I use and love put.io. Completely hassle free. I'd never go back.
The killer feature is instant completion of torrents if someone else has already downloaded them. I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.
Useless for US citizens who are not using private VPN, since it downloads torrents on your machine, which tells legal institutions that your IP address is downloading that movie using torrent.
So far guys I'm using StreamNation.com (http://www.streamnation.com), way better than put.io, their UI is amazing, they offer way more features and their iOS app is a killer with an offline mode. Last the pricing: they are 10 times less expensive. Plus they transcode all videos and stream them, and they support magnets! You should try my friends, no-brainer!
It's interesting that they don't talk about torrent anywhere on the pages, in order to verify that they support it I had to search on their blog for word like "magnet".
I guess they probably prefer to have a low profile approach and use generic sentences like "your ripped DVDs, video files and web clips"
> I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.
Is that at all legal? Unless you mean films that have fallen into the public domain or that remain unlicensed in your nation or jurisdiction, I'm pretty sure this is unlawful. If there aren't laws on the books yet concerning a 3rd party service downloading or hosting pirated content on one's behalf yet, I would still consider this to be unethical behavior.
Does put.io intend to share the business tactics of MegaUpload? (ie. looking the other way concerning how many users will make use of the service?)
I don't mean to sound belligerent. I feel this is an angle that would be good to discuss.
I have to agree. the service clearly targets people who want to access consumer video torrents, and much of that content is pirated.
they avoid some problems by requiring everyone to pay directly. Megaupload really got into trouble for their affiliate programs, which essentially paid people to upload pirated content. Those programs drove a whole industry in Vietnam.
They clearly keep track of unique torrents across users because they provide the instant download feature. Thus they should be able to respond to DMCA requests quickly. By the same token, they may come under legal pressure to disclose user information about accounts that accessed successfully DMCA'd files.
There are legitimate uses for Bit torrent though, and this service seems like it would benefit the health of ecosystem as a whole. They'll probably seed a lot of data, maybe especially rare data. That would be helpful for things like big scientific datasets that often end up hosted on some .edu FTP site.
They seed automatically. Based on what subscription you have, they'll maintain a specific ratio. Minimum is 2.0 ratio but better accounts have a 20.0. https://put.io/plans?select=1.1
Because instead of an annonymous user, there is now a company to sue. I don't see them lasting unless they create copyright controls that will make most people not want to use them.
Some countries allow you to access any content you have a license for. Especially so for old content that you may personally lack the ability to transfer onto new media formats.
A lot of people mention ability to almost instantly stream the movie you want, but you can already do that using torrents. It's called sequential downloading. After buffering a few % of the whole torrent, you can start watching it with VLC (not sure if other players support it).
Sequential downloading is considered by many to be bad for the health of the torrent [1], and many developers refuse to implement it into their software/libraries [2].
That is just silly. It will make the download slower for the majority of people in some weird cases (i.e. bastards that download and stop right away when done, making the end of the files really rare)
That said, I have 7 torrents of pretty uncommon data that is lingering with missing parts. none of the movies, so i doubt it is because someone used sequential download.
Point being, for movies and music, where sequential download would make sense, there is lots of interest so it is harder to be missing pieces.
Sequential downloading defeats one of the primary goals of torrents: to make rare data common. If only one peer has chunk ae986f6ea789 of a torrent, it makes sense that you'd want to download that chunk first in case the peer disconnects before it's fully seeded. Even with movies/music, 70% of the peers may have the first 70% of the movie downloaded, so if you join the swarm it would make sense to throw you at the final 30% in order to increase potential bandwidth to those chunks. I also see overall speed going down as too many peers are requesting the same chunks, when they could be getting other chunks at higher speeds
There's no need to do purely sequential download, though. You only need to download sequentially at the speed of playback, the rest of your bandwidth can go to the rarest chunks.
You're right, but then you'd need to programmatically determine the video bitrate in the torrent client, or integrate it with the video player. Either way is a pretty heavyweight solution.
This argument is moot when you're streaming some blockbuster movie, there will not be any rare chunks to speak of. The client could implement a threshold where sequential downloading is only switched on when there are x number of seeders.
I agree in spirit, but the idea of everyone starting at the same end of the download does indeed go against some of the core ideas of bit torrent.
Personally I think maybe something should be built on top of bit torrent to accomplish this task. To me it's a case of being careful when re-engineering underlying protocols because of a higher level need.
Anyway, it's a nice hack, but I kind of understand where the client developers who refuse to do this are coming from :-)
I will also heartily voice my love of this service. It has totally changed the way I view movies and TV shows.
I'm a technically-inclined person, but I really don't want to spend hours fiddling with torrents. The instant torrent completion is an absolutely killer feature. The UI is easy to use and dead simple. The developers regularly update the site and let us know when there are disruptions.
I'm a "broke" college student, and to be honest, out of all of the online services I pay money for, this is the one I think the least about before purchasing.
It seems as though the primary use case being discussed and implied is torrenting of media that is not legal (however ethical you feel it may be) to torrent in many countries. Please remember that when you do so, you weaken the case the rest of us have against the same laws you're ignoring, against DRM, against intrusions into our privacy, and against unfair ISP practices.
(a) Those who download stuff illegally instead of paying like 0.01% of their disposable income per year for it whilst making about as much money as those who have created the content.
(b) Those who download stuff illegally instead of having no access at all or paying completely unaffordable fantasy prices for it whilst making only a fraction of those who have created the content.
In which group you fall depends mostly on where you were born. And this is not primarily a debate about inequality as much as it is about infrastructure. There simply is no Netflix in most parts of the world that gives you reliable access to a huge movie library for peanuts.
So when you say "you weaken the case the rest of us" you should be aware of how "you" and "us" can mean very different things depending on who says that to whom.
THIS (b) is the comment I was hoping to see. It's a minority in the world that have Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video, etc. The rest of the world has no "legal" access to content... and by legal access I mean, access to the same relative conditions as the US (which is the source of the main content being pirated): price, timing, quality, etc.
