alt.hn

2/23/2026 at 3:35:31 AM

Freemediaheckyeah – A collection of free stuff on the internet

 https://fmhy.net/

by con

2/23/2026 at 7:22:57 AM

- the site is awesome, but could be better

- I was also a fan of githubs awesome lists (eg. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)

- I think separated lists are cool, because they focus on one subject, like self-hosted above... but if all awesome lists were in one big list...

- awesome lists are often data, with a lack of search functionality. fmhy site has a search functionality, but I often prefer searching links by a 'tag'

- what most of awesome lists lack is 'votes', or 'ranking'

My solution is to provide links, with tags, and 'ranking' https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database. Provides search by link, title, description, whatever. I think that is where it all should go.

Also my database captures links from fmhy.

by renegat0x0

2/23/2026 at 9:54:23 AM

I think an important distinction is that most of the awesome lists required an entry to have some sort of a sentence-long pitch about why something's awesome instead of a giant list of items with no way to distinguish between them without clicking. That's far more important than tags in my opinion.

That said, I am biased as I maintained quite a few of them years ago and am happy to see today's youngling maintain this tradition of low-effort contributions to make a source that's better than a search engine when looking for stuff in a specific niche.

by input_sh

2/23/2026 at 4:44:44 AM

Note for the hacker crowd: they don't mean free as in speech. They mean free as in beer that fell off a truck.

by CobrastanJorji

2/23/2026 at 6:52:53 AM

"Beer that fell off a truck" has a somewhat negative connotation, but FMHY-listed sites are generally not only free, but also high quality, especially the starred ones. Nowadays when I'm looking for a service to do something I just search FMHY instead of a search engine. Much better results.

by flexagoon

2/23/2026 at 7:43:59 AM

“Fell off the back of a truck” is a euphemism for stolen goods; it’s not so much about quality (indeed warez releases are often stripped of ads/launchers/annoyances, rendering them very high quality).

by jl6

2/23/2026 at 4:48:36 AM

When I was coming up, hackers embraced both those definitions. "Information wants to be free" and "fuck corporations" were our guiding principles.

Edit: to the dead comment in reply to this one, of course it's more nuanced than "all information should be public at all times". It's almost like a 5-word axiom necessarily omits nuance in exchange for brevity.

Hackers also used to exhibit critical thinking skills, sheesh.

by stackghost

2/23/2026 at 9:17:55 AM

VC "hackers" still think that information is free and fuck corporations, just as long as it's not "their" information or "their" corporation

by dudefeliciano

2/23/2026 at 6:49:56 AM

That’s long gone, especially around here. YC is YC.

It’s sad the best we could do in terms of community forum is a VC’s website.

by redrove

2/23/2026 at 9:13:44 PM

Ycombinator is far from your average venture capital rent-seeking company. I am surprised that a person who thinks this way without added nuance would spent time on this website.

by vovavili

2/23/2026 at 7:18:38 AM

>It’s sad the best we could do in terms of community forum is a VC’s website.

It is sad. There are definitely some talented people here but the pervasive corporate bootlicking is pretty hard to take, at times.

Certain usenet newsgroups had a similar vibe, once upon a time, but usenet couldn't solve the spam problem.

by stackghost

2/23/2026 at 5:23:09 AM

[flagged]

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 5:31:27 AM

Meta, openai, google have a bridge to sell you

by staplers

2/23/2026 at 6:53:26 AM

Speech isn't a medium in this context.

by aardv44rk

2/23/2026 at 8:54:19 AM

They mean free as in a poem that can be recited by anyone who has listened to it previously.

by numbers_guy

2/23/2026 at 6:21:51 AM

Piracy is preservation.

Always has been.

Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain in ways that mere piracy can never be considered stealing.

by LocalH

2/23/2026 at 7:10:30 AM

I think it's insane that the concept of a legal deposit [0] is so rarely extended to films or other media. Even more insane is that US courts have found it to be unconstitutional. A primary school's student newspaper needs to send two copies to the national library, while a movie can be played in every cinema in the nation and...nothing?? Let alone video games and other, more complicated media...

