I’m in my first month of Usenet. I own several popular BluRay Movies but thought I’d save time ripping them manually and instead see what I could get off Usenet (NZBGeek + Eweka) now that my niece is visiting and needs entertainment.

I noticed a number of popular titles are consistently difficult to obtain (“aborted, cannot be completed”), even when live within only a few days, or even hours.

I assume this is a very vigilant DMCA takedown bot. How commonplace is this? And why does it only apply to some titles and not others?

Is it worth continuing with Usenet? I thought paying for content would ensure a certain “quality” of experience. So far, I’m a bit disappointed.

  • naviEnglish
    7·
    9 months ago

    I’m inexperienced with Usenet, but why is it better than torrenting?

    I have 5-6 trackers which provides me basically everything I need and it sounds like Usenet might be similar in that regard.

    • GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      The main benefit is that you don’t need to use a VPN, so you get full download speeds. Also the availability and download speed isn’t dependent on seeders, so more obscure content tends to survive longer on Usenet.

      • naviEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        That’s interesting about the life time. I’ve actually heard the opposite, where niche/old things can be easier to get from specific trackers vs Usenet because of their lack of popularity.

        I suppose it’s probably mostly about which websites you are a part of and if they specialize in specific content.

        • borari@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          Yeah, Usenet servers all have a maximum retention time, usually around 3000 days or something like that. Any articles older than the retention time of your server won’t exist for you to grab, but stuff is usually reuploaded frequently. With torrents a super niche thing requires someone seeding the content all the time for it to be consistently accessible, while Usenet requires someone to reupload it once every 5-10 years (barring takedowns) which imo is more consistently stable, but as the other poster said having both ensures your bases are covered. I personally don’t really torrent anything beyond oddball bbc2+ documentaries at this point though.

        • GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          It really does depend, so I mainly was speaking from my personal experience. But this is also why using both is recommended for *aar, because then you get the best of both worlds.