The rest of the world hasn't got flat fee video rentals, on-demand TV services, has to wait 1-2 years to get a season already aired in the tv series home market, hasn't got the option to watch it without voice-overs, etc. This is a digital breach that decision and law-makers keep pushing for, and the result is "piracy". Later this media lobby points the finger at countries for downloading their "content". Ironic given that studios/distributors were never planning in providing that content in the timely manner and format customers wanted it in.
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking the people who are in group (b) are the ones who have enough money to afford a high-bandwidth internet connection, a modern computer, and the knowledge to know what torrents and the accompanying technology are.
The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for. There might be a handful who genuinely can't access it, who have no way to legally pay for it outside of handing over a substantial amount of their small wealth, and they paradoxically also have access to an internet connection strong enough and a computer powerful enough that can handle streaming these movies. However, they do not represent the vast, vast, vast majority of users.
In my part of the world (Eastern Europe) 25 mbps no-quota costs about $20/mo (~2% avg income) in the urban areas. Outside of cities the price stays the same but usually only (A)DSL is available, with bandwidth ranging from 512kbps to ~15mbps.
Accidentally, an average price of a DVD movie is also around $20. So yes, there are places where fast internet is affordable, yet movies are not. Unless you want to watch only one per month and give up your internet instead.
There is also a matter of TV series, which you have to wait 1-2 years for (poorly dubbed) in TV or on DVD.
Of course we are probably in something like the top 10% of wealthy places to live in. I can only imagine that situation in poorer countries resembles the one we had when internet was just kicking off and hardly anyone had connection. There was (illegal) business model of downloading movies (from Kazaa or weird warez forums), burning them on CDs and selling for the locally acceptable price.
Guess what - unless the price of virtual goods is adjusted to the local standards, and the availability increases, piracy will be there.
If a $20 DVD isn't affordable, $20/mo internet isn't. (I'm also fairly skeptical that your average DVD movie is $20, as though that's the absolute lowest you'll ever pay.) Movies aren't a God-given right, so it's not like you deserve a set amount of movies per month.
Even then, while that situation is certainly more excusable, you're still the minority. That site isn't made for the Eastern European lower class who can't afford to buy a DVD. It's made for folks who have the money (which means they can purchase and maintain a computer as well as a monthly internet connection) but who don't feel like spending it.
Plus, I'm fairly sure iTunes has movie rentals in most Eastern European countries.[0]
I have a cheap internet connection (16Mbit, ~$13/month), and I'm not a minority. In my country, having an internet connection that's speedy enough for video streaming is not a luxury. And yet, I can't even buy anything off iTunes, Google Play Store, not to mention Netflix and other similar services. In fact, we even got PayPal only in mid 2013 (and not even the full service - we can only send money and can't receive anything), that's how "open" the internet is to our market.
Also, my country is in southern Europe, not part of the EU yet.
> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for.
I think this is highly biased towards your own ideas of how someone could use such service. You are, in fact, projecting[0] your own probable scenarios to large group of people you have never met, living in countries you've only heard of in the news. That, sir, is unfair. You should not stick with generalized opinions and prejudice, mkay?
Actually, I'm not a minority, I know hardly anyone who behaves differently in my country. I also certainly am not in lower class. I hardly ever watch movies and when I do, I go to the cinema, because I don't like storing use-once junk in my apartment. Try to put it in perspective of 2% of income - in US most people can accept $85 broadband but hardly a $85 DVD, even if they are earning much more than average. I would be considered an idiot with too much money to spend if I bought them for myself. The only DVDs I have seen anywhere were gifts, as they are easy to pick and fit in boxes well.
The only reason why broadband may cost that much is because it's localized and one can't simply buy EU broadband in US. There are actually good reasons for broadband prices to be affected by local economy, since labour and materials may have different cost there. That's not the case with DVDs, which cost the same (pennies) to manufacture.
But maybe I should have put more emphasis on the problems with availability rather than money. Having a choice of spending my $20 on cinema tickets or a DVD, sometimes I would choose latter to watch something at home. But here DVDs are released only when the dubbing is ready, often after a year from the original release. I could get to this content earlier online, but I don't have Netflix here, nor Play Movies, Pandora and many others. There were problems with DVD releases that were solved in two ways: by VOD with reasonable monthly fee or by torrents. Saying torrents are for the greedy is just a good excuse to prosecute piracy instead of improving the market.
Your first sentence doesn't make any sense -- There is so much more that you can do with a $20/mo internet connection than a $20 DVD. I would go as far as to say that today, in the developed world, an internet connection is a necessity; DVDs on the other hand are not.
> The vast majority of people will be using this to watch movies they don't feel like paying for.
There's also a huge population of people around the world who get access to movies, TV shows and other media only after a significant delay and use this kind of services to get access to that media on the day it is released. Those living in the US may not realize it but there's no amount of money you can pay to get the hit TV shows on the day they are released in Europe and other parts of the world.
There's a pretty penny to be gained out of these would-be customers if the media distribution companies can figure out how to monetize zero day world wide distribution. It is not a technical problem to solve. Every day that this problem goes unsolved, the content industry loses money.
A little anecdotal evidence: out of the two american tv shows I watch, the other one can not be viewed from my home country at all, the other one will be available with a delay 6-12 months and a horrible dubbed soundtrack. Would I pay a reasonable price to get them on the day they are released instead of the clumsy torrent service I am using at the moment? Yes I would.
Torrents are always going to be more clumsy for media consumption than Netflix, etc. put.io is trying to bridge that gap, but it won't close it completely.
Real, legitimate streaming services are really good. they adjust quality based on available bandwidth. they have clients for every device you own. They provide all kinds of helpful metadata like cover art, actors, content classification, playlist recommendations, watch lists, etc etc etc etc
Torrents are terrible. half the stuff is malware, the quality is all over the map, languages and subtitles are a crap shoot, you use a ton of band width, you have to manage huge files locally, etc etc etc etc
Now, if you like you can work out the intersection with countries that have access to a similarly complete selection of movies at comparable cost to what Netflix offers in the U.S.
You will quickly find out that your "handful" of people is in fact hundereds of millions of people.
