Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
When property is valued over people, piracy is protest. Pirating undermines a system that guards profit while neglecting humanity. Every download is a refusal to accept laws that protect wealth over well-being.
Enshittification, everyone. It comes to everything.
Am i the only one that is more concerned about AI-slob subtitles, because i get my animes from 3rd-parties anyway?
The problem here is that all these major anime providers are owned by Sony, so you’re kinda fucked if you want to boycott them.
Did you read the article - or even the title? This story is about people turning to piracy, not turning to another official source.
You’re not fucked if you have The Pirate Bay. :-)
Have you been living under a rock?
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Animelab died for this
The whole “calling out Israel for genocide means you’re antisemitic” line is so worn out and honestly just exhausting. Israel has spent like 4+ decades trying desperately to associate criticism of israel with antisemitism.
I’ve been boycotting Crunchyroll for years, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.
“Piracy is a human right, collective ownership of the seas, comrades!” — Erik L. Midtsveen
Maybe instead of everyone calling it isreal and palestine, they should say the isreali government and innocent people.
They should say Netanyahu is committing genocide.
Saying israel instead of directly naming the culprits is sort of like when people say antifa. In the case of antifa it makes bad actors able to demonise the word and make it seem like a bad thing, so it can be used to twist peoples minds and make them think its a bad thing.
In the case of this genocide, it dehumanises the people committing the atrocities and diverts blame to the word instead of the people. Which has the effect of people like Netanyahu being able to reassociate the word with the israeli people and the jews.
So it absolutely isnt antisemitic to say israel is committing genocide, but it is unhelpful to divert the blame from the real asshats in charge.
Netanyahu
Yes, Netanyahu!
I wouldn’t even pirate their content! Let’s just hope enough people leave so they can shut down already!!! :-(
Its not their content (unless they make originals I dont know) they are just distributing Japanese content
I would very much like a streaming service that makes it transparent what it actually spends its income on.
Like - a streaming service where i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the studios/artists that actually produce the anime? I would take that.
But right now i’m worried that i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the shareholders of the streaming provider as “profit” while the studio gets almost nothing.
Yeah… sweet summer child you might not want to read Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s closer to 99% for BigContent lawyers and right holders and less than 1% for actual creators.
Lol, I’m sure it’s a good book and Cory Doctorow is well renowned, but I can’t help but think: “Defeat Chokepoint Capitalism by buying our book right now!”
And ironically enough even though most book by Doctorow might be DRM-free, maybe this one is, I can’t remember.
If you want I give you a free TL;DR: it’s not just monopolies, it’s also monopsies. When we feel trapped by buying with Amazon we often forget that authors often have the same feeling. So the “chokepoint” is not 1-sided but 2-sided.
Get thee to The Pirate Bay and send your direct donations on the side.
where would i send them to?
Corporations can’t stand it a logarithmic graph. They need freaking geometric progressions, and then they do stuff that gets them an anti-logarithmic graph.
Greed kills
why not just pirate shit without a noble cause for once? You know - the old fashioned way
Impossible.
Piracy is always noble.
quiet.
Fuckin wish I pirated this turd.
i liked it.
Perfection
what are the good sources nowadays…been out of the game for awhile and it’s to trust any sites promoted on any mainstreamish social networks.
like freemediaheckyeah, old reddit hub…is that still good?
ime every pirate source had 50/50 shot of turning into some virus/scam honeypot shortly after reaching high enough popularity
I mean, I basically just download anything that’s not an executable. So if its a video, audio, pdf, epub, etc… I don’t worry about it. Its very rare for an updated system to get infected from a random .mkv.
I just use (https://fmhy.net/torrenting) one of the torrenting aggregators because its the most comprehensive search, I found an anime that I couldn’t find anywhere else because there are dead torrents with no seeders everywhere else I looked.
You can get the Evangellion dub off of internet archive, found that out a couple of days ago cause bored.
https://fmhy.lol/ Free Media Heck Yea has loads of free content across tons of topics listed.
nyaa. Just look for a currently active Nyaa torrent site for anime. There’s several.
