[Rant?] Is it just my misunderstanding or do most Indian OTT providers not show or have popular English TV series or Music any more?

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6pack

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I remembered I still had my Hotstar subscription and went to the site to see if there was something to watch and everything looks like it's catered to Hindi & South audience.
English Tv series are very less and I don't like the stuff on it. It's just the usual crime and drama or alien stuff. Rest is children's cartoons. Amazon Prime I don't have but last time I saw most of it was under separate subscription. I don't have Netflix or any other subscriptions. Is it the same on other providers? Are they mostly Hindi and South Indian languages?

I've seen the same with music providers. Even YT Music is just popular Indian music instead of any other language. The English language stuff is just Taylor Swift songs or some rap songs which I hate.
I remember deleting my spotify subscription since they just one day removed all the japanese pop songs from my saved list. Like 99% gone overnight. Now I can listen to Jpop or some Korean songs only on YT music videos.

Probably it's just me I guess. First it was Anime disappearing from tv, now its english. I wonder what's next. What do you think?
 
Unfortunately, everything is algorithm driven and thus the recommendations are based on the population. I find it difficult as well as almost every recommendation is against my taste.

Anyway, switching to RD with 200 providers and Trakt lists has been the best thing ever. The lists meet my taste and the recommendations are based on that.
 
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come and embrace the way of Usenet and *arrs young padawan (or old padawan? jk), its the best time to get in with BF sales around, if you have a NAS setup with jellyfin working, then nothing beats usenet for ease of use and superior quality
 
6pack said:
Even YT Music is just popular Indian music instead of any other language. The English language stuff is just Taylor Swift songs or some rap songs which I hate.
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Maybe their recommendation system sucks, but there's a massive amount of content in the libraries. I find what I'm looking for more often than not, and the quality is acceptable to me too (unlike Amazon Prime music, which was awful). If you want curated stuff, the community playlists could be worth a look.
 
altair21 said:
come and embrace the way of Usenet and *arrs young padawan (or old padawan? jk), its the best time to get in with BF sales around, if you have a NAS setup with jellyfin working, then nothing beats usenet for ease of use and superior quality
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I think usenet was blocked by indian isp's. I don't have broadband so can't do all this. just mobile 5G internet now.

@t3chg33k What's RD? Real Debrid? What is it? I've heard of it on Reddit a lot. Edit: I saw a post on reddit. It's a subscription based provider. I don't have kodi so wont be using it.

edept said:
Maybe their recommendation system sucks, but there's a massive amount of content in the libraries. I find what I'm looking for more often than not, and the quality is acceptable to me too (unlike Amazon Prime music, which was awful). If you want curated stuff, the community playlists could be worth a look.
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The curated stuff has unrelated US and other songs embedded in it. If you mean Radio, then, I don't like that since my taste is different from what others like. YT music quality has gone down a cliff after they introduced some Stable Volume feature. Now everything is either very low volume or very loud volume. And bass is blown out in most songs and distorted. I thought my music player or EQ settings changed but no, it was YT doing shit to the music. I think they did it because people were downloading music videos and saving it. So they decided to destroy everything. Now everything is compressed to shit. Even 720p video looks like 480p now and they removed the HD tag from 720p video resolution. No use of YT music now.

Edit: Guess going for ahem flac or apple lossless music (if free sources not available) is the only way now. Wonder if there's a way to save apple lossless music from android to pc.
 
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6pack said:
I think usenet was blocked by indian isp's. I don't have broadband so can't do all this. just mobile 5G internet now.
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no? I am using it on Jio Fiber and Jio Mobile data, works fine either ways but its not suited for you if you are constrained to mobile data
6pack said:
@t3chg33k What's RD? Real Debrid? What is it? I've heard of it on Reddit a lot.
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basically, its an aggregator, bypasses all paywalls from filehosters like Mega, torrents etc, and then just serves it to you from their servers, then you can just use something like Stremio and have a bunch of add-ons from real debrid to scrape content and play them at will.
 
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altair21 said:
no? I am using it on Jio Fiber and Jio Mobile data, works fine either ways but its not suited for you if you are constrained to mobile data

basically, its an aggregator, bypasses all paywalls from filehosters like Mega, torrents etc, and then just serves it to you from their servers, then you can just use something like Stremio and have a bunch of add-ons from real debrid to scrape content and play them at will.
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Years back I remembered when I was on VSNL/BSNL I couldn't even connect to usenet. That was when utorrent was in alpha/beta mode and it took ages to download a webpage on a 56kbps modem.

pranesh.in - Spam and internet abuse in India

This is a short paper on the historical growth and spread of spam and Internet abuse, including telemarketing and mobile messaging spam, in India. Additionally, it covers current and proposed Indian law, and regulatory / law enforcement actions against cybercrime.
pranesh.in pranesh.in
Indian ISPs initially operated usenet servers to provide NNTP access, but quickly withdrew such services and, in some cases, firewalled access to the NNTP port 119 to block usenet access from their service, because of massive amounts of abuse originated by a unknown but probably New Delhi based Internet vandal and author of Usenet and email spam software, who was only known by the moniker “HipCrime”7.