That really does nothing to disprove my point that people who can't afford movies (either purchasing, or importing, or renting in iTunes) are also extremely unlikely to be able to afford broadband internet and a modern computer and be knowledgeable enough to handle a cloud-based torrent client.
I've lived in part of the poorest region of Brazil in 2004. Most people I knew in middle class could afford at least a computer good enough to download things on emule or kazaa (BT was just starting to get popular but was still more geeky by then, where I lived) ... And I was impressed by the pirating knowledge... People who barely knew how to use Word and Excel, could download, or had a son who knew how to do it. Yet they couldn't afford to consume movies and music at the normal price. Because of extremly High tariffs, cultural goods where more expensive than in the US or Europe. And yet salary was much lower...
Broadband was expensive too, but 512k was something like 60$... And because internet access had so much more use than just consuming cultural information, people would prefer to get it and save on something else. Like the dvds that they would get by pirating.
Before 2002 when Broadband access was excessively rare... Most people would just buy pirated dvds from the flea market... For 5 $ or less. They where ready to pay for them... but at a lower price than what official goods where... You never bought dvd for youself except if you were wealthy or to give them as gifts.
The cost of providing an internet connection tends to adjust to the market. There's countless testimonies on this thread to that effect. The different regulatory environment, lower cost of labour and less entrenched monopolies in less developed countries mean that connections are cheaper.
Knowledge is basically free. Anyone with an internet connection and a PC made in the last 10 years (not particularly hard to come by, even with very little money) can be knowledgeable enough. Equating wealth with knowledge is foolish.
That's a terribly first-world-centric view to take. I live in Lebanon, definitely a country that does not qualify as "developed" by any standards and people here are in group (b).
Your options here for watching movies are (a) cinema(which doesn't work for TV shows), (b) wait for them to show up on crappy cable services, (c) buy pirated DVDs for 1~2$ a pop and (d) torrent. Buying legal DVDs is possible but extremely hard, not simply due to the cost but also the availability. If I wanted to buy a pirated DVD there are at least 3 different shops within 2min of my home in an eastern Beirut suburb whereas if I wanted to go the legal option I'd need to drive down to Virgin in downtown Beirut(15min drive) and pick from an extremely limited selection.
The only viable solutions if you want timely and not incredibly inconvenient access to movies or shows are (c) and (d). Internet connections are incredibly expensive relative to Europe or the US(50$/mo for 4mb and a 25GB cap) and yet I know a lot of people who go with option (d), mainly because traffic at night isn't subject to the cap. People will simply cue up their torrents and download them between 12am and 7am and watch them the next day. If you keep a buffer of unwatched movies/shows this can work quite well. My personal approach is to torrent to a digital ocean droplet and then download over regular HTTP overnight. Most people are not technically savvy enough to do that but they would be able to use put.io. I happen to use my droplet for other things, but if I didn't put.io would be cheaper as well.
How we treat minority groups is important in part because they are so easily ignored. There are real people around the world who yes, have reliable fast internet (something much more common outside the US) and yet are denied legal access to the media they would happily pay for. Now, you can suggest that they should just not consume content that is not available to them, but that is like saying just don't participate in modern society.
Yes, it is important, which is why affluent first worlders shouldn't hold them up as poster children for their pet cause of not wanting to purchase things.
Media consumption costs are closer to 3-5% of after tax income by my reckoning. Not sure what they are of disposable income, since I haven't calculated exactly what that is for me - I also like to eat well, you could argue much of my food is overpriced or non-essential. It wouldn't be less than 10% as rent is a large fixed cost.
And my media consumption isn't enormous. A few packaged DVD purchases, Netflix account, and the movies - which is very expensive these days.
There is actually a really cool opportunity here. A service like this could put an access fee on certain torrents, collect payment via bit coin and pass the fee on to the content creators.
Technically, it's totally feasible. of course, that only works if the content creators are willing to license the content, and that's difficult for even big players like Netflix.
There's a huge international market for video and bottom disappear prices. case in point: every sketchy DVD store in the third world. there's lots of legitimate money to be made if you were able to sell legally to that market. The real question is: how do you manage the Price differentiation? If a movie costs $10 in the USA and $0.50 in poor, region-excluded country X, how do you keep everyone in the US from buying the $0.50 version?
If put.io solves this problem, it'll become a billion dollar company.
This opportunity doesn't really exist. Even with a much more established and proven business model like Netflix, they still have trouble getting and keeping licenses. The possibility of content owners going from wanting to kill Netflix to outright supporting people who upload their content to random Internet users isn't just distant; it's pretty much nonexistent.
>> "There simply is no Netflix in most parts of the world that gives you reliable access to a huge movie library for peanuts."
True but you can still get movies via DVD or VHS is those places. e.g. If I don't have access to Spotify it does't give me a valid excuse to pirate. I can still purchase through iTunes or buy CD's.
I'd not really consider DVD/CDs as the same thing as digital downloads. I'd love to purchase digital movies/music, but there's no way I'll buy a CD/DVD as they're useless to me.
IMO that isn't a valid reason to pirate it's just a crazy sense of entitlement. They've made it available to you in a reasonable way but it's still not good enough for you because it's not exactly what you want.
1) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable or hard to find) and rip them (assuming this is sufficiently legal) then throw away the useless pieces of plastic you just paid premium for (which in some regions equates your license), or
2) buy CD/DVDs (except the ones that are unavailable, etc) and put up with plastic crap that is bulky, unreliable and slow, or
3) not buy anything
It's ridiculous, this is the 21st century. They can fit a whole season of some serial onto a micro-SD card, but instead you want me to buy a "box set" of cardboard junk and plastic that is larger than the laptop I intend to watch it on? (which, incidentally, doesn't have a DVD drive for pretty much the same reason it doesn't play cassette tapes or vinyl records either)
Five years ago I had a fire, packed salvageable stuff with smoke damage in big cardboard storage boxes. Over the years I've unpacked and cleaned almost all of the items. The box with all my CDs? They are probably fine (I guess), but I never bothered, I just got them digitally and am happy about those things not taking up any shelf space.
Not respecting copyright in 2014 is a moral issue.
