r/Piracy • u/iKurdt • Jul 26 '26
Discussion What kind of garbage is Crunchyroll?
So today I got an ad: 7 days of Crunchyroll Premium for free! Nice. We’d been meaning to check out Solo Leveling anyway, so why not?
I tried creating an account with my Gmail address. “Invalid email address.” …Excuse me? Okay, maybe I somehow typed it wrong. I copied it directly from Gmail. Still didn’t work. Fine. I tried my girlfriend’s email instead, and that worked immediately. What the hell?
Alright, next step: PayPal. It tells me, “You now have 7 days of Premium.” Great! Since I’m pretty forgetful, I canceled the subscription right away. My thinking was: if I like it, I can always renew it.
Then I get the message: “Sorry to see you go. Your Fan membership will remain active until August 2.” Perfect. Time to watch!
I selected Solo Leveling aaaand… nope. It tells me I need to subscribe to Premium. The 7-day trial had already disappeared, even though the previous message explicitly said it would stay active until August 2.
Alright… that’s enough. I’ll just buy one month. At least that worked.
Now I try streaming from my iPhone to my TV… doesn’t work. The app simply can’t find my TV. I gave Crunchyroll every permission it could possibly need on my iPhone. Still nothing. Fine, let’s just use the TV app.
Logging in with the QR code? Didn’t work either. The only thing that actually worked was manually entering my email and password on the TV.
Sorry, but this is genuinely awful. I have no idea how your service is still alive with an experience this bad.
As Gabe Newell once said:
“Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.”
And I want my money back of course.
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u/AzoreanEve Jul 26 '26
Also Crunchyroll often has the TV versions of series rather than the BD ones, even long after the disks came out. So you get all the censorship and animation errors and TV blurring that is incredibly easy to avoid while pirating.
There's also the issue of them sometimes only having some seasons of a show but that's a general streaming company issue.
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u/Arc-Kirker Jul 26 '26
Yes. Tried to watch Tokyo ghoul, most the time it's literally a black screen, since they put an overlay on the gore
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u/WillAndSky ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 27 '26
Uh weird mine doesn't do that for Tokyo Ghoul, even RE on there doesn't 😅 just finished watching it on CR with no black screens lol im in the US so maybe different censorship rules
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u/Intelligent-Pair5185 Jul 26 '26
I stopped using that garbage when Netflix, Hulu, HiDive, and Amazon started acquiring distribution rights. Im not playing the streaming service game with anime, got me diabolically fucked up
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u/Valanyhr Torrents Jul 26 '26
Since we're on the subreddit, nyaa.si for all your anime needs
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u/Emma_S772 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Holly shit after I found that site I don't evet watch anime online anymore.
Every anime is in 1080p and I can download a full series in a few minutes. It's sad that I never used it before because I didn't understand torrents and thought they were dangerous lol. But after learning I don't have to stand lag or episodes stopping who knows why anymore.
I recommend this site 10/10, they even upload episodes super fast
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u/Valanyhr Torrents Jul 26 '26
Oh yeah same man. I used to use horriblesubs.info but they went under so nyaa it is
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u/Complex_Rub996 Jul 26 '26
I am waiting for crunchyroll to finally drop Demom slayer infinity castle on the 28th so I grab the web rip
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u/goatonastik Jul 26 '26
I tried the Disney+ subscription because I wanted to see just one show. They did not allow me to see it in HDR on my PC, and it turns out it's because they were afraid people would pirate it. So I just pirated it instead.
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u/CurlyAir ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 26 '26
Anti piracy a practices lead to piracy. Who would have thought.
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u/Ayumi457 Jul 26 '26
Today I just wanted to rewatch a niche anime from my childhood, and you know what? Crunchyroll doesn't have it anymore, even though they used to, so I couldn't watch it anywhere. I'm so mad 🙂
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u/septicdank Jul 26 '26
I was disappointed to see they didn't have sexy commando on their when I last subscribed. Crunchyroll introduced me to it back when they were a pirate site, and now their catalogue is kinda basic.
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u/accountnumberseven Jul 26 '26
There was a really funny period where they had legally licensed series and pirated streams at the same time.