Everyone likes to shit on patents, but patents are designed well. You invent a thing and in exchange for publishing it openly, you get time-limited exclusive rights to it. Why the hell is copyright not like that?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

by franga2000

2/23/2026 at 8:08:39 AM

> Everyone likes to shit on patents, but patents are designed well.

I think the critique of patents has more to do with the patent officers often being ignorant of blatant, widespread prior art, or having a bizarre idea of how the relevant legal principles should apply in a particular problem domain.

by zahlman

2/23/2026 at 9:01:40 AM

It's sufficient but not necessary. It would be better if there was an entity like the library of congress who would keep it safe, but private until copyright expired after which it would become public. Right now piracy leads to way more of free entertainment than preservation.

by charcircuit

2/23/2026 at 9:59:05 AM

In practice, it's necessary. While escrow should absolutely be a requirement to receive the benefits of copyright protection you'd also need to make sure that the escrowed artifact is actually complete and in a usable form and covers every version of the work. That means a lot more than dumping it onto the library of congress so even with that requirement we would benefit from independent archival.

by account42

2/23/2026 at 7:05:56 AM

well maybe but they don't do a very good job at it

popular stuff that you could watch anywhere, you can pirate of course

but anything more obscure is impossible to find, or was there at one point but is now long gone

by 1317

2/23/2026 at 12:17:22 PM

Whose "they"? Private sites do a phenomenal job at preserving a large amount of rare content.

by circularfoyers

2/23/2026 at 9:18:12 AM

Piracy = Piracy. Stop doing mental gymnastics to justify stealing. If you rip a movie and put it up on the internet, it's not preservation, it's piracy.

by dncornholio

2/23/2026 at 8:43:37 PM

Patently false, just look as far as Netflix taking down exclusive shows and movies from their catalog. You would literally not be able to watch them anymore if not for folks putting them up online.

by skeaker

2/23/2026 at 10:01:28 AM

Even if you disagree with copyright infringement, it's not the same as stealing.

by account42

2/23/2026 at 9:00:17 AM

> Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain

I was clapping my hands at the skilfulness of this satire -- the idea that a person could actually believe this near-perfect inversion of reality, where piracy is not merely acceptable but in fact noble -- and then I started to think that... you actually probably do believe this.

If you were in fact trolling all along, my hat is off, you got me.

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 8:44:31 PM

You must think you're really clever.

by skeaker

2/23/2026 at 10:39:41 PM

In the time it took you to write that comment, you could have pirated something. Something that the original creator will doubtless now steal from future generations.

Let that be upon your head.

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 6:33:29 AM

I've used this site for years, I originally found it off their subreddit. When they finally moved to a dedicated site it really improved the whole user experience from whatever reddit CSS was doing.

The admins keep it consistently updated and remove problem sources on a regular basis.

by FiniteIntegral

2/23/2026 at 7:11:41 AM

> The admins keep it consistently updated and remove problem sources on a regular basis.

It's very much a community effort! There's a semi-open discord (the invites are only open on fridays) with a website suggestion and voting system

by flexagoon

2/23/2026 at 6:33:33 AM

This is a very interesting sub https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories

This reminds of FTP directories I used to download things from. There were FTP search engines (they are probably listed on this website already).

by smusamashah

2/23/2026 at 4:36:45 AM

We need to make all of this so much more popular again

by with

2/23/2026 at 4:46:29 AM

Very cool. I have a similar side project for scraping youtube playlists and aggregating open source texts. Mainly materials for computer science, system design, and DSA (data structures and algorithms).

On GH as joshribakoff/leetdeeper

by joshribakoff

2/23/2026 at 7:18:52 AM

This is a fantastic resource. Not just for illegal purposes either. There is plenty of free stuff that is legal here.