It is good when authors can earn money on their work, and thus it used to be that authors had a deal with the government. Tax money is spent to enforce a limited monopoly for a few years, and afterward society could the work to the improvement of all. This deal has now been completely perverted, and all works stays perpetually under restrictions.
Worse, In Sweden, we have a special deal on top of copyright. Every time someone purchase a harddrive, they are forced (through taxes) to pay for the privilege of "private copying". This deal is then again perverted through the use of DRM. Companies that do this are effectively stealing, and here the word is used correctly: They are stealing my money. I paid for something, and the other party is now refusing to give up their side of the bargain.
When asked to respect copyright, I am asked to balance the moral issues at hand. Can I, morally, support the perversion in order to get authors some money, or should I ignore copyright in order to force a change.
Same thing in France. Everything is taxed,cds,dvds,usb keys,hard drives because of the so called "private copying".
I dont mind,the problem is "who's getting the money?why artist A and not artist B".And it's usually the artists that need it the less that get the most of these "revenues".
Here in Uruguay it's a really opaque method that determines how artists get money. It's determined by an organization called AGADU based on things like plays on public stations, etc:
Which collects money from plays and from public performances on behalf of artists.
IMO Local artists probably get more money than they'd have gotten otherwise, while foreign artists are probably underpaid (though Uruguayan revenue is very likely a rounding error for them).
I know of a person that works there, and I don't think they're scammers or mafia or anything, but the model is definitely outdated and I dislike a private organization having that kind of power (not to mention most artists never explicitly gave them representation power).
Just the opposite - every time you buy any content from the evil media mega corps you're funding their war against privacy, democracy and individual freedoms.
Exactly. When SOPA came looming around, I realized my digital buying habits had in effect been indirectly funding lobby activities to make the internet and my life worse. That's when I decided to stop giving them money.
I have several friends and family who live off of that minuscule amount...
You can rent basically any movie on Amazon, or buy DRM free music from a variety of sources. If you choose not to and torrent, you're not performing some sort of noble protest in the name of the artists. I can assure that they don't see it that way.
Note: I'm not saying that people in creative capacities think that torrenting is evil, and yes, they know they are part of a broken system. I just think it's disingenuous when people justify torrenting using this argument. You're torrenting because you think the market price of whatever content you're downloading is too / you don't feel like paying. Simple as that.
Megaupload had more legal use cases than this. They will have to stay under the radar, or else be busted by the feds like so many other torrent related sites. Kind of hard to do, when you'll inevitably end up with people torrenting using public trackers. Most people on private trackers have already figured out seedboxes, so if they do restrict to private trackers, they won't have much of a market. And if and not when they get raided, there will be plenty of incriminating evidence against their client base.
I'm sure their customers are enthusiastically paying $5 a month for fast downloads of their 3 TB of personally customized Ubuntu distributions, and that the numerous references to music and video on this page are all to Creative Commons licensed remixes of Jonathan Coulton songs.
I understand the ethically shady bit but... how does it weaken the case against DRM? Surely it just continues to demonstrate how useless it is as a strategy?
As someone who just got his daily 40min of "TV" interrupted by amazon error AMZP-9, right in the middle of an episode... i'm now regretting not having downloaded a torrent ilegaly. The whole thing with torrent is not about saving money. I already have access to the content for free for paying amz prime. it is all about convenience. I was lied to that instant streaming was more convenient. Well, that until AMZP-9 popups in the middle of an episode and there is not way to watch it for the day.
With torrent, at least i'd know beforehand when setting my 40min* aside, that i will press play and see the damn content. So yeah, it does not weaken the case against DRM. i will agree that it strengthen it. Any engineer worth its salt would CACHE the damn stream. They can't because of DRM and silly contracts out of touch with reality.
(* and that is not counting the 5min that it takes to GET to the content on amazon player... piece of @!#)
In theory what you say makes sense, but then why is there still DRM? There's been strong evidence that it's useless for a long time already, and companies are still implementing it. What do you think will actually convince people to stop that hasn't happened already? I say it weakens the case because more piracy just inspires the knee-jerk reaction of "we have to do something to protect the children from pirated software!" It's like the TSA. Is it actually effective? I don't think so. But the more attacks we perceive the more the average joe and politicians think we need more TSA.
What you say makes sense as well, I guess we're really talking about two different arguments. One logical/reasoned (look, DRM has basically failed) and the other emotional (OMG piracy! We must have more DRM!). They're kind of orthogonal to my mind.
>> In theory what you say makes sense, but then why is there still DRM?
For a whole complex of reasons, some of which boil down to exactly what you say. Maybe if nobody ever pirated anything it would go away, but I doubt it. It's too useful for other purposes - market segmentation, multiple resales for new formats or devices, preventing reasonable backups etc etc.
>> I guess we're really talking about two different arguments
Right, and while I completely agree with your logical reason, my fear is that the emotional one is more prevalent and thus, the only one that will really determine future behavior.
I haven't considered "market segmentation" as a purpose of DRM - that's certainly interesting. I think the concept of market segmentation is unfair and manipulative, so I think this lends more weight to the commenter who suggested they feel a moral obligation to violate what copyright has become. Personally, I still prefer to pay for what I'm getting, and I just avoid products from companies who make that more difficult then it needs to be. But I see the viewpoint better now.
I should say that for market segmentation it appears to work - those that stick to the rules are limited to media from their region. But this is another driver piracy.
He said that doing illegal things with these torrents will only give the corporations/ones in power more leeway into getting politicians to pass laws that require DRM, violate our privacy, etc.
No he said it would weaken the case, I was wondering how.
If piracy stops people will say DRM works and they need more powers to really cement it in place. If piracy continues then people will say they need more DRM to stop it.
I cannot see how the existence of this site (or other torrent services) weakens the case against DRM.
But that's nothing to do with making any case, simply practical consequences. Much like the drug war, DRM and its legal environment are basically self perpetuating now. I don't see.how continuing piracy has any impact at all.
It honestly is not an issue, in my opinion. put.io just seems like a low-cost seedbox. https://whatbox.ca/ has existed for eons and is primarily used to pirate music and it hasn't been shut down.
