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