Advanced pirates, whats a tip others might not know?
I'll start. Did you know you can run a headless version of JD2 on a raspberry pi? It's not the greatest thing in the world, but sometimes its nice to throw a bunch of links in there and go to sleep.
I have this same setup on Synology using docker and funnel all the searches through Jackett and Transmission downloads through a gluetun VPN container.
Living in the UK it was a game charger on the ISP restrictions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbSfaKwyfXE
I have a dated opinion, it's probably still true, but compute power is much cheaper now.
If your player doesn't support the format, Plex will transcode it on the server -- which is extremely slow if all you have is just a junk pc as server, while on Kodi (or what I personally use, Infuse), you can use any file server, like smb, and they'll just play. No fuss, any lags will definitely be a network issue.
I only watch on one device (Nvidia Shield Pro) directly and do not need streaming over the net. Because of this I have also not looked into Jellyfin much either.
Overall I got to know Kodi first and like the customization and add-ons etc. I have my library/metadata set up that way and am too lazy to check the others out and maybe switch (don't fix a running system, right? xD)
Awesome true! I haven't used Kodi since it switched from XBMC on a modded OG xbox. I love everything plex has to offer but in the same mindset, i haven't looked much beyond plex because it works for my needs. Thanks for the input.
I've been doing basically the same thing on a QNAP NAS slowly as I find time to learn.
My current setup is NAS with a docker running Jellyfin (Plex alternative that is FOSS and also better in my opinion). I setup a reverse-proxy via https to Jellyfin on the NAS.
I have VPN+Prowlarr+Radarr+Sonarr+Lidarr+qBittorrent setup on my PC and uploading locally to the NAS for Jellyfin.
I have a domain purchased and using DDNS to point the url to my IP, though that doesn't appear to be working properly right now.
So as is, it works quite well at least on my local network, but when I find the time I'll get the domain working so I can properly login to Jellyfin remotely with it. Then next up is moving the torrent setup onto the NAS in it's own docker stack.
My NAS also has two physical network interfaces so I'm also going to setup the other one to be exclusively a VPN connection so I can let different docker stacks use different network interfaces. (VPN for torrent docker stack and non-VPN for remoting into the NAS or something. I'm not sure yet.)
Jellyseer is great even though im the only one using it in my house, the ui is much nicer than radarr/sonarrs for downloading and seeing trending films and tv
I seriously need to learn all of this stuff. For years I've just been doing the same thing. Turn on my VPN, find the movie or show I want on whatever torrent site, download it with qBittorent and then hook my laptop up to my receiver and play it with VLC.
20 some years and I'm still doing it that way, except that I use Plex so I can watch stuff on the TV. I use Prowlarr once in a great while if I'm having a hard time finding something but I don't DL anywhere near as much as I used to.
Yeah I've been doing the same way for so long and honestly I don't have any problems other than the couple of times I forgot to enable the VPN and got a slap on the wrist from my ISP. The shows I like to watch are spread out across so many services that it would cost me a fortune to subscribe to them all, so I do use eztv a lot and before that RARBG (RIP).
I'm disabled and on a fixed income and there's no way I can afford 4 or 5 streaming services. I don't even watch that much other than an occasional series like Silo and a movie once in a while. I think a lot more stuff is tracked now than it used to be(I even got hit for an older game) and it's just not worth it to try without a VPN.
Never saw Pretty in Pink but enjoyed Molly Ringworm in The Breakfast Club. I also have a Kindle and am on the 3rd book in the Silo series. The other thing about e-books is that even bestsellers aren't tracked by anyone. There are nowhere near as many books on various sites as there are movies and TV shows, but you can still find just about anything.
I'm running a mini-ITX system with three 3.5" drives, the case dimensions for it are 240x207x401mm. It's a pretty tight package, and way smaller and more efficient than the dual Xeon Dell T7500 I used to run.
I have done basically the same thing. With a few differences.
I setup Transmission and SaBnzbd on the NAS but offloaded sonarr/radar/prowlarr + jellyfin to my server so it's not taking up resources from the NAS.
Found Usenet to download significantly faster overall and sonarr/radar get releases from them much quicker then torrents. Only about 1/15 downloads end up being torrents.
Also overseerr is an amazing tool that you should add into your system. I use it for myself but I also have made accounts for my family so instead of asking me to download something they can just press two buttons and it automatically does the rest.
The modularity of docker makes this great!
I have a docker stack with overseerr, 2x sonarr, 3x radarr, 2x readarr, lidarr, unpackerr and sabnzbd. Another stack with nordvpn and qbittorrent.
It's so easy to setup and it becomes very powerful.
I have some users on Plex that simply do some requests on overseerr, I approve them, then everything gets downloaded automatically. They just have to wait for it to be available.
I used to be suscribed to Netflix, not anymore since their offering dropped while their prices raised.
Lack of knowledge isn't dumb, it's just lack of knowledge. You can't know everything.
I run 2 docker containers, named slightly differently (my setup is a bit more complicated within a stack though). Then I map a different port for the FR one so it doesn't conflict. Of course, you need a different config volume. Then once the container is up, you can I link my FR sonarr to my EN one. So when I request something on my EN Sonarr, it also adds it to my FR Sonarr.
I also do that with movies, but for HD and 4K instead. I manage multi-language differently.
Radarr/Sonarr can't handle multiple versions of the same movie/episode, so a lot of people have a second instance for 4K movies (so they can have both a 1080p and a 4K version of the same movie). Also if you have a lot of anime it can be worth it to have a Sonarr instance configured just for that
I don't know overseerr yet, sounds like it might be useful for my gf 🤔 Also never heard of unpacker, gotta check out the advantages of that.
I only recently finally got into docker and it's amazing. Good thing I spent the extra bucks for the NAS that supports it back when I bought it some years ago. Maybe I'll switch Sonarr/Readarr/Readarr and Prowlarr to docker too, so that I can manage everything the same way.
I was so close to going legal and signing up for Netflix, and then all the other platforms started to pop up and the content got split over all those. I just want one platform for all my favourite shows and movies. It should be shared like with Spotify/Google-/Apple-/YouTube-Music, not the exclusive chaos that it is now.
Unpackerr is good to unpack torrent files when they are multiple rar files for example.
It seems to do its job, I have less failed imports and less manual intervension.
I used to be legit. Then Netflix started to cancel my shows, they raised the price and other platforms started to pop up. I said fuck it and went the way of piracy. I'm legit with gaming and music since there are convenient solutions for those.
This can be learned. I did this through trial and error and basically learning about docker.
I'm now proud of my setup but I sanked a lot of hours into it.
Don't cheap out on a NAS, I got an entry level Synology when I first started it was great for learning but was quite slow. I needed to sell that and buy a more powerful model to get one that could run Docker. I went for 716+ which I bought used off eBay and works well for me, the difference in speed is night and day. Ram can be upgraded onboard if required. Good luck 👍
The 220+ was the first model I had, I found this slow and didn't natively support docker as part of the package manager.
Docker compatibility should be a priority when buying if delving into some setups mentioned here it just makes everything so much more convenient.
The 16 series model is expensive to buy new, I picked mine up used from eBay from someone who was upgrading to a newer model.
You can Google Docker compatibility for Synology models and get a list of models that work with it and narrow your choices down to these.