I think the real case should be against anti-piracy. The music and movie industries punish people because they don't like their business model or their product. Copyright laws were created when books were the medium. This is the fundamental key: I can not create 300,000 physical books with three mouse gestures.
Think about how common piracy is. They demand what? 250k for each song downloaded. Multiplied by the number of songs downloaded illegally per day... they feel they are entitled to 600 trillion dollars per year. Does that sound right to you?
Anyone else worried a list of all your torrens is kept in one place and can be tied directly back to you via you Credit card, unless you pay via bitcoins.
They might not do anything with this data but when pressed by Mr big Coporation they may have no choice...
I am. Anyone know details about the founders? Are these guys trying to make a statement, or out to make a buck? In which case, selling the data about its users would be a great monetization model.
It could have been founded my mother Theresa. It would still be a sweet place for the MAFIAA tugs to drop DMCA requests, or whatever those abuses are called nowadays, by the truckload on their heads.
Because DMCA makes itself easy to be abused. Off the top of my head, I can remember Microsoft asking Google to take down results to OpenOffice[1]. The first Google result for "DMCA Abuse" reveals this:[2]
Thrice today I've clicked on a link to put.io (which was upvoted on a number of sites), scrolled around absentmindedly for a bit, and left. It was only just now that I thought, 'wait a second' and clicked back, to realise that your site is a bittorrent service (and one that I may actually use since my free EC2 instance (which I was using as a torrent box) just expired).
I guess what I'm saying is, you might want to unbold 'Hassle-free' and embolden the word 'torrenting' in your byline. Or something like that. Here's what my brain saw when I went to your site:
- It caches torrents that other people downloaded(popular torrents) so if you add them, they are in your library immediately
- You can subscribe to RSS feeds of TV shows from showrss.info without needing to download every show individually
- You can install the XBMC app to access you content there
- A REST API? Yup! They have it!
- It converts videos to MP4 on their cloud
- You can use multi-connection downloaders to reach to speeds like 30Mbps
- There are many apps to use with put.io
Theoretically, assuming that the mixer is perfectly implemented and law enforcement never uses their legal authority to compromise it, and that your records are never acquired by law enforcement.
There's no reason to believe any of those assumptions are true – and once any of them fail, you've helpfully given the prosecutor a detailed, hard-to-deny log of your every transaction.
It'd take effort for a mixer to log things - it's not something that happens by itself. There's no reason to think the implementor would do that, unless the mixer is already compromised.
Other than that, there's really not that much to implement in the mixer.
Additionally, the break in security is disjunctive. It's not just the mixer that has to be compromised, its the entire chain - exchange, wallet, mixer; if any of them do not cooperate, your trail ends.
> It'd take effort for a mixer to log things - it's not something that happens by itself. There's no reason to think the implementor would do that, unless the mixer is already compromised.
This is true in theory but the history of software is littered with obvious counterexamples where theoretically secure software was compromised by admins forgetting to disable debugging / logging, insecure temporary or backup files, etc. When you use a mixer you're trusting the admins to get all of that right even before you talk about malice.
I'm not saying it's trivial, merely that the bitcoin infrastructure was obviously not designed to counter state-level threats. The perfect identification of all past transactions is just too easy to get wrong and and a prosecutor only needs to show a convincing case, not absolute mathematical proof – I wouldn't bet against the simple timing of transactions being enough in many cases
True, but will someone really spend hours following your bitcoin trail across the internet getting subpoena's for your information at numerous exchanges and mixing services you put your coins through. When there are literally millions of people downloading illegal content in the clear?
I loved it! And still do, but sadly I moved to a RPi/XBMC/transmission/SickBeard/Couchpotato setup which was very easy to setup using xbian, thus not using showRSS anymore. The raspberry is a bit underpowered (according to me) though, so I'm thinking about replacing SickBeard with showRSS again. Pitty there isn't a good & easy way to do it. (not that I'm afraid of doing it all manually).
Perhaps also interesting, before using showRSS I was using TVshowsApp (http://tvshowsapp.com/).
Something I'm missing from showRSS btw, is the ability to browse trough all episodes/seasons and be able to select an episode/season to be added to the RSS-queue, so my downloading box would fetch it next time it checks the feed. But than, showRSS does one thing very well, so I'm not sure more features like that would be helpful for everyone.
ShowRSS right now works as a piece in the workflow for many people: feed what aired a few hours ago to another system. It hasn't got an archive and it doesn't serve as one. Thus, no option to do what you say… it's meant for the last week or so, not a lot more.
It does what it does pretty well, though. The new system reads a few sources (not just EZTV) and picks the best releases. So, 720p for everyone in a matter of hours and for almost every show you can think of.
P.S: have you thought about using transmission+dyndns? It's how I run it (minidlna+transmission, and showRSS pushes to my rasppi, no RSS involved!).
I agree, it does what it does very very well! And it's not meant as a show-organizer.
minidlna seems like something I'm going to be looking into, thanks! And for dns, I use a domain which I manage using cloudflare and a script [1] which gets run by cron and updates the cloudflare entry every day or so. Didn't wrote the script though, found it somewhere and had to edit it a bit to work again.
Something else I have been looking into is splitting up the load, using the RPi only for streaming and xbmc; and handling downloading and NAS capabilities using a different device, such as a MIKROTIK RouterBOARD (which I'm afraid isn't going to work).
I was using it for some time until they started to use all kind of tricks to force me to upgrade to the more expensive plans. It started from $5, then I was paying $10 and after the next "upgrade or we remove your account", I cancelled.
Wow, a bit surprised to hear that! What kind of tricks are we talking about? I've been on their $5 plan for over a year and have never heard anything from them about upgrading!
Interesting, they used to offer a 10GB plan for $5 (which I've always been on: http://d.pr/i/WDEK ) . Apparently it's not available anymore! However, I was never asked to upgrade my plan (I didn't even know the plan I was on didn't exist anymore before today!)
I was as well on the $5/month plan, I suspended my account for a little while due to exams, and tried re-activating it just to notice the $5 plan was gone. A few mails with support later they provided me a link to re-activate my 5$ plan. I didn't use it that much though, merely for shows in combination with showRSS.