It's easy to remember the URL too.

by dvntsemicolon

2/23/2026 at 4:52:55 AM

stremio + debrid had been nice for most things. after a bunch of random stremio plugin outages i built my own little app that just talks to apibay and the debrid back end and links it up to vlc a few months ago and have just used that.

by mediaconsumer

2/23/2026 at 5:15:03 AM

Having some knowledge about 'how the sausage is made', the smoothness of a stremio + debrid setup feels pretty close to magic.

by BLKNSLVR

2/23/2026 at 5:43:01 AM

Which debrid service do you use?

by dottjt

2/23/2026 at 8:32:34 AM

alldebrid. their 4.0/4.1 api has all the stuff to decode magnets and browse their files. filter mkv,mp4,etc. i made a little database of imdb tt values to assist autosuggest for searching and a nsfw filter for the few friends and family using the app.

have thought about extending it to realdebrid/torbox/etc but it's just been kinda set and forget. every once in a while will add a feature... most recently i think was seeing if there was a matching srt file and feeding that along with the video file to vlc so you get subtitle support if it's not baked into the video file

by mediaconsumer

2/23/2026 at 9:18:09 AM

disclaimer: had opus summarize the key api endpoints and flows so anyone could whip their own up:

  ## External APIs & Endpoints
  
  ### Apibay (Search)
  - \*URL\*: `https://apibay.org/q.php?q={query}&cat=0`
  - \*Auth\*: None
  - \*Returns\*: JSON array of `{ info_hash, name, seeders, leechers, size, imdb, category }`
  
  ### AllDebrid v4 
  - \*Base\*: `https://api.alldebrid.com/v4`
  - \*Auth\*: API key as `apikey` query parameter, `agent` param required
  - \*Endpoints\*:
    - `GET /magnet/upload?magnets[]={magnet}&agent=YOURAPP&apikey={key}` — Upload magnet
    - `GET /magnet/status?id={id}&agent=YOURAPP&apikey={key}` — Poll magnet status
    - `GET /link/unlock?link={link}&agent=YOURAPP&apikey={key}` — Unlock hoster link to direct URL
  
  ### AllDebrid v4.1
  - \*Base\*: `https://api.alldebrid.com/v4.1`
  - \*Auth\*: `Authorization: Bearer {apikey}` header
  - \*Endpoints\*:
    - `POST /magnet/status` — Body: `id={magnetId}` or `status=active|ready`
    - `POST /magnet/files` — Body: `id[]={id1}&id[]={id2}...` — Get file list with download links
  
  ### VLC Media Player (Local Binary)
  - macOS: `/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC`
  - Windows: `C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe`
  - Linux: `vlc` (from PATH)
  - Args: `--fullscreen --no-video-title-show {url}` (optional: `--input-slave={subtitleUrl}`)
  
  ### Magnet Unlock Flow
  1. User clicks a result → `handleSelectResult(result)`
  2. \*Fast path\*: `getMagnetIdByHash(hash)` checks cache → if found, `getStatusV41({id})` + `getMagnetFiles([id])`
  3. \*Upload path\*: If not cached, `allDebrid.uploadMagnet(magnet)` → cache ID via `setMagnetId(hash, id)`
  4. If magnet not ready (still caching on AllDebrid), status modal shows progress
  5. `flattenMagnetFilesResponse()` converts nested file tree to flat `[{ filename, link }]`
  6. Fallback: Legacy `getStatus(id)` → `getFiles(link)` for each download link
  7. `unlockLinksToFiles(links)` — batch unlock, filter to video files only
  