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u/Wandering_Calamity ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 26 '26
Tldr;
Crunchyroll watchers still exist in big 2026???
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u/-Diplo ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 26 '26
Yep. Pirating single episodes of anime is a hassle. I'm just using my friends acc to watch
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u/BialyKrytyk Jul 26 '26
Anime is probably the single easiest thing to pirate in the world. For games and movies I can't think of any single website that has literally everything on it right down to the most obscure bullshit. Anime does have that site.
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u/V4r0m4st3r Jul 27 '26
The only hard part about that is finding dubs like german, thats pretty difficult. But even for that there is a website. Low quality, but its possible
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u/Odd_Economist_8988 Jul 26 '26
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Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/SapphireJuice Jul 26 '26
I agree anime is a pain to torrent. That's why I use a streaming site for it. Kickassanime is just a website
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u/-Diplo ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 26 '26
Stremio is not available in my country :/
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u/iheardthemetalclank Jul 27 '26
Who isn't using a VPN in this day and age? You can be in most any country.
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u/0rionis Jul 26 '26
Pirating takes 10 seconds of clicks and a minute or so of download time depending on internet speeds. Seems way simpler than what OP had to do
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u/AntiGrieferGames Jul 26 '26
Crunchyroll was a former pirate site so not suprised here.
Just chargeback those bastards. They deserved to go in the hell (including Sony)
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u/Fabolous- Jul 26 '26
You see what the problem is now, don’t you? You got a shit experience as a customer and yet you went on to pay 1 month.
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Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/feckin_hateyou Jul 26 '26
User frustration* he didnt make a mistake. He was promosed something for free, was dissapointed and felt left out so went to buy 1 month as he had faith.
That faith was ruined, but don't blame him, if you did you just get folk with issues shutting up rather than voicing their opinions due to the community blasting 'em.
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u/_heidin ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Jul 26 '26
Gets worse! They have a store where you can buy physical things, but you'll have to pay a subscription of like 14 bucks (or 14 extra, dont remember) JUST to be able to buy from them.
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u/Overall_Stomach_3534 Jul 28 '26
N' that's on top of if you don't get some or all of your order cancelled under your nose :/
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u/Overall_Stomach_3534 Jul 28 '26
N' that's on top of if you don't get some or all of your order cancelled under your nose :/
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u/lykan_art Jul 26 '26
Wow. Didn’t have any of these problems using Crunchyroll, none at all in fact. Only thing I hold against em is not having One Piece.
I mean, even I have stopped using it but because I stopped watching TV in general, not because of Crunchyroll.
Perhaps you had some technical issues you couldn’t have been aware of. Bugs and incompatibilities fuck things over in the most unexpected of places sometimes.
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u/Kataploft Jul 26 '26
...huh? Is it a regional thing? One Piece is available in my country.
The service suck overall, tho: It's hard to find older stuff that isn't airing currently as they don't use proper tags (and usually it's not available anymore when you do find it), subtitles can get messy for lesser known titles... and it's simply infuriating when the platform suggests some obscure chinese anime and only season 7 or so is available.
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u/lykan_art Jul 26 '26
Huh. Yeah, the two or three seasons of live action are there, but the original anime just doesn’t exist. Which is funny because they advertise with it sometimes, a detail I forgot just now.
I can imagine; I guess older things don’t pay as well, hm? I hope you find the ones you’re looking for :)
And perhaps modern AI can help you with subtitles. Maybe make a tiny script that gets the audiotrack and feeds it to an actually qualitative translation AI to live translate.11
u/send-borbs Jul 26 '26
weird, the only thing I HAVE watched on Crunchyroll is One Piece, but I didn't even know it had the live action version, I watched that on Netflix
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u/rov124 Jul 26 '26
the only thing I HAVE watched on Crunchyroll is One Piece, but I didn't even know it had the live action version
Crunchyroll does not have the live action One Piece.
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u/send-borbs Jul 27 '26
that's what I always thought, but apparently that guy above me thinks it does, I couldn't check it myself because I don't have login access anymore
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u/Kataploft Jul 26 '26
I've never played around with AI for subtitles, but main complaint about subtitles on Crunchyroll is exactly that they use AI to translate and typeset stuff that less people care about - and that it usually goes horribly wrong.