I have had contact with the support of put.io more than once, and they were always very friendly and helpful. (even if some of the request were things such as "add play.fm support").
The big advantage over anything else I've seen with putio is that populair torrents are downloaded in a matter of seconds (due to someone else already having downloaded it) and the mp4-conversion. Btw, a small tip, instead of using the site itself for watching media which is downloaded, you can stream it directly into VLC or MPlayerX (the later also support streaming youtube video's I believe) which is very very handy!
Just noticed, there is an option for the legacy 10G $5/month account:
http://lry.be/WRxO
Are they insane? If there's any country hostile to these kinds of services it's the Netherlands. The copyright outfit BREIN is taking down Usenet providers (if they can proof they are willingly providing access to pirated material), Usenet communities and Torrent communities housed in the Netherlands left and right; I can't imagine they would leave something screaming that it basically is intended for violating copyright and with rising popularity like put.io alone for long.
My bad. Having never heard of a seedbox before, I googled it and was under the impression that it just meant "machine used for torrenting" e.g. a vps or a local server.
I'm an IT RETARD - I have no shame about that. At best I know about sudo apt-get install - but seedbox configurations on most providers is click next next next.
They even have 1 click installers, it's really simple.
That's very true, but I'm always apprehensive about stuff like that, given how dangerous a default config can be to my wallet. Specifically, if bandwidth isn't properly capped, or metered, I'd be shelling out more money than I'm saving by (hypothetically - calm down RIAA) pirating content!
Whatbox is pretty nice, and also user friendly. Feral used to be nice but it was never user friendly. Also, Feral's support is absolute shit. They were down for basically an entire month and barely communicated with their customers. Seedboxes.cc is also nice and somewhat user-friendly.
Ah yeah, i'm still holding up to my x-small linode without metered, it works fine for that with the ocasional torrent i have to seed. But you are right, when everyone moves to metered, this will not be that good.
That seems like a condescending opinion from someone who hasn't had experience with Put.io. I've tried both Put.io and several seedbox providers, and found that Put.io is better for my purposes, and I expect the purposes of many users.
A seedbox would be better if:
* You're active on private trackers. Most private trackers don't work well with services like put.io.
* You enjoy the level of control that's available with a seedbox.
Put.io is (in my opinion) much better if your goal is quickly and painlessly getting multimedia files from public torrent sites. It has some neat features like Mp4 video conversion to stream/download to iDecvices that would be challenging to implement in a seedbox, and instantly completes downloads that other Put.io users have in their files. Something that would be impossible on any seedbox.
Now that their lowest plan is $10/mo, there isn't as much of a cost advantage for put.io as there used to be when they had $5/mo plans, but even at cost parity, I'd still pick put.io over any of the seedbox services I've used, or setting up my own seedbox on a VPS.
put.io does have some interesting features in my opinion. One of them being that it will convert any video to mp4 which I can then stream directly to my Apple TV.
They also allow for external subtitle tracks to be added and again, it works with the Apple TV (something that other alternatives were never able to do).
Also, judging by the percentage of torrents I add on put.io that are instantly completed, I guess they have a sizeable user-base... That wasn't always the case with the seedboxes I've tried before (I'd say more than 90% of the torrents I add on put.io are completed, converted, and instantly streamable to the Apple TV)
PlexConnect is a simple DNS server that rewrites requests to trailers.apple.com to your local machine (where a daemon is running that responds to requests from your Apple TV.) It then takes the place of the "Trailers" app, and requires only that you change your AppleTV DNS server config to your own machine, and that you install their SSL certificate in your AppleTV's certificate store.
You can edit your AppleTV's certificate store with an Apple-developed program called Apple Configurator (in the OSX App Store for free) so at least it doesn't requires anything like jailbreaking.
Uh, holy crap??? That's amazing. I hadn't even thought of trying something like that. That's brilliant and ingenious. At this point I'd just resigned myself to transcoding where needed (usually just need to change the container, which takes one ffmpeg command, and about 2 minutes for a one hour video) and let iTunes handle everything, but I have a major soft spot for Plex and miss using it. That's just phenomenal. gushing.stop();
Another interesting option is Beamer[1]. Bought it a while ago and I have nothing but good things to say about it... Just drag any video on it and stream it to your AppleTV in seconds.
I just visit put.io from my iPhone or iPad and from there I stream the video and send it to the Apple TV via Airplay. There's also a couple of free 3rd party native iOS apps that let you connect to your put.io account, and stream the videos, but they're not really necessary. Never had much luck with AirPlay mirroring with my Macbook Air, it's always laggy in my experience.
So yeah, you do need either an iPad or iPhone to do it, however Put.io has a Roku app if you have one of these.
1-3 was done by Wuala and if their history is of any indication, this is an unsustainable model even without added complexity of being fully decentralized, bitcoin-supported community project.
Torrent recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) is much higher than Usenet, even pay service which I used to have. Also, 5 MB/s down is more or less saturating my connection. I have no use for 16 MB/s down.
One advantage is to instantly stream video files for most torrents. If someone else on put.io downloaded a given torrent before you, it's available for streaming in mp4 immediately (and that's the case for most torrents I've added to put.io)
That is only going to work for a lower quality feed though. Even the best streams from netflix are not as good as an actual 720p high bitrate video. You would need to be able to stream at a consistent 6 mb/s minimum to even start to stream at even 720. If you want a low quality video like what you are talking about you can literally download it in like 1 minute at 16 mb/s so there is really very little reason to stream at all.
Would it be that strange for HN folks? I'd imagine people from this community would be willing to get the best, or at least the fastest connection available.
(I think I'm an exception, I have the lowest available option from my ISP, 40MBit)
I guess they would, but this is a matter of providing that speed. I don't think 128+ Mb/s is very common, usually caps around 100 Mb/s in a lot of areas.
I don't think the capitalization of b matters as I wrote the full word "Bit" instead of just "B" (for Byte).
Anyways, my ISP has a 240Mbit plan.. and this is rather small city and Europe (not north or west either). I guess I just assumed SF (for example) would have even better options. Looking at other major ISPs around shows 100, 2x150 and 250 as top speeds.
