I like watching things like educational tv or some competition shows if they are objective and have good sportsmanship… stuff that definitely does not appear in the top ten list, probably not the top 50 list. Assuming I should not mention show names here but will mention on DM if woul;d help.

I’ve found public torrent sites and dht searches can be hit or miss. For older episodes, if I can even find torrents at all, then there are no seeds. But some of the shows I like, it seems like the scene release groups just completely ignore them… despite covering past seasons. I’ve had this happen with 2 different shows (one while rarbg was still around, another just this last month). One I’m currently looking for, I found only EZTV covering and they completely skipped one of the episodes.

I’ve had bad experiences with private trackers in the distant past. But even if I was willing to try again, I saw one or too that want you to reveal your real (e.g. non-VPN) IP addres and am waay too fuckign paranoid to do that. Do you guys think I’d have better luck on usenet? If not, is there something else you guys would recommend? I am looking to have offline copies similar to what you get with torrents (streaming might be an option if there are ways to download that don’t require me being smart enough to do video editing or having to manually record)

edit: just to clarify, I ahve read the megathread here and on the old pre-reddit migration r/piracy. have tried practically every public torrent tracker and dht search engine (btdig/solidtorrents/etc) i can think of as well as looking on most of the direct download sites i can access.

    • Zedstrian@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Have you found a private tracker that works well for documentaries? I’ve tried TorrentLeech, FileList, MVGroup, and usenet so far, but my to-find list still has several releases I have yet to find in 1080p (despite most such documentaries having released since 2010). MVGroup is the best tracker for documentaries I’ve found so far, but they tend to upload lots of documentaries a tier below their optimal resolutions (ie 2160p documentaries in 1080p and 1080p documentaries in 720p).

  • practisevoodoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Depends on the urgency. Usenet, indexer and something like sonar is effective if used in a fire and forget style. Episodes will be downloaded when they are reposted but that may be months or years later.

    • drunkensailor@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      In this case, one of the shows was aired recently and my public torrent rss feeds didn’t find it (I did not have a rss for EZTV at the time and they appear to be the only ones who covered it, but like I said, they completely skipped one of the episodes…). I think for sonaar, I would need to have usenet indexer already for it to pull from it (used to use it just for torrents) so seems like it wouldn’t make a big difference here cz its a cart before the horse kind of problem.

      e.g. sonaar would need me to add more sources first… but i don’t know which sources other than public torrents are good for this kind of thing.

    • Zedstrian@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      Problem with PBS is that each of their releases has an availability time limit, making finding their older content at optimal resolutions difficult.