You've now found your movies and TV shows successfully from part 1. But after watching every piece of Jack Ryan media, your brain has turned into a stew, and not just because it is pure lib shit. Manually searching and downloading one episode or season at a time can be tedious. Ain't nobody got time for that! This is where automation comes in.
Automation
The recommended software to automate downloading new episodes as they come out and movies as they release are Sonarr and Radarr respectively. To use these, I would strongly recommend installing these on a computer that is always connected to the network (aka not a laptop). Having a dedicated server is the best option.
Even a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi works well enough (as long as you are comfortable with the GNU/Linux shell). If you go the Pi route, please use an external hard drive (don't forget to put it in your fstab file), SD cards don't deserve to suffer like all of us living in a police state. If you have any questions with that, we can talk in the comments.
On GNU/Linux I would recommend installing Sonarr/Radarr through Docker, specifically this link has a good collection of images to use.
Otherwise, here are the install guides for Sonarr and for Radarr.
Note that these programs do not actually download anything themselves, you have to connect them to your torrent client to be able to download things. They also need to be set up with any trackers you want to search from. Sonarr and Radarr have a weak selection of torrent trackers available by default, and if you want access to more try out Jackett (beyond the scope of this post).
I would spend some time messing around with the settings for each of them, making sure everything is "wired up" correctly. The whole thing can be finicky sometimes, but it is really worth it to come home after school or work and have the latest episode of your weebshit ready to watch.
Usenet
If you were attentive, you might have found something about Usenet within the settings. Usenet is an ancient form of communication popular during the post-internet, pre-web era. This was around the time of BBSs and IRC, but I'm sure none of the zoomers here were alive at that time (I certainly wasn't).
Usenet, besides being a weird email/reddit hybrid, is also a huge, mostly hidden, file sharing hub. It can be more complicated to learn the terminology, but it is worth it! To be up front with y'all, it is both an investment of time+learning as well as money.
People over on r/usenet have put together a great guide to usenet, so give it a read. Confused? Here is a translation table from bittorrent to usenet terms.
- Torrent → Usenet
- Torrent file/Magnet link → NZB
- N/A (I guess the swarm) → Provider (where you download from)
- Torrent client → Newsreader (The program you use to download)
- Tracker → Indexer (Where you find downloads)
Usenet is not P2P. This means you shouldn't/don't need to use a VPN. You download directly from a server, but to get access, you have to cough up to a provider. You can either pay a monthly subscription (usually with unlimited bandwidth) or buy "block", which has unlimited time limit, but a limited amount you can download. I personally just use a block from Usenet.farm. The general consensus is that if you download less than 72GB a month, go block and vice-versa. There are almost always deals and discounts going on somewhere, so stay up to date on the subreddit.
As for the newsreader (the downloading program) I use NZBGet, but SABnzbd is also a popular choice. Like your torrent client, you can hook this up with Sonarr and Radarr to automate downloads.
But that leaves the last piece of the puzzle: the indexer (or tracker from torrent terminology). In usenet, most of these will cost money or be invite-only, and hell, many are both. If you are just getting started, I'd try out nzbgeek. Don't forget to add your information (including API key) into your automation program. They are quite friendly there and should be able to walk you through setting it all up. I managed to get into drunkenslug a while ago when they had open registration, and they have a generous free tier.
Closing Notes
Well this went long. I tried to explain this as best I could, but I probably made some mistakes along the way. I would love to continue the discussion in the comments, including suggestions and questions. In the next post I will go over downloading music, books and scientific papers. See ya later!
Also, I don't know where else to mention this, but I strongly recommend mpv as a video player. The MacOS version is called IINA and the Windows version is mpv.net. Give it a try, you might like it.
Ok this is epic