I see this as a mechanism for diffusing liability. Users who would otherwise be legally liable for seeding copyrighted content can instead use put.io, which "seeds" for them without their involvement and just lets them download as if they were only leeching.
As long as nobody gets a legal beatdown for using put.io...
This is a really cool idea, but I'd like a bit more storage, and less cost, before I sign up. If I could get 3TB for $15/mo, I'd be there. 3TB drives can be had for $120, and I'd like my cloud storage to be competitively priced.
Offloading my torrent collection into the cloud sounds like a great step forward, but not if it results in me paying more.
Amazon's S3, which presumably has scale advantages over put.io, charges $80/TB/month just for storage. put.io charges only 60% of that with data transfer included. Based on that, I doubt your wishes will come true any time soon.
S3 is one of the most expensive ways to store and transfer stuff though. Not to say the original poster could find that pricing, but if S3 is your benchmark you can save a lot of money.
I’m assuming that the service cost doesn't come primarily from storage, but rather from bandwidth usage, and the increase in hardware requirements for handling a larger number of torrents.
I really dont get this. The use case must be to download copyright protected stuff, otherwise no one would pay for this, but isnt it pretty dangerous to hand all your download history and stuff like that to a 3rd party ?
That opposed to an unlimited Usenet Subscription for $10/mo with SSL encryption and no user traceable data.
Doesn't anymore. They had one then closed it down saying that: "it didn't work out for them". I guess it was good enough when they were new.
I'm curious how they made it on top of HN today. They are not new, the concept is not new. Nothing is really innovative about it. Still they are topic No. 1 today.
Well it looks like a cool service, not sure how to sign up though ? I don't have a facebook account and there is a link to use email instead that doesn't seem to work.
How does this save bandwidth? Let's say I want to watch a 4gb 720p movie? If I use this, won't I just then be streaming that much data or losing quality? Torrenting generally is better for slow connections than streaming because you can torrent and then play offline instead of having to worry about buffering and a consistent connection.
I thinke they meant that they are caching caching stuff on the backend so the downloads "finish" faster if they are other people on the service downloading the same files.
I was disappointed by Put.io in the past, it over promised and under delivered. It seemed like an unstable app with very slow speeds. It looks like they have improved since I last used it, I will give it another try.
I used them before and I'm trying them again. They now seem to allow you to pick the best mirror available for you, so your ISP's peering is no longer a problem.
Wait, I don't get it. This is basically the same as running a server with a torrent daemon (like Transmission) on it, except you pay them instead of get your own server?
Also their arguments are somewhat invalid:
> People sharing your internet connection. They hate you! With put.io, you won't disturb them, because you won't be hogging all the bandwidth.
It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the data remains the same size, except you can usually limit the torrent traffic whereas most people wouldn't know how to limit http(s) traffic in their browser.
> Watch RSS feeds
My torrent server does that too, but I never use it anyway
> Huge torrents are hard to get
Why?
> Get to your files from anywhere
Okay this is the only advantage if you don't have your own server.
>It doesn't matter whether I download 18GB from http(s) or from a torrent, the data remains the same size
Incorrect. For starters, torrent overhead is much higher than http traffic and so the transfer is actually cheaper for http. More critically is the fact that high connection count, as associated with torrents, results in connection saturation on 90% of consumer routers thus crippling all traffic, especially sensitive stuff like gaming, for everyone involved.
Other than that yeah, but this isn't for people like us. This is actually perfect for people like my father; he comes around every week to grab TV and Movies off me. I could remotely manage his account until he figured it out himself.
The thing that could make this service much better would be a feature to LAN sync content, so that one doesn't need to pull down from the internet when the file is avaliable over the LAN. Kind of like how Dropbox-esque services do it.
I think the primary benefit is plausible deniability. Such a service wouldn't make it impossible to be legally targeted, but it could make it sufficiently unpleasant that they decide to target a more brazen offender. It's a bit like fleeing from a bear; you don't need to be the fastest runner, you just have to be a little faster than the slowest person.
Having the server in someone else's name provides a slight buffer, but is hardly insurmountable. If the server belongs to a company in another country then that could make it difficult for a local court to issue a subpoena that's enforceable in said company's jurisdiction. If you are one of a dozen users of a given server then that could hypothetically make it harder to prove which user was the infringer.
All of that is obviously hypothetical, I am not a lawyer, and I certainly don't have expertise in international law. These are simply the musings of my groggy brain first thing in the morning. Anyone who isn't half asleep care to weigh in?
So as far as I understand, this service basically just equates to a way to download torrents faster. Sometimes much faster, but still, that doesn't seem super important. Also, can someone explain to me what kind of torrents people would actually use this for? They seem to have a huge emphasis on videos, but they also say that they don't allow copyrighted content. Maybe I just don't know much about torrents (I mostly use them for things like downloading Ubuntu), but I don't understand what kind of legal videos people would be torrenting so frequently that they need this.
They don't even pretend outside of TOS. On the main page in the examples there is copyrighted material.
Also, how is paying somebody to brake the law for you not breaking the law as well? Out of all the ways to get "videos" of the Internet this must be the least secure nowadays.
Many people use ISP-provided router that choked when there are a lot of open connections. A torrent client will usually try to open as many connections as possible, pushing the router to the limit. Under that condition, if another user join the network and tried to browse the internet, he'll encounter a lot of connection timeout error. The only way to avoid this issue is to configure the torrent client to play nice (limit the number of connections) or tweak the router QoS settings to lower priority for torrents traffic (not sure if it's possible with encrypted torrents).
source: my apartment shares a single dsl router to all its tenants
Its not only that, a download over HTTP uses less bandwidth than a download over torrent because of the block overhead. It does end up being quite significant.
Additionally you don't need to upload anything at all to be able to download something. Typically when downloading a torrent you do have to upload something for the swarm to prioritize data to you.
For those of you using XBMC, you might want to check out XBMCtorrent then [1]. It does exactly what the name says, while not depending on a service to do the download: select a torrent, watch it.
