I was looking through the megathread and saw this real-debrid thing. I have heard this name some times so I read what it does but wasn’t able to understand it. If someone could explain it to me I would appreciate it.
Also, it caught my attention that “it’s a good way to prevent your IP from ever hitting the torrent’s swarm, which is the main cause of receiving copyright infringement letters”. Does this mean it’s an alternative to a VPN when torrenting? Is it like a seedboxes or something? Are there any free alternatives?
What a debriding service does is download the torrent for you, and cache it on their servers. From there you can download it from their servers without ever “touching” the torrent itself. Common uses for it are with Stremio, to stream cached movie torrents directly from the debrid service’s servers.
These services are also used to download from paywalled DDL websites, such as rapidgator, nitrodl, etc, so you do not need to wait 500 hours of 50kbps.
also really popular in Germany, because if you download the torrent yourself, you can get a huge fine from the copyright owner.
I’ve wondered if Real-Debrid actually is German made too. The dash in the name gives that vibe.
how does a dash sound german?
der strich… That’s how.
It’s the most commonly spoken (Western) language that uses a lot of compound words with and without dashes. I always tend to think there’s a German speaker involved when I see dashes used in English where a native English speaker wouldn’t use a dash, hah.
How-did-you-know-im-german??
It’s French, I suspect based on the entity receiving the payment
💀
So it’s similar to a seedbox but with even more utilities? I don’t really understand the cache part. It’s like they “save” the downloaded files for you?
Yes, and then you stream them from their servers. It’s quite different to a seedbox though, and that’s because (apart from torrenting) they have premium subscriptions to DDL services, such as rapidgator, to allow them to rapidly download the files for multiple people. Then, you download their “saved” version of it on their server. You have no real access apart from downloading from/streaming from debriding services, whereas a seedbox you have control over it, can install other applications, have storage limits, etc.
Does this clear it up?
Yes. I understand. I have only one last problem. I hate subscription services. Although real-debrid is really cheap so if I have to pay for something it will definitely be it. But just to know, are there any free alternatives.
No. Hosting dozens upon dozens of servers to cache files costs money. Plus, they also need to buy subscriptions to the DDL services themselves. No free alternative with these features exists sadly - alldebrid has a one-time payment for a month at €3.99, no wires attached. Pretty fair price to test it out.
How in the world could they possibly cache all that content? They’d have to be google massive to be able to do that, and all for 3$/month? Something doesn’t make sense
Storage isn’t nearly as expensive as it would seem looking at normal consumer cloud storage pricing. I think they also clear the cache of truly obscure content after a while. And I also think some of the “cached” content isn’t even stored on their own servers, but is actually streamed from one of the 3rd party direct download services. That would ease the storage and traffic load massively.
Files aren’t kept 24/7/365, but apart from that I cannot tell you as I don’t work there 🤷