BruisedMoose

Remember when we’d just torrent movies from the Blockbuster?

Using the “torrenting” to mean both physically copying something and downloading is fucking me up.

But yeah, in the US, pirated cartridge games weren’t really a thing.

For PC games, it was stupid easy to copy a game and give it to a friend. Copy protection for floppy games was usually just like “look up the 5th word in paragraph 3 on page 16 of the manual” which was easily defeated with a photocopier. And if you were on BBSes, you could gain access to the “private” file section or just find a pirate board. The limitations in hardware made it time consuming, but doable. Having a dedicated phone line was a huge boon.

And then you get into CD based games, broadband, stronger copy protection … And that hasn’t really changed a whole lot. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

But man, the entire PC industry in the 80s was built on and thrived on piracy. If sharing programs and games hadn’t been so common and easy, what would the home market have looked like? Would Doom have secured the same space it now occupies? Would Windows have become the prominent UI?

If you aren’t already self-hosting services and aren’t really comfortable with command line, you might want to look at something like CasaOS and this video: https://youtu.be/QfpZcXXGpVA

I watched it several times when building my stack and still go back to it from time to time.

Ultimately, Sonarr and Radarr take away the tedium of running your media server. You tell it what you want, it does the work of finding, obtaining, naming, and sorting. Then Jellyfin picks it up automatically. Jellyseerr, as others have said, puts a nice shiny coat of paint on it.