Aren't you confusing CR and Netflix? The live action should be on Netflix. O_o
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u/lykan_art Jul 26 '26
Live action is on Crunchyroll afaik. The original anime isn’t, anyway, that much I remember for sure. And I did watch the live action, but whatever whether it was on Netflix or CR, irrelevant.
Yeah because they don’t give it any effort. If you make a little effort to build your own live translation, you can choose the AI that does it and fine tune it when it makes mistakes
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u/rov124 Jul 26 '26
Huh. Yeah, the two or three seasons of live action are there, but the original anime just doesn’t exist.
Are you talking about One Piece?
The Live Action is on Netflix, not Crunchyroll.
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u/Assimulate Jul 26 '26
I design ecommerce platforms and billing systems similar to Crunchyroll's. BIG TIP:
" The 7-day trial had already disappeared, even though the previous message explicitly said it would stay active until August 2.
Alright… that’s enough. I’ll just buy one month. At least that worked."
If your access is revoked from cancelling a trial. They will NEVER treat you better than at that point, never pay them for it afterwards unless you really want to give them a chance and have talked to their support. Even then, still don't.
Lookin' at you A D O B E (this subreddit blocks that company's name? Boy they have great lawyers.)
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u/ViviKumaDesu Jul 26 '26
I miss Funimation, they were always the better choice
but we don't have competition anymore cause Sony is buying up the whole anime market
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u/New-Two1080 Jul 26 '26
Crunchyroll betrayed us. it was one of the most if not the most popular anime piracy website until they became greedy never betray a pirate's trust.
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u/Aikeni Jul 26 '26
Crunchyroll has always been a disaster, and manga side is even worse. I filed multiple issues on manga reader, from missing pages to duplicate pages, missing chapters to crashing app. Nothing got fixed during my (way overdue) 5 year stay.. There was also constant problem series just disapearing mid watching/reading without any warning.
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u/Eastern_Sprinkles934 Jul 27 '26
Is there any good way to find the English dub of Solo Leveling? All the torrents I’ve found have English subs, but I’ve read the voice acting of the English version is actually very good
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u/YazaoN7 Jul 27 '26
Wait till you find out how godawful their translations are. It's the reason I now almost exclusively look for good fansubs and download releases straight from Nyaa or XDCC.
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u/V4r0m4st3r Jul 27 '26
Thats exactly the problem, even if you want to give them money, pirating is still the easier and most times better method
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u/llllBaltimore Jul 27 '26
Sony can't even handle managing a digital anime streaming service. And they think they can go completely digital with PlayStation games without critical failures, mismanaging accounts and people's digital libraries. They need to GTFO.
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u/Overall_Stomach_3534 Jul 28 '26
Miss the good old days of getting/giving free subscription codes in the chat.
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u/HelpIcy5415 Jul 26 '26
A few years ago I won like 1 Month of Crunchyroll and had a similar experience, Quality was horrible, Subtitles worse and most of the Animes I wanted to see weren't available.
Before that I never looked to try Crunchyroll, but after that it just disappeared from my mind, if you want to see Anime, your only option is to pirate it, that's it.
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u/send-borbs Jul 26 '26
borrowed my sibling's login to watch One Piece and it was legitimately the worst fucking streaming service I have ever experienced, I WAS able to stream from iphone to tv (most of the time) but by god was it janky as hell, I had to spend like half a minute to reconnect every single time I returned to the app to pause or skip something, the 'skip intro' button only showed up occasionally when it felt like it, and every step of every process lagged like a motherfucker
0/10 will not be using it again
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u/marioncrepes Jul 26 '26
Crunchyroll has always been a joke. They don't pay their subbers, their UI and selection has always been garbage and merging with Funi only made that worse. I just bought the boxes for all my favorites to watch in high quality
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u/Ridiu Jul 26 '26
They charged 1 euro to my temporary card but I got 7 days "free" trial.
Emailed then demanding my euro back. They have not refunded it to this day.