  ### Playback Flow
  1. User clicks Play on a file → `handlePlay(url, filename, subtitleUrl?)`
  2. `window.api.play(url, subtitleUrl)` → main process resolves AllDebrid link → spawns VLC
  3. `library.recordPlay(hash, title, filename, streamUrl)` → updates or creates history entry, increments per-file `playCount`

by mediaconsumer

2/23/2026 at 7:08:03 AM

Real debrid has been pretty good for me

by PacificSpecific

2/23/2026 at 8:36:40 PM

paying to pirate is absurd with these debris services

personally I'd rather recommend stremio + torrentio, though I prefer offline watching for zero buffering issues and no wait

by Markoff

2/23/2026 at 4:38:45 AM

Too much free stuff already and anything new will eventually become free. I'd rather wait or direct money to the projects I support.

by hatmanstack

2/23/2026 at 4:23:27 AM

I point to this resource to my friends and family when they want to get stuff for free.

A great resource as an alternative to hostile and expensive subscription based "services" that shouldn't be businesses.

by colesantiago

2/23/2026 at 4:36:37 AM

Awesome site. Easy to remember as well.

by freakynit

2/23/2026 at 4:42:06 AM

The modern bible of online piracy.

by ls612

2/23/2026 at 4:19:52 AM

We abandoned piracy too soon. We fell for the trap that enshittified everything. It is time to pirate again.

by camillomiller

2/23/2026 at 4:28:02 AM

In the music space, piracy won.

After Napster, there was no going back from giving people immediate unlimited access to everything.

Streamers like Spotify learned that there’s a price point that is low enough for people to “round down” and forget it’s on their monthly credit card statement, but high enough that major label execs are happy. The trick is ignoring what the artists want.

by parpfish

2/23/2026 at 4:37:24 AM

Bandcamp does ok without ignoring what the artists want. I think the biggest issue with buying directly from the musician isn't the price but the friction of purchasing online

by eucyclos

2/23/2026 at 5:11:35 AM

And the friction of storing stuff. I want to listen to music, not manage a collection.

by gsinclair

2/23/2026 at 8:10:46 AM

Takes all kinds, I guess. If I don't have it permanently (or at least non-transiently) recorded on physical media that resides within my living space, I can't feel like I "own" it.

by zahlman

2/23/2026 at 8:01:42 AM

The artists wanted to sign with labels.

by TiredOfLife

2/23/2026 at 4:38:19 AM

Jokes on us, after all has settled. Have you tried to buy a ticket to live music lately? It was $750 for a good seat in more than 1 occasion this past year, and that is first market tickets from the venue, not a traditionally 'scalped' ticket.

These two equations are tied together. Before, the lucky artists were front-loaded their buckets of cash from the labels. But now the royalty cheques are measured in pennies and the live music enjoyers seem to be the equalization payments.

by k12sosse

2/23/2026 at 6:39:15 AM

Artists aren’t charging more for concerts because they are making less money on album sales. Concert tickets are priced based on supply and demand. If they could have been charging $750 back then, they would have, no matter how much they were making on album sales.

I do think you might be right, though, that there is a causal relationship between diminished album revenue and more expensive tickets, it just isn’t because the artists need the money. Since most people can now listen to all the music they want for a flat fee, music lovers can now spend more of their hobby money on concert tickets, which increases price very directly since supply is limited.

by cortesoft

2/23/2026 at 4:51:11 AM

jesus go to a basement it's like $15 at most and you can meet actual artists

by jamboca

2/23/2026 at 4:57:36 AM

Most of the people that complain about ticket prices are going to ticketmaster venues to see elaborate productions built by the biggest artists in the world.

When I tell people that I used to go to at least one show every week on my grad student stipend they are very confused. It’s because I was seeing music by local bands or up-and-coming acts that would charge $10 in the back of a dive bar. Those types of shows aren’t $10 any more, but they are still cheap. And those are the artists that are in the most need of your financial support with tickets and merch. Once an artist is big enough to book an arena… they ain’t struggling

by parpfish

2/23/2026 at 5:24:55 AM

Lots of local metal shows are in the $15 range, so not too far off

by atomicnumber3

2/23/2026 at 6:12:35 AM

Growing up the Pub Rock scene was pretty eclectic and cost less than buying a round for your friends.