I pretty much just use 1337x.
I just bookmark the piracy megathread/wiki thingy, lemmy/reddit (backup). For streaming, I would probably recommend hydra, it’s really all the same but that site has “auto-next” which I prefer. There was one site I used to enjoy that was just better than any streaming platform I’ve paid for, skip intro, skip credits (would even detect after credit scenes), subtitles in all languages and audio tracks even commentary, quick responsive high quality loading of any media your mind can remember. They went after it hard and I haven’t seen a proper iteration since (every clone slowly lost features as they were whack-a-moling).
For downloading, they’re really all crappy (several link hoops to jump through) and hit or miss (for quality and selection you can’t beat the ease of a torrent unfortunately). You can find what you want eventually but the difference in hassle is just crazy.
i used to stream pirated some shows and a movie last decade, then they took down all those sites, i dont download.
Fmhy ✅
no idea, man. I’m just a poser)
Funnily enough, i was considering just today whether i should re-open my old Crunchyroll account. But i guess i won’t do it now after all. IIRC there’s been a streak of bad press about crunchyroll; like, this today isn’t the only issue.
All the streaming services are unethical now, both in pricing and operation. Netflix is maybe the least bad, but I can’t justify the cost for that, either.
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
What happens next is like what happened in the 2000s. People will turn to piracy as legitimate content is no longer feasible, affordable, or ethical. Then the corporate oligarchs will crack down violently to make examples of the people they’ve given no other choice or recourse.
It’s time to eat the rich.
Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.
Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.
people they’ve given no other choice or recourse
I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.
I’m looking for an ethical anime streaming service rn, and i’d be willing to pay for it (like, $10/month). Any options at all?
Like, “ethical” means that the money is used to keep the studio running that is producing the anime; not that the money goes to some big banks to profit off anime.
yeah, that just doesn’t exist anymore
True. But many people can justify it ethically.
Even if you make good money, it is still ethically questionable to support predatory practices and financially reward the objectively evil. Piracy is ethically neutral at worst and can easily be interpreted as a net positive, at least where it comes to most media. I deliberately choose to support some obscure stuff with my dollar because I want its creators to succeed and my conscience is clean.
Good for you, but Oovid opened my eyes to how different our living conditions are.
Some people may have may many alternatives, some few and some none
Stremio + Torrentio is the way to go.
Torrentio has started blocking VPNs.
I bailed on CR when they fired their US based IT people and outsourced to the cheapest Eastern Euro country. It wasn’t even a purely moral decision. The website was janky in the first place and I knew it wasn’t going to get batter at that point.
So non-Americans can’t do a good job, amirite?
I didn’t get that vibe from the parent comment. the reaction was to the motivations of the rich fatcats who aren’t happy with the obscene wealth they already have. Not American Exceptionalism.
especially if they arnt familiar with the tech.
Just canceled. Thanks.
I’m doing my part!
My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i’ve got left at this point is netflix and spotify.
Netflix pricing almost has me there.
I’d cancel it in a heartbeat but my wife would murder me.
Honest question, did you try self-hosted music?
Few weeks ago I thought this was a joke but… there is a TON of stuff out there already.
From the “rough”
- minidlna (with optionally tailscale to listen outside the LAN)
- 1min setup https://github.com/9001/copyparty
- NextCloud
to having mobile apps
- navidrome (with updates via lidarr)
to minimalist
to federated
to handling discovery
… there is just so much out there!
Edit: since I wrote this message (15min ago) I setup LMS thanks to podman and shared it via
ngrokand my wife can listen to my music on her phone instantly.So… yeah it’s that quick and convenient.
Is it perfect, definitely not, but it’s also very quick to get started and to reconsider.
Spent another 5min to
scpthe container and~/Musicon my RPi5, which I keep on 24/7, has a 512Go microSD and tailscale… and I guess that’s it, I have my own music server. I don’t have discovery on though but still, already useful!