HipCrime’s activities8, such as forged cancel floods and “sporgeries”9 (spam forgeries) with steganographic / Markov Chain generated random gibberish content caused widespread havoc on usenet newsgroups in the mid to late 1990s. This led to several Usenet operators refusing to peer (that is, exchange traffic) with NNTP servers operated by Indian providers, or in some cases, even refusing to accept usenet posts originating from IP addresses controlled by Indian ISPs VSNL and SILNET – a so-called “UDP” or “Usenet Death Penalty”10.
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6pack said:
The curated stuff has unrelated US and other songs embedded in it. If you mean Radio, then, I don't like that since my taste is different from what others like.
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I meant playlists uploaded by individual users. For example, when you search for a genre or artist, you should have an option to look through user created playlists in a section titled "Community playlists". YouTube Music should also attempt to provide you with a auto-curated playlist matching your search target. If none of these work for you, then fair enough, the platform probably isn't for you.
6pack said:
YT music quality has gone down a cliff after they introduced some Stable Volume feature. Now everything is either very low volume or very loud volume. And bass is blown out in most songs and distorted. I thought my music player or EQ settings changed but no, it was YT doing shit to the music.
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I won't discount your experience, but I can't relate to this at all. Do you have a specific example of a bad stream that can be contrasted with a high quality locally stored file?
 
6pack said:

pranesh.in - Spam and internet abuse in India

This is a short paper on the historical growth and spread of spam and Internet abuse, including telemarketing and mobile messaging spam, in India. Additionally, it covers current and proposed Indian law, and regulatory / law enforcement actions against cybercrime.
pranesh.in pranesh.in
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damn! this is some lore I wasnt aware of lol, we Indians do deserve our infamous reputation online XD
 
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I wont be uploading pirated music here sorry. Feel free to not believe me. I have flac/mp3 that sound better than YT music. But to show that, I'll have to upload it somewhere. Nopes. Not taking chances. You can look at the stream info though.
Screenshot from YT.jpg


Look at the audio stream. You can see a Normalized 100% /41% (content loudness 7.7dB).
100% is YT audio volume in my pc. You can see YT has increased the volume by 7.7dB over 0 dB to normalize it. So its just distorting audio now. Video below.


What stable volume does.

 
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Back in 2008-2011 was in the 'scene' in India. But gradually moved to OTT with at one point being subscribed to almost 10+ paid OTT services. But after watching the shenanigans of these services I am back to the 'scene'. Have youtube premium which gives me youtube music together with amazon prime. More than enough for my media consumption. With OTT you are just paying for access now. No guarantee it won't be removed in the future.

If you care about the volume normalization on youtube music you should stop using the default youtube for music.
Youtube Premium 1080 premium bitrate
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Youtube premium music: video
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Youtube music premium: audio only
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Also you can upload music including flac files to Youtube music account. These files are only accessible by you.
 

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6pack said:
Feel free to not believe me.
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I already said that I won't discount what you're saying.
6pack said:
I have flac/mp3 that sound better than YT music.
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I wouldn't make the case that YT music would match your local files. But whatever they are doing with the audio, I haven't noticed an additional quality degradation regarding volume/bass/distortion in recent times.
6pack said:
stable volume
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I wasn't aware about this, so I looked it up, and Google's help page states that "Music is not affected by this feature."

Link: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14106294
ronnie_gogs said:
If you care about the volume normalization on youtube music you should stop using the default youtube for music.
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There's also an Audio quality setting under 'Playback' that I have had set to 'High', in case that might matter.
 
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6pack said:
I think usenet was blocked by indian isp's. I don't have broadband so can't do all this. just mobile 5G internet now.

@t3chg33k What's RD? Real Debrid? What is it? I've heard of it on Reddit a lot. Edit: I saw a post on reddit. It's a subscription based provider. I don't have kodi so wont be using it.


The curated stuff has unrelated US and other songs embedded in it. If you mean Radio, then, I don't like that since my taste is different from what others like. YT music quality has gone down a cliff after they introduced some Stable Volume feature. Now everything is either very low volume or very loud volume. And bass is blown out in most songs and distorted. I thought my music player or EQ settings changed but no, it was YT doing shit to the music. I think they did it because people were downloading music videos and saving it. So they decided to destroy everything. Now everything is compressed to shit. Even 720p video looks like 480p now and they removed the HD tag from 720p video resolution. No use of YT music now.

Edit: Guess going for ahem flac or apple lossless music (if free sources not available) is the only way now. Wonder if there's a way to save apple lossless music from android to pc.
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Yes, the beauty of Real Debrid is that is has nearly all popular torrents cached so it can be played back instantly.

Stremio is one such UI which integrates Rd but the Kodi add-ons are better in the sense that you can access all titles from all OTTs around the world instantly.

I never downloaded large files previously but now prefer the 50-100 GB Bluray rips when available as they playback instantly with subtitles and are of course immensely better in quality than what streaming services provide. Also use Trakt for tracking all watched content as that too integrates with nearly everything, keeps an history and provides recommendations based on it.
 
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Pat said:
Is Real Debrid still functioning well after the recent crackdown?
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They disabled checking of cached content on their API which affected the add-ons and plug-ins until they were updated.

Also any torrent or files for which they have received a DMCA request is blacklisted. That is more of a whack-a-mole though since new torrents keep popping up anyway.

Also, they have disabled a lot of the file host support, so it is less useful if you depend on those.

Otherwise for its primary purpose, there is no impact as cached content is still there.
 
6pack said:
I remember deleting my spotify subscription since they just one day removed all the japanese pop songs from my saved list. Like 99% gone overnight. Now I can listen to Jpop or some Korean songs only on YT music videos.
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Can't say for anything else but I'm guessing Spotify doesn't have rights/license for JPOP/KPOP, either globally or specifically for India.

Same thing happened with Spotify and Zee Music some time back.
 
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Superbad said:
yes for old users.

new signups are refunded
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From what I read, anyone who requested for a refund or chargeback on the day they posted that comment, have been permanently excluded from the service based on their login or IP address. Otherwise, new members are still accepted.
 
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