Serious questions that I struggle to answer. What is the point of an FTP server...

That's my point though; why bother, let's say, downloading a movie when the quality is above average through various easy to find streaming sources?

Not baiting, not tourist. Regular Jow Forums browser and post regularly. The FTP one is a blanket answer to my blanket question, I was hoping for a bit more than that. As for the VPS hosting websites, what kind of websites?

But sometimes things are objectively better. That's the point of my thread. I want to understand why there's such a dissonance. Take the private tracker thread for instance, arguing about torrents and usenet superiorities.

Thank you for this response, I just read it replying to others. I appreciate the insight and the privacy point.

Interesting. This kind of goes hand in hand with the original question.

That's not the point. "Not that you have to"
The question is merely to be answered. Whether you believe its a superiority thing or not, the point of discussion is to understand the differences.

Because quality of private tracker releases are usually better, and better quality means more suitable for archiving and gives better experience.
There are many downsides of streaming but the largest of them, from my point of view is that you pay for those "service proivider" but you own nothing. They can delete anything and there's nothing you can do about it.

well really I use sshfs and remote mount a server filesystem
I make websites for local businesses and some servers I have to experiment/bullshit on

How hung up would one have to be on quality though? The quality is above average on most 1080p streams and require no effort to find; why is not owning the movie / shown in question such a big deal?

I see, thanks for disclosing that.

>How hung up would one have to be on quality though?
Their 1080p are in crappy bitrate and are optimized for streaming. Private tracker releases have noticable difference compare to streaming on a decent setup, especially in audio on a home theater setup with good speaker system.

>why is not owning the movie / shown in question such a big deal?
Because in the future they may lost or if streaming is the only thing exists then you are stuck with shitty stream quality locked underneath DRM.

fuck off we're full

Based on your question, I'm assuming that you're mostly looking at the angle of "somebody has a bunch of pirated media on their FTP/Usenet/private tracker vs just paying for Netflix", and not the more general uses of an FTP server, or Usenet, or a VPS. For the piracy use case, its all just additional obscurity over a plain website with HTTP links or public torrents, which is very easily taken down/DCMA'd nowdays. There's no practical benefit, just that by being more arcane for users, it's also more arcane for the copyright holders to take shit down.

The "convenient" streaming services obviously have their own downsides as well, namely that you're paying for a service that can be taken away at any time (it's not "ownership" like old DVDs/CDs). And you're limited by device, etc, which is one practical reason why people (including me) prefer unencumbered media, even though I could definitely afford to pay for the "official" service.

There's also the philosophical/ideological component in that people just don't want heavily DRM'd services or want to stick it to the man or whatever, but I would consider that minor. People pirate because it's easier for them overall, and pirates stick to obscure FTPs/private trackers because it's more resilient to takedowns. That's pretty much it.

>

Serious questions that I struggle to answer. What is the point of an FTP server? What is the point of Usenet downloading? (Paid or unpaid) what is the point of private trackers? What is the point in having a VPS?
thanks, just bought 100 FTP servers and VPSes

Your response is a bit dystopian IMO. There are a ton of places that host movies and TV shows available freely though, I imagine most people watch a show or movie and be done with it, bar a handful of treasured movies. I appreciate the quality point but I feel like it's outweighed by convenience.

This did give me a giggle.

It's not that inconvenient, really. I can tell my homeserver to download when I do other stuff and comeback later. And since my server is remotely accessible, all I need to is to stream the files from said server. In the end it's still streaming yes, but with much better quality and on gigabit local network. Plus you can use your player of choice too, not some shitty javascript player.

>What is the point of an FTP server?
None. FTP is a dead protocol and shouldnt be used at all. sftp if you need a basic file transfer to the server, webdav otherwise.

>What is the point of Usenet downloading?
None. Usenet is obsolete in every aspect.

>private trackers
depending on the tracker you have a great source of highly specific material collected in a single place.

>What is the point in having a VPS?
Too many to list? Mail Server, Web Stack, reverse proxy, vpn and many many more.

But you appear to me to be a complete piracy faggot who's only hobby is pirating movies, series, porn and video games.

I mean, you could simply open an app on your phone and select a movie, watching it instantaneously.

When you got your own home cinema going its blu ray or bust. streams are for poorfags.

If you have a whole movie theater setup at home then a bit of effort isn't much honestly.
The fact that I can still stream movie from my server on every devices is just a bonus that comes with it.

I can agree with you on this point. It's about the only point I see but then, I can't imagine someone sitting and binge watching a ton of movies they keep on record.

How are you going about that? Plex? Emby? And do you pay for the server or is it self-hosted?

I just use a seedbox lul

Plex, Emby or just play the file through smb. I self-host. It's easy to setup. A cheap SBC with gigabit ethernet should do the job if you won't be doing any transcoding.

>why bother, let's say, downloading a movie when the quality is above average through various easy to find streaming sources?
You mean legal, subscription-based streaming services, right? Because free streaming often has quality so atrocious it's not even worth considering, so I'll assume you mean paid-for services:
Because the downloaded movie can have even better quality, you can keep it forever without paying an eternal subscription to retain access, you don't need to jump through DRM hoops to watch it and its availability doesn't depend on your streaming provider, so you'll never wake up one day to realize the movie you wanted to watch has suddenly disappeared from the streaming service's library. Also you can play it in a proper player, in-browser streaming is pretty garbage for video because browsers in general are garbage for video, a decent media player can achieve much better image quality, especially when significant scaling is involved.