You could try moving to Tidal or Qobuz, they treat their artists better and there are tools to transfer playlists
Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.
I’m never, ever buying digital licenses to video or audio content. My limit is games because avoiding it is kind of impossible.
Too many platforms close down. I’ve lost licenses from the Impulse acquisition and subsequent shutdown, plus one or two others. Any day these guys can just put up a 30 day notice and rip everything out of your library. Usually this happens after an acquisition… looks like bandcamp was sold in 2023 and the buyers shitcanned half the staff too.
Disks are cheap and piracy works until they enforce digital IDs for all connectivity on the internet. At that point we’d be back to swapping thumb drives.
I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.
I was recently turned on to Stremio + Torrentio and it’s very good. I’m considering making a Pi5 device dedicated to it.
I have an old Pi floating around that I should probably look at using for stuff like this.
Are they going to be around once Google removes sideloading from unauthorized devs?
Get a divorce
Netflix has been enshityfying and on the capitalist death spiral for YEARS, cancel that shit and spend your money on a VPN and some hard drives…
Netflix makes dope original productions in my experience; I’ve watched many of their shows and enjoyed them.
It’s not wrong to give money to studios that produce good content. What’s important IMO is that the money really goes to the studios, and not to some big banks trying to leech off it.
except they cancel after 2 seasons, because they dont want to pay anymore. Plus i saw the quality in some of the shows in the season, where thier costumes, or props quality is very showing.
I’ve been paying for a VPN for over a decade and I am up to about 20TB of used disks. Make of that what you will.
Your setup isn’t modern enough and you still find convenience in paying for Netflix?
I don’t know what else to make of it…
Not far off. Most of what i’ve setup originates from a plex lifetime sub. Maintenance is completely trivial.
Every time I hear about the next thing I think about modernizing which then requires standing up something new. New shit requires a new virtual host and completely new setups of many things. Then training my wife and others on how to utilize the new tech, and then praying it doesn’t just break tomorrow from The Establishment in some way.
Plex is one of the very few solutions that works with minimal sideloading and fuckery. My instructions for someone to start using it are “download the app, check your email for an account link, and enjoy.” I would not recommend any newcomers to go with Plex though, because it’s definitely not a modern solution.
I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.
I use plex also because I have a lifetime sub. Totally agree.
Switch from VMS to docker. Use NAS to keep the media, and store your compose stacks somewhere backed up, then all you need is one host with docker/podman and a repeatable configuration driven deployment. Start adding apps with compose files, no new host setups, no significant resource needs.
I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.
Yeah, I have Jellyfin running alongside Plex, (luckily, they happily run side-by-side with the same library), but I consistently find myself using Plex instead. I want to like Jellyfin. I want it to succeed. And Jellyfin is like 80% of the way there… But that remaining 20% is a real sticking point, and I almost always end up falling back to Plex after trying (and getting frustrated with) Jellyfin.
It’s an unpopular opinion on Lemmy because of the FOSS mentality, but Jellyfin simply isn’t mature enough to fully replace Plex in many peoples’ setups. Especially when you consider the whole “getting friends and family to convert” side of things, where Plex handily beats Jellyfin in regards to account and app setup; I can walk my mother-in-law through setting up Plex, but Jellyfin adds a whole new level to the equation when she would need to sideload the app onto her TV.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
I built out bluefin as a panacea to issues I had with subtitles on a set of media on my plex server and it couldn’t even give me subtitles.
I hear a lot of rave reviews for Kodi, but that’s serverless so now I need to open up storage or setup a vpn server and isolate a vlan… and how in the everliving fuck am I going to explain configuring this? Oh, and that needs sideloading too and if I go with a vlan now they need to figure out how to connect their device to a VPN. That’s a nightmare.
Sure, I can setup Kodi at home on my TV device and leave plex as is but i’m no closer to a server based transcoding solution. That sucks.
