I'm wondering about what your piracy workflow looks like.
- Where do you find what shows/films to watch?
- Do you stream for convenience or download for superior quality?
- Where do you store media?
- What software are you using to watch it?
- How do you keep track of your watchlist, which episode you already watched or where you left off in a movie?
I have Netflix and Disney+ (through family) and it already drives me crazy to remember where which show is available, download quality sucks, shows get delisted halfway through watching them. Sometimes multiple seasons even are across multiple streaming services. (I was very sad before I discovered there were more than 4 seasons of Adventure Time). I even want to pay for the production of good media, but streaming services make it a really hard sell 🤬
I know that the -arr suite with jellyfin is a pretty nice workflow, but I'm not into self hosting (yet).
I use a NAS running the Unraid OS, with a Docker setup using the Servarr apps to find and fetch media using SABnzbd and qBitorrent to download from Usenet and private trackers. It pipes movies, TV shows, and music into my Jellyfin library, which has all the features of Plex, but is free. I don’t believe in telling corporations what shows I’m pirating. Bazarr automatically fetches appropriate subtitles for everything. I have the Servarr apps set up to fetch the best quality using the Trash guides.
For visual media discovery, I use Jellyseerr, which allows me to easily find new shows and movies, and allows my family and friends to request shows to be downloaded. Jellyfin automatically cleans up watched media so that it doesn’t take up space after it’s been watched.
For audiobooks, everything is fetched from private trackers, specifically the mouse site, and automatically piped into Audiobookshelf, to it can be streamed to friends and family. Ebooks get likewise sent to a Kavita server, so they can be quickly sent via email to physical readers as desired by users.
And of course, all ebooks and audiobooks are seeded in perpetuity, meaning I get a lot of points on the tracker from seeding hundreds of torrents. I use those points to buy free leech tokens, so I don’t have to worry about ratio. Other types of torrents are usually seeded until they are at 1.5 ratio, then they are deleted.
Video games I download are automatically synced to all gaming PCs on my network via Syncthing, so they can be installed by everyone. Save games for each person are also backed up to the NAS and to any other PCs or portables used for that game by that person.
All this is protected behind an obscure domain proxied by Cloudflare and protected by an LDAP server that authenticates and validates access for each user to the services they are allowed to use. Torrents and Usenet media are downloaded to the NAS using a bound VPN located in a country that doesn’t cooperate with Western governments. Everything is streamed to users on a fiber connection.
Thanks for this very detailed description. Setting this up sounds a bit much to me, but still interesting
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Mostly Lemmy/Reddit/social circle recommendations
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Download
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I used to download directly to my phone and watch there. Then I got a NAS and started copying from my phone to the NAS. Then I set up download software on the NAS to have it always on. Then got Plex set up. Then the Arr's (although these are janky and I end up doing a lot of manual additions).
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Plex
I would highly suggest getting a NAS and playing around with it. Self hosting is complicated, but I got it as a "dumb" network drive on my LAN. Then slowly I started adding on different Docker containers and added to it. Each setup was a painful learning process of errors and troubleshooting, so don't try to do everything in one go.
You don't even need to be a pirate for self hosting. You can buy dirt cheap physical media on eBay and rip it to make a pretty huge personal library on the cheap.
If the Servarr apps are being janky, you may want to check out the Trash guides for each app. The default configuration ends up fetching a lot of bad releases, because it doesn’t have many criteria to meet for a download to match.
It’ll take you an hour or so to copy the configs you want, but it’s worth it.
Thanks. I'll check it out. The downloaded files were 35GB for 1080p resolution. Don't know what the hell it was doing.
It’s was grabbing the very first file that matched the name, is what. That’s one of the things you will be configuring for the Trash guides. I prefer the best quality possible, since I’m downloading to a NAS. But if you’re downloading to a desktop, they also tell you how to search for media that’s of a reasonable size. For 1080p, suspect you’ll be grabbing high-quality files that are 15-20gb for a movie.
Thanks for the recommendation. What hardware are you running docker on?
Synology NAS. I think it is a DS220+ or something like that.
You can make a DIY NAS with an old cheap PC. Or pay a premium for Synology and they make things a bit easier (although setup can still take quite a learning curve if you don't know about this stuff).