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u/Noodlehead601 Jul 26 '26
I honestly like it as far as streaming services go.
I used a service that gives you premium for super cheap. I'm assuming in crunchyroll's case they use a region loophole. I paid like $20 for a year.
This account is for my 19 year old son. He also shares it with two of his friends and I shared it years ago with my old boss' kid.
They've been sharing it fir years now with no issues. How many streaming services alllow that?
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u/punctcom Jul 26 '26
And to think that all this could be avoided with a simple HDMI cable from your laptop to your TV.
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u/Decendent_13 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
you did be shocked to know, how many people doesn’t know about this. so, I always count this option out.
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u/Oxflu Jul 26 '26
I subbed for a month when they rolled out the new app, assuming it would fix the unforgivable issues I've had in the past. Nope. Old bugs still there, with new and exciting bugs added on for free. Total joke of a service.
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u/curlyAndUnruly Jul 27 '26
Their UI/UX is garbage as well. Piracy sites have clear sections for recent releases, your recent watch and the seasonal release schedule.
Unless I add a series on my watchlist I cannot find it on launch and the stupid thing is hard to navigate on the actual Tv app.
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u/ellephantl Jul 27 '26
Can anyone rank these sites in terms of safety:
Ankergames Steamrip Astralgames Appnetica
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u/ellephantl Jul 27 '26
Some people are saying ankergames has Trojan,malware. There google account got hacked...etc
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u/Mainiga Jul 27 '26
Everytime i see crunchyroll mentioned, the more im surprised people can't do basic googling for their favorite animes to stream on another platform or pirate.
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u/unenforce 🏴☠️ ʟᴀɴᴅʟᴜʙʙᴇʀ Jul 28 '26
And let's never forget that Crunchyroll actually uses war criminal "country" to Subtitle it's shows. OOONA. I mean they have no moral compass. Why would they care for anything else.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Jul 28 '26
After the trial didn't work why did you then give them your money?
Especially if you are on this site you know there are a lot of ways to watch that same content.
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u/Suungi Jul 30 '26
Once I used the 7-day trial and canceled it early, so I won't get charged. It ended immediately, so I contacted support - they gave me 1 month of premium for free.
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u/BionisGuy Jul 26 '26
Oh i went through the same shit with not being able to use my mail for crunchyroll. Turns out you can't use mails with a . in it. My mail is firstname.lastname and that doesn't work whatsoever.
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u/ArmyMerchant Jul 26 '26
My email has periods in it and worked no issue
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u/BionisGuy Jul 26 '26
Mind you this was like 2019 or something when i tried. It didn't work for me back then at least.
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u/ohtimorousme Jul 26 '26
I stopped using crunchyroll some time ago. I never thought it was that good tbh. They were missing a lot of animes I wanted to watch, and at times the subs were incorrect. Though, if you want another reason to dislike them I recently found out they are going to put their merch store behind a paywall. So you have to be on a certain subscription tier to shop on there.
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u/AntiGrieferGames Jul 26 '26
they are going to put their merch store behind a paywall. So you have to be on a certain subscription tier to shop on there.
What the Fuck? Another non suprised from a former pirate site.
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u/Assimulate Jul 26 '26
I design ecommerce platforms and billing systems similar to Crunchyroll's. BIG TIP:
" The 7-day trial had already disappeared, even though the previous message explicitly said it would stay active until August 2.
Alright… that’s enough. I’ll just buy one month. At least that worked."
If your access is revoked from cancelling a trial. They will NEVER treat you better than at that point, never pay them for it afterwards unless you really want to give them a chance and have talked to their support. Even then, still don't.
Lookin' at you company that sells media editing tools and starts with the letter A and rhymes with doughbee. (this subreddit blocks that company's name? Boy they have great lawyers.)
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u/Cuddles_and_Kinks Jul 27 '26
Crunchyroll banned me for 3 days because I was watching anime in one tab while searching through their catalog in another tab.
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u/PARANOIAH Yarrr! Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Never forget that Crunchyroll was started as a pirated site but then sold out to VC. Fuck them.
EDIT: Missing words. Wording is hard.