The Old Greek Theatre staged some high Art at times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoODPQ4CTM

by defrost

2/23/2026 at 8:58:34 AM

> Jokes on us, after all has settled. Have you tried to buy a ticket to live music lately? It was $750 for a good seat in more than 1 occasion this past year, and that is first market tickets from the venue, not a traditionally 'scalped' ticket.

> These two equations are tied together.

Not in the way you're trying to imply. No matter how rich performers already were in the past, they had no way to make tickets to their performances cheap, even if they wanted to. Cheap seats in the past reflect lack of demand. Expensive seats now reflect increased popularity.

by thaumasiotes

2/23/2026 at 5:52:03 AM

[dead]

by inigyou

2/23/2026 at 4:27:19 AM

I just bought a bluray drive and I've started ripping movies. The quality is fantastic on an HD bluray upscaled on a 4k tv, and even a DVD looks far better than I thought it would, and far better than it did 20 years ago when DVDs were current.

by idontwantthis

2/23/2026 at 4:40:32 AM

Vinegar syndrome has a couple UHD releases that are on 100GB BluRay. Storage available has been.. ahem, sparse. But you can get a real nice nearly-automated workflow for ripping with makemkv.

by k12sosse

2/23/2026 at 10:53:28 AM

Beware that not just any Blu-ray drive will work with UHD Blu-ray discs. There's both hardware limitations (100GB aka BDXL) and firmware restrictions (incl. copy protection) for with the drive needs support. Some drives with the hardware to support BDXL but without official UHD support can be patched to support UHD but check the MakeMKV forums before you buy such a drive.

I haven't come across any Vinegar syndrome releases yet (that I'm aware of) but lots of Shout! Factory or Arrow Video ones. From the Films that I'm interested in more have UHD releases now than not.

by account42

2/23/2026 at 3:17:32 PM

That’s a really cool project. For now I’m just grabbing them from the library and record stores. Can’t justify spending more on them than I would on streaming.

by idontwantthis

2/23/2026 at 5:20:33 AM

This looks like a reasonably good page (there possibly are better ones) for general AI chatbots, rate limits and sign-in requirements:

https://fmhy.net/ai

by peter_d_sherman

2/23/2026 at 5:50:37 AM

[dead]

by inigyou

2/23/2026 at 4:29:31 AM

[flagged]

by ranger_danger

2/23/2026 at 5:12:24 AM

[flagged]

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 5:15:27 AM

You can find their work for free here: https://fmhy.net

Just keep it hush-hush.

by zetanor

2/23/2026 at 5:27:55 AM

Thanks, but I should have been clearer: I meant the work they use to pay for their groceries.

That's the good stuff.

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 7:01:20 AM

You mean the work that pays for the yachts of some billionaires?

by h4x0rr

2/23/2026 at 8:23:22 AM

Could you be more specific about which payment is upsetting you?

Assuming OP is not a billionaire themselves, I can only think of cash flowing from a billionaire employer to OP for work done by OP. But I don't see how that could "pay for" the billionaire's yachts?

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 8:51:04 AM

I like how this went from “piracy is categorically theft” to “trickle down economics is real and good” in so few posts, it is an impressively rapid display of statements that look like silly opinions but are actually objectively false assertions

by jrflowers

2/23/2026 at 9:16:03 AM

> “piracy is categorically theft”

I think you think that that's something I said or implied, but I haven't said or implied that.

> “trickle down economics is real and good”

Ditto.

If you want to talk about those things, I suggest starting a new thread at the top level.

by akoboldfrying

2/23/2026 at 11:05:44 AM

> If you want to talk about those things, I suggest starting a new thread at the top level.

It seems like if you didn’t want to talk about the things that you implied in your posts you would elaborate on what you really meant, instead of asking folks to repost the points that you were trying to make.

by jrflowers

2/23/2026 at 5:51:09 AM

[dead]

by inigyou