD card, some of which is taken up by OS and programs, so I've got like 15 GB for all my data, which forces me to choose wisely and compress a lot. Currently all my doomsday files are under 3 GB. They contain important and/or otherwise valuable stuff I think I'd appreciate if I'm left without the Internet -- tons of plain text, a lot of HTML sites, many images and only very, very few videos. I have only my all time most favorite movies there, each compressed down to like 20 MB, which is borderline unwatchable but I love it. I also printed out many webpages on paper, it's so comfy to read them this way you wouldn't believe. Anyway having all my doomsday files so small is extremely convenient, I have them backed up on many USB flash drives, CDs, file sharing sites etc. It's so easy to manage the collection when it's so fast to copy or upload it anywhere. I believe keeping the media as small as possible is the most important thing, it's what's going to decide where and how you will store it. With small enough collection the answer is simply you store it everywhere.

Actually I might as well take this opportunity to share my paper Internet with others so that all the effort I put into it comes to better use: https://files.catbox.moe/nev2ih.7z.

Sorry I can't share the whole doomsday file collection -- I would but it has pirated files n shit, you understand.

However I also have a separate collection of personal files, currently 1.7 GB in size. It's publicly available if you know how to get it (my website has clues on that). Here I store all my programs, art, writings, photos and stuff like that. Managing this is the same story as my doomsday collection: I just have it backed up on every computer, it's on every backup CD I burn, on my USB drives etc. Plus the people who download it from me help back it up I also have a small shell script (which is itself part of the file collection) that manages synchronization of the files across my machines with rsync, it makes logs, can show me the largest files I have (so that I can make them smaller) and so on.

[thanatos]

I've changed my habits on what media I seek out and save for later so my options have lowered. If I'm looking for movies, tv shows, or other videos my first stop is probably the Internet Archive and if it's not found there, I'll move onto finding them in search engines hidden deep inside pages among pages until I find something that looks relevant. If neither of those work my only others option is to load up tor and look through some onion sites or sail the high seas. Although I'd have to ask myself why I preserve certain media like this in the first place, do they serve me for some practical purpose or am I just a collector of some sort?

These days I like storing information, notes, writings, and other forms of written works on my computer. But even digital storage is something I've been moving away from too since I'm seriously trying to convert as much information as I can to physical form as it's easier to manage that way so it doesn't get lost or damaged as easily or I can't access it without a computer. I only have a few ssds with me at the moment and the one I depend on the most has my most important plaintext and html files that is already showing signs of malfunctioning and has bad sectors, which has resorted me to finding ways to reduce disk writes as much as possible to prolong the lifespan of an ssd further if possible. The linux kernel already had a module that has proven to be very useful for this exact purpose with a specific filesystem and it's very easy to do, all it takes is putting files in a location that doesn't write back to the disk, then once I'm done with them, I transfer them over to the main disk and let the write do the rest. Doing this prevents the faulty ssd from writing too often too many times, and this is especially important for people who actually give a damn about what their linux machine is doing, which most people don't seem to recognise. If it's not making any sense, that's okay, just PM me and I'll explain the details a bit further about what I mean.

Anyway, my point is that I hate digital storage now. Or at least I'm starting to hate it the more I understand it and the longer I've been with it. Physical storage is magnificent. It doesn't rely on technology, even if that technology continues to work normally and never breaks. It's never going to use electricity and I've already had problems where the power has gone out more than once, no backup generator or battery, the power cuts out in and instantly my work is gone. I like owning things physically, it's just like physical ownership of dvds and cds over streaming platforms like nutflix or dickney plus or asshole tv, you get to hold on to them forever and no one is going to take it away from you. It's that sense of physicality that matters to me, a paper on my desk with information I found on a website is stored more "safely" in real life than a text file on a hard drive that can get corrupted. Also with how discontent I am with digital storage I suppose I've distanced myself from the future of technology in general. I've stopped liking computers for a long time now. If I moved out into the woods, I'm not bringing electronics with me. Or having electricity. I will however print out all the websites and plaintext files I have on my ssds and bring them with me to the woods.

[vulonkaaz]

for music i just yt-dlp, with all my scripts if i'm on youtube it take me exactly 1 click and 3 keystrokes to download the audio of current video at maximum quality and store it as .ogg in my music folder, if i want higher quality i just buy the FLAC or the CD (unless its Universal Media Group, last time they sent me a disc in a broken CD case absolutely not protected for shipping and it didn't even have all the songs that the streaming version had, I just torrent them now not gonna give them money anymore), sometimes I just buy random CDs at some local store with heavily discounted items and its a total surprise what i will find when i put them in the player

anime and movies just come from nyaa or 1337x, usually in AV1 format whenever I can, preferably 720p or 480p rather than 1080, those are just stored on the NVMe of my seedbox and manually copied over to my laptop when i wanna watch them, i got a few blu rays and DVDs but those can be kind of a hassle to play or copy

i'm thinking of getting into the encoding business at one point and release my own low bitrate AV1 torrents probably in 480p, video content take so much space on the internet even tho with the right encoder and enough compute power you can make it way smaller while still being enjoyable to watch

here's a 37MiB Shrek i encoded a month ago btw https://x0.at/3qAw.webm (compression is a bit extreme, I'd bet a 100MiB Shrek would be enjoyable to watch)
another guy who encoded low bitrate movies https://vsv.fractumseraph.net/index.html

[drummyfish]

here's a 37MiB Shrek i encoded a month ago btw

This is impressive AF. Like I said above I try to do the same with movies, aiming more for like < 30 MB, but some of my movies of comparable size to your Shrek seem a little lower quality, I wonder if it's because they're live action or if you have a better know how in encoding. Do you have any resources/tips on extreme video compression? All I do is experiment with ffmpeg flags: basically downscale, lower FPS, convert audio to mono, lower bitrate of audio and video and set encoding preset to slowest. I also tried more obscure stuff like changing pixel formats but think it didn't achieve much.