Hi, sorry I took a while to get back to this. I meant free streaming; I've watched free 720p streams, albeit decent links, of shows not even originally recorded in HD on a 50 inch television and the quality was great. I'm not going to argue that there isn't much difference in a richer file downloaded and transcoded to a big TV but it's a lot of work for crashing down into a show. I guess you just have to be that anal to care as much about quality to the nth degree.

>What is the point of an FTP server?
Nobody uses FTP, but having a file server is good for accessing files remotely and sharing them with friends.
>What is the point of Usenet downloading? (Paid or unpaid)
Super fast, secure and convenient. Usually high quality.
>what is the point of private trackers?
Better quality and selection than public trackers.
>What is the point in having a VPS?
I use it to host my files, my simple website, my mumble server, write/execute programs remotely, and as a Guacamole server.

Why not AWS? AWS is expensive. I paid like $12 for a whole year on this little VPS. AWS would cost at least $10/month, not to mention you're charged for every GB of bandwidth.

>how would you ever convince a normie that these options are better?
You wouldn't because for a normie, they're not. Normies value convenience and price as the top metrics for a product. They'd rather pay a combined $25/month for Netflix and Amazon Prime, because it would be a lot of effort and learning for them to get up to speed about torrenting, VPNs, Usenet, etc.

>free 720p streams
>the quality was great
Those are mutually exclusive. Every free stream I've watched has been barely acceptable at best, but usually compression artifact-laden 360p. They try and keep the bitrate as low as possible because bandwidth costs those sites money.
It's really quite convenient to just torrent an entire season of a TV show, and then have the high quality files right on your hard drive, ready to watch whenever you want.

720p streams, even paid ones, are almost always very low quality and bitrate starved to shit. They look absolutely fucking awful, if that is what you consider "great" then I don't think there's much else to say.

I didn't disagree, but versus effort, I see more people just streaming a large file to their TV or whatever the case.

All of the rigmarole of hosting the content is either costly or requires effort. I think the only way I can see it as a hobbyist choice.

>punch in title in torrent website search box
>click download
'effort'

Torrenting is just as easy, if not more, than those free streaming sites. Especially since the free streaming sites are usually LOADED with a millions different ads and overlays that you have to wade through to start the video.

is there anything wrong with having hobbies?

I'm more referring to the apps available on your phone with the movies readily available.

Streaming is faster than downloading though.

>Streaming is faster than downloading though.
At 1Gbps it isn't really a problem for me, plus you can have the torrent client download the file starting from the beginning, in which case you can start watching immediately and don't need to wait for the whole thing to download.

Do you connect your phone to the TV? That seems rather inconvenient. I just have my TV plugged into my PC as a 3rd monitor.
Personally, I would rather wait the 4 minutes to watch the movie in a decent quality rather than have an instant awful experience.

Again I think that the majority of people won't notice or appreciate the difference. Which also leads me back to what is the point in all of these mediums when the normie variants are considerably more straightforward, quality is good (Not like you can't see or hear the movie, plus it's in 1080p), and doesn't cost a dime.

>ftp server
no point, just use http like a normal person
>usenet downloading
no point, just use torrents like a normal person
>private trackers
no point, just use public trackers like a normal person
>vps
when you need an extra machine just for a very short time

> I think that the majority of people won't notice or appreciate the difference
I think you're 100% wrong. Any time I've watched a quality torrent with normies, I always hear comments like "wow this looks pretty good". They're just used to shit quality when watching pirated versions of shows or movies.

You might have severe myopia and not be able to discern between a 1GB 1080p stream vs a 7GB 1080p encode (there's a huge difference), but tons of normies torrent movies so....

And by that same token, when I put on what you would call "Crap quality" to a normie, they say the same thing. It's not an accurate comparison.

I've already stated multiple times that there is a quality difference, I'm referring to ROI.

If you think navigating to rarbg and clicking the magnet button is not worth the effort, and elect to watch a ridiculously over-compressed stream instead, I'm really not sure what to tell you.
It's like saying you prefer a 40oz of Colt 45 because it's cheap and easy, and buying PBR is too much effort.

it was a good idea to separate concerns through protocols, but people were lazy and then they crammed everything into http and the rest were never developed.
i'd draw a parallel with creation of that monstrosity javascript.

>that monstrosity javascript
I wish they had followed through like 10 years ago and cleaned up the language. Now it's a clusterfuck.
For front-end stuff, web-assembly is pretty cool. You can write C++ code and compile it down to an intermediate. Then, it gets downloaded by the clients browser and compiled to its machine code. No interpreting going on, and it's only 20% slower than executing native code on the machine.

The fact that people are writing JS for backend stuff is disgusting.

Vanilla FTP is insecure by design and should be avoided whenever possible.
Use SFTP or FTPS instead.

If we were to have a race, I'd have a film on my screen faster than you would. It'd be considerably more convenient for me, and I don't have to juggle a ratio for the privilege.

This.