I'm not sure about this claim. From personal experience using ADSL, a 3G USB stick, my uni's 100Mbps connection back in the day and lowly 128k ISDN, I'd say that a torrent can either saturate one's connection with a healthy swarm or be slow as molasses due to the lack of seeds. I'm not sure how a seedbox can bypass the inherent mode of operation of the Bittorent protocol.
Simple, seedboxes tend to be close to other seedboxes. They then potentially talk to each other over the same network, or a nearby one they peer with, meaning bits generally have less distance to travel and over bigger pipes. A disproportionately large number of seedboxes are hosted on OVH's network.
The capacity from the seedboxes back to you might not be that great, but it doesn't matter because your home connection is so slow in comparison that it can still easily be saturated.
There's just no way in hell I would ever use this without VERY good assurances that my credit card will never be linked to what I download. There's about a billion ways that could happen, EVEN IF put.io has no intention of ever releasing that information.
Are they sure they won't be hacked? why?
Are they sure they wouldn't have to give up my information based on a public, lawful gov't inquiry?
What about a secret, unlawful inquiry? Are they sure about that case?
How they can launch this with ZERO information about steps they've taken to protect anonymity is mind-boggling to me. I'm about to send out a note to my less technical friends to avoid this like the plague.
I've been using put.io for 3 or 4 years now, it truly hassle free and I literally can not understand why it wasn't featured in HN before.
I have upgraded and downgraded my plan many times, depending on my own needs, it's been years I don't use a torrent client.
This is how you download torrents blazingly fast:
Download firefox + DownThemAll! extension, configure downthemall enabling all the maximum of speeds
go to http://put.io, add a torrent in the download queue, it will probably be done within minutes, if not seconds (no exaggeration), then download them straight to your computer through downthemall
To me it sounds very scary to make profit with something related to torrents.
If I was the founder of put.io I would spend most of the time looking at the window expecting an FBI helicopter to land on my garden at any time.
I wrote this (https://github.com/posborne/putio-sync) a few weekends ago for automatically grabbing content from put.io using their API (https://put.io/v2/docs/index.html). Pretty handy and performs downloads quickly by doing multi-segment downloads. Pure python and MIT licensed -- should be pip installable from pypi.
I string this together with another script to rename content and it drops right into my Plex library.
When you have some slow peers along with a lousy internet connection, put.io really helps. with my upload speeds (makes 56K jealous), to seed a torrent up to a meaningful ratio, i should wait forever. put.io helps me with this and many other stuff. besides that, they recently added a server to my city, which boosted my usage.
Besides the torrents, they catch rss feeds, podcasts faster than I do, and I just stream it, if I need any subtitles, I just upload them (or fetch from open subtitles) and there they are.
I love their service and will keep supporting them, and recommend to anyone I know.
I was a costumer, before focusing entirely on torrents, they also provided downloads for Rapidshare-like-sites, where you could download one file every two or three hours, which was pretty inconvenient. Put.io had a few premium accounts, so they downloaded that for you.
I guess then the premium accounts were suspended as it was hurting Rapidshare's sales and Put.io stopped offering that service.
Put.io is awesome, it's a very good and very well executed idea, but it was even more awesome a few years ago, and less expensive.
Umm... maybe i am misunderstanding their service, but i fail to see the point. With put.io, a server can torrent the file for me. And then... i stream it from the server... So, my pc still needs that gigabits of transfer, at my usual net speed. Where was the gain? Couldn't i have used the same time to torrent it? In fact i would have to torrent it ONCE, but with put.io i have to stream (and thus effectively download that data) each time i want to view that file...
You also avoid nasty letters from copyright lawyers, which can get you kicked off campus at some universities or even kicked out of school sadly. Of course a vpn also avoids this, or a seedbox, or newsgroups
The biggest advantage from other commenters seems to be that put.io has a fairly large user base and if another user has already downloaded a torrent you want, it's available instantly in your put.io account.
For $15 a year you can get a crappy little VPS with 20 gigs of disk and 200GB/month connection. Install transmission on it and use it as a seed box. On popular torrents you can get 4-7mbps transfer speeds. Have the files saved once done to a folder that you share via BT Sync, and the files will automatically move to your computer once done. Just another solution.
So far guys I'm using StreamNation.com (http://www.streamnation.com), way better than put.io, their UI is amazing, they offer way more features and their iOS app is a killer with an offline mode. Last the pricing: they are 10 times less expensive. You should try my friends!
My concern with this is that they will have your credit card details / address information. At a later stage should they have a big legal problem (which I suspect they will) the lawyers will come directly after you. It's a great idea, and if it was for legal use only, but you know what people are really going to use it for!
Hmm ... so the service looks to target what would be considered illegal in most countries yet has no meaningful way to hide the user's identity? Using a VPN will not help when subpoenas are coming down for release of CC/payment details with names, billing address etc. Am I missing something?
But what if you want the stuff on your computer? I'm guessing you have to download it from the cloud, so… I don't get the point? Help me out here.
Edit: Well, I guess you still get the benefit of them doing the seeding instead of your home connection… That's more attractive to some than others I suppose.
All download data flows to put.io and don't take your bandwidth. But then you download it via http - the same files. What's the point? You only save bandwidth avoiding torrent seeding. Is it so significant to worry about it?
Does anyone know how good the transcoding is on the stream? I torrent a lot of x264 video with multiple complex ASS subtitles in the MKV container, so it'd be nice if it handled those.
It'd be really cool if one of these websites integrated with Amazon S3 (i.e. download it and store in one of my buckets). I don't need the storage, just the bandwidth.
seems like whatbox.ca offers a way better service. They got way more storage for less money and they are fast as fuck.
Only down thing is no instant completion, but if you got enough seeders on your tracker, than every torrent would be finished in less than 5 minutes
This is great but how long until it gets shut down by RIAA or it's posse crew members and the founder gets slapped with a huge fine? If anything they should operate in a country where US does not have a good expedition treaty.
I'd rather commit sepukku than paying a web-service that charges 10$/month to seed for just 2 days until 2 ratio.
I'll go with a cheap debian server + apt-get install transmission-cli
The killer feature is instant completion of torrents if someone else has already downloaded them. I can be watching a movie 60 seconds after thinking of it.