Even better if you connect Jackett with Sonarr and Radarr
recently I got a subscription to AllDebrid.com and just connect that with Kodi + Seren or Stremio + Torrentio. Alldebrid is a torrent cache server, if you add a torrent to their site it usually is already cached on their side and then you can download the files at your maximum speed. It's great for streaming high quality Blu-rays with Kodi or Stremio (which have built in scrapers, so no need to manually add torrents). Just google a tutorial with Kodi+Seren+Alldebrid or Stremio+Torrentio+Alldebrid. The sub is super cheap. And game torrents, like from fitgirl, are also cached on there.
I highly recommend upgrading from Jackett to Prowlarr.
More indexers available, Prowlarr syncs its indexers to the rest of the 'arr suite automatically, you can use it to manually search your indexers for whatever instead of just specific categories via the 'arrs (sending the desired results directly to your dl client), and there's a nice history page where you can see what software performed what searches to which indexers, all the parameters it used, how many results it got, and even manually re-trigger individual searches to see the results.
I'm just starting to learn about Usenet, alldebrid, sonarr, jellyseer etc. I'm not quite getting how it all fits together, though I've downloaded many a torrent. Anything you could recommend?
Overseer/Jellyseer/Ombi are request interfaces. You and your users submit requests for movies/shows (music too if you use Lidarr) through there.
Those requests are fed into Sonarr/Radarr which actually manage the media files. They will search your indexers via Jackett/Prowlarr to find the most suitable torrent or nzb, dropping that into your download client (I use qbittorrent and SABnzbd, though I've disabled torrents for the time being.). Once completed Sonarr/Radarr will remove them from the download client, sort the files into your media folders and rename them accordingly. If a piece of media couldn't be found, or is below your desired quality standard Sonarr/Radarr will monitor RSS feeds from your indexers and occasionally perform searches, upgrading files as they are found.
Finally Emby/Jellyfin/Plex can scan your media folders, grab metadata from imdb/thetvdb/themoviedb and present it all nicely for you.
If you haven't already; putting these services behind a reverse proxy like nginx and a set of subdomains makes ease of use much better. Instead of remembering a bunch of port numbers and IPs: sonarr.domain.tld, radarr.domain.tld, etc.
Within my local network I run Pihole both to block most ads/tracking for every device on the local network, as well as just a local dns server to resolve those domains. (I also own a public domain to easily reach my stuff remotely)
Use Alldebrid if you want to stream videos torrents directly from the internet with a media player like Kodi. You basically get a pirated version of a streaming app. You can stream in really high quality if your internet is fast enough. I recently streamed the ripped Blu-Ray version of Avatar 2 without issue which was like 100GB. I haven’t downloaded and stored a movie/show ever since I use Alldebrid with Kodi+Seren and Stremio+torrentio. It’s paid but it’s super cheap.
If you are patient and have the storage space you can use Usenet or Jackett+Prowlarr+qBittorrent
No not really, the connection with the Alldebrid servers is encrypted. So your ISP can't see what you are downloading. But Alldebrid might store your IP and what you are downloading. So if you don't trust them maybe a VPN is recommended. Though if you live in a country where they don't go after individual pirates then you don't have anything to worry about. And usually they only go after people who are sharing files, which you automatically do with torrenting, but since you only download files with Alldebrid you aren't sharing.
Alldebrid I'm not familiar with; as far as I can tell it's a download agrigator/cache. They collect torrents and other downloads at the slow ish speeds of peer-to-peer torrenting, then allow you to download directly from them at higher speeds as they have the full file available. Not a free service and not all that helpful imo. But to each their own.
The reason for Jackett/Prowlarr is various indexer sites have different APIs accepting search queries and returning results in slightly different ways. Prowlarr/Jackett act as a middleman translating this information into formats each indexer and querying software understands so each of those devs don't have to work on supporting each indexer separately. I'm pretty sure it also caches some requests/responses so you aren't hitting indexers multiple times in a row for the same searches, helping with rate limits. As well as just providing a nice central place to manage indexers that may be used by many different bits of software in your setup.
.nzb is the equivalent of .torrent files but for usenet.
Last question, hopefully an easy one. How do you actually download the files without getting in trouble? Behind a VPN? Or does Usenet somehow have protection?
You are connecting to usenets servers via an encrypted connection and downloading directly from them. Your isp cannot inspect this traffic because of the encryption and you are not publicly broadcasting your actions (unlike with torrents) besides the initial connection to a usenet server which in itself is perfectly fine. It's primary a message board system that also happens to be leveraged for file sharing. Nothing inherently illegal about that.
The usenet host assumes all the risk by hosting the content. It's up to them to not be hosting illegal/copyrighted content. You're just reading publicly available messages.
Usenet doesn't need a VPN because it's a direct download, it's encrypted with TLS.
For torrents, you will have to put your torrent client behind a VPN, but it's recommended to leave everything else(e.g. *arrs) not behind a VPN so it doesn't misbehave. If you're using docker, you can use a container with a built-in VPN like https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/config-options/
you have to use debrid like a streaming service in combination with a streaming app like kodi, syncler, stremio to get the full convenience. no need to scrape for torrents it just streams the file directly from the debrid cache so you can watch massive 4k blurays instantly with no buffering
I tried setting up Seren twice on my Kodi but had many issues. First time it just made my entire Kodi unstable, it crashed every ~20 minutes. Re-installed Kodi, then tried to install Seren, and had many issues again. E.g. missing dependencies, tried to install them manually, failed, etc.
I'm running OSMC on a Vero, perhaps that's the reason.
Also not a fan of installing 3rd party repos on Kodi.
So, I'm using the alternative solution with the Yatse app. In Stremio I select External Player, and then I can select Yatse => Play Media and then it starts playing on the Kodi.
I'm on the latest Kodi v20.
Just after installing Seren, which was already problematic due to Failed Dependency errors I had to resolve manually, I got random bsod (with the sad smiley)
Today got another bsod so I now think the hardware is just dying.
Kodi is just a pita for many things. I'm tech savvy but it's just too complicated to eg get ad free YouTube (which is flaky at best), or Realdebrid via Seren.
It works perfectly for videos from my NAS.
Yeah Kodi sucks balls sometimes, like on my AppleTV it occasionally just uninstalls the addons i've installed, but it's the only media player capable to use Alldebrid on an AppleTV.
i remember when i configured stremio a while back there was no built in scraper that worked with debrid. i had to google and finally found a random syncler scraper that worked