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- Jellyseer is what I use, also allows others to request stuff
- I download via torrents, automated with the *arr suite
- My seedbox, fast speeds also help with my ratio
- Jellyfin, just because i prefeer FOSS
- Jellyfin covers that, if i happen do delete some show then Jellyseer still remembers if i finished it or was only partially done
Lots of seedbox providers offer all these tools with their boxes so you dont need to host anything
I search for stuff in qBittorrent and download it directly onto my home server using the web UI. I've got most of my family's devices set up to be able to access it either via an NFS or SMB mount, and then it's just a simple matter of opening the corresponding video in VLC.
Nzb360 for Android.
I buy apps. But I never donate again.
I've donated several times to the dev. It's an amazing app.
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everywhere?
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download. to download I use a bunch of websites through prowlarr/sonarr/radarr with qbittorrent nox for automatic downloading and importing to jellyfin
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my server (laptop on my shelf)
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jellyfin
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jellyfin
Is your laptop running a Server os or is it still usable as a normal laptop?
it's running arch (which can be both it doesn't have a DE or a WM installed but it could have) my main computer also runs on arch (with i3 although I wouldn't really recommend it to a novice that's not interested in this kind of stuff you'd probably be better off with KDE) and "it's still usable as a normal computer"
I’m more a fan of Hyprland myself, but i3 is a great and mature WM. Currently I use KDE, at least until I bother to get an AMD GPU so I can switch to using Hyprland and not have to watch Obsidian and Discord fight with Wayland constantly.
I used hyprland for a while but I switched because the developer is transphobic and that caused controversy long story short hyprland is abandoning wlroots which also caused performance issues for me so for now I'm using i3 because there's simply no good Wayland compositor that will work with proprietary Nvidia drivers (and nouveau still lacks in performance)
edit: you can make it look good (transparency rounded corners etc) with picom
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- Mostly movies from yts . mx, and movies and tv shows from watchsomuch . to.
- Mostly for convenience and I think information should be free. I cam back to the high seas after they decided to have 4,758 different streaming services and kind of hate exclusive as an excuse to get you to pay for one service over another.
- I have a dedicated 6TB hard drive(wish I would have paid a bit extra for an 8 or 10 though). I also used it for rsync back ups but that's it.
- I switch back and forth between Jellyfin and Plex. Jellyfin is a bit fiddly but open, Plex "just work" but is closed source. I try to use free software as much as I can.
- Both JF and Plex will keep track, but I've had issues with JF if a movie or show doesn't want to run(I think it's a transcoding issue) sometimes I lose progress of my most recent watched stuff. Kind of sucks. I've had more issues with JF than with Plex which sucks.
Same as you, I also haven't fully dipped my toes to the world of self-hosting (yet).
- For non-animation movies/series, I wade through the popular/trending categories or read recommendation from friends, lemmy or, god forbid, reddit. I don't really need to do this lately as my shows backlog is as long as my games backlog.
- For convenience always. 720p is fine for me.
- I stream. Unless it is one of my favorites I want to keep.
- Real-debrid+Stremio.
- Stremio does it for me. Also for anime, I have Anilist.
Headless server with debian and mldonkey, I search on ed2k/kad network and public trackers for bittorrent. I use plex to stream to my devices.
I use Plex, emby, and Jellyfin shares.
- Various sorts and browse for recommendation
- Stream in 4k when available, 1080 when not
- I don't
- Plex, emby, Jellyfin
- It's automatic. Favorites, individualized playlists, watchlist. Sort by played.
Seedbox VM running on my Synology permanently routed through VPN running radarr, sonarr, jackett, plex. I find stuff either by searching what's new for the month or by occasional subscriptions of the streaming services.
- I mostly check predbs for releases from scene, imdb, youtube and everywhere.
- Download for convenience. Multiple Devices, Data Caps and Internet Instability in my Country. qBittorent (Docker) with a couple of rules & rss. I don't use -arr suite since I prefer to manually check the torrents
- Old Haswell PC (Unraid) with HBA+DualNic in the closet
- Plex & Jellyfin (Backup Solution)
- Plex & Jellyfin (Backup Solution)
