I have been torrenting the same primitive way for a long time. Turn on a VPN, open up a browser I only use for this purpose, go to tpb or yts, grab my movie, and shut it all down when the movies over.
I’ve only updated my torrent client in this time, the method has not evolved.
Now im interested in self hosting jellyfin with an arr stack, with the end goal being to share it with friends and family outside my lan. I’d like to use docker containers so its all containerized, and of course keep it safe and secure.
What kind of set up, from hardware to software, would you recommend to get this going? Any guides in particular? I’m especially iffy on allowing remote access for non-tech savvy family (like a roku app), so any tips/guide recs for that would be helpful.
I’ve been searching around some and I’ve found a lot of resources but I’d like to get the opinions of people in here before diving in.
I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)
Tldr: Suggestions or guides for beginner setting up jellyfin/arr/ remote access for family?
May I a recommend a change in approach?
Ditch the torrents for Usenet. Faster downloads, fully encrypted, none of the risks of torrents.
I used to torrent the old fashioned way (and still do for some obscure stuff), but I switched over to usenet.
The arr stack fully supports usenet natively.
You can check out https://trash-guides.info/ for a massive amount of information.
The TLDR is:
get a usenet subscription. I use easy news, viper news and one more I cannot recall. Easy news unlimited, the other two are “block” accounts from an entirely separate usenet provider to “fill in the blanks” if any files are missing from my main provider.
sign up for several indexers. DrunkenSlug is my favorite. I am subbed to a few more as well. The more you have the more you’ll have access to.
set up your arr stack. Use Prowlarr to configure your indexers, which will propagate them to Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr.
set up your download client with your provider configuration. I used SABnzb
fine tune your Sonarr and Radarr. Try to prioritize releases/codecs/encodes/remuxes based on your needs. I just try to grab h265/x265 or HEVC to reduce storage consumption as much as possible. You can even specify if you want 5.1 audio, Dolby Atmos, HDR, etc. it’s all there in trash guides.
set up your Jellyfin. There is where I cannot help because I use Plex. I did set it up and it scanned my library quite well but it’s just not there yet for normal users (friends and family)
This is just a very high level overview. Feel free to ask tho I am not a Usenet/Arr guru by any means but my setup works.
Edit: you can still incorporate torrents into your workflow but you really don’t need to. In the off chance you can’t find something on Usenet and you find a torrent, just download it normally and throw it in your library. Jellyfin will pick it up and pull the relevant metadata for you. I do the same thing using YT-DLP for videos.
While I’m sure usenet us all you say it is and more, I object at a philosophical level to paying for what is essentially a piracy service.
And you know what? I do tend to agree with your view. It’s just that I’ve reached a point where I can’t be bothered with private trackers and some of the weird rules some of them have. Specially now that I migrated away from a seed box to an in-house (literally) server.
The convenience is top notch tho!
Usenet is good for some things, torrents are still king for others
Like if I want a specific release of a movie in a certain quality, like a dv remux then I might pop on blu or ptp. 90% of the time I’ll just grab a dv/hdr10 remux on usenet though
Anime is all about trackers, ab/baka/nyaa destroy usenet. Animetosho makes usenet passable but still destroyed by the first three
Music is the same. If I want some basic mainstream release in scene quality then sure usenet is fine. If I want to be sure it’s tagged decently and actually a solid 16bit flac? Red/orpheus. If I want anything remotely niche, international artists, indie shit, like even singles and eps by popular artists? Or I’ll pop on soulseek but the downside there is I can’t figure out how to automate it
For music I would definitely agree with you. RIP What.CD
AnimeTosho covers the majority if not all my anime needs. Makes it easy for people to just add stuff to plex watchlist, and it gets automatically downloaded with the preferred quality and language settings.
I still have a (very) old Baka account. That site is a godsend. Nyaa comes in clutch at times, I won’t deny that.
Movies and TV shows, tho? Usenet. Specially western stuff.
I miss what.cd so damn much
Oh right I totally skipped tv shows haha
Depends on how picky you are as well to a degree. I’m an “archival” person - I download shit in remux and flac pretty exclusively. When it comes to anime I have some strong opinions about what fan subs are the best and what ones are total shit (to the point where I pretty regularly mux my own releases). If you can get an AB account I would highly recommend, imo best of the three
tv shows i agree usenet and western movies usenet most of the time. Unless you want a specific high quality release group (wildcats, 3L, etc) instead of framestor and random groups, who dominate usenet releases.
The only thing with tv shows and usenet: if you want a long running tv show, say the Simpsons. Torrents easier 100% of the time. If you’re manually downloading through an nzb site then it’s still faster because I guarantee you at least one torrent site you’re on will have a set of season or series packs that works; the season packs on Usenet are often the quickest things to die.
If you’re grabbing with sonarr I guarantee you will get a ton of shit that sucks, especially for an old show like that. Like some of the old episodes will be the ones they upscaled and stretched to 16:9 by zooming in and erasing a third of the image. A bunch will be in German, even with trash guide filters, because German dub people don’t tag their releases in ways that play well with any of trash guides regex. Even if you adjust your regex to scan for it (German in title, basically) then you have the occasional issue if the episode name has the word German (plus other dubs that are labeled poorly)
And for any hbo tv show and many Netflix tv shows (tho nf is far less aggressive) you will often find a sea of dead postings where torrents are fine. Like a remux of the sopranos? Better hope it was posted very recently, like in the past few days, because hbo monitors usenet like crazy. Netflix does too but not as strictly. Dmcas everywhere.
It’s still worth having of course and I use it a lot. Like you said it’s my go to for western movies and certain western shows. Especially when they’re actively airing. But there’s a lot of scenarios where it sucks
Usenet is an excellent suggestion. I wish I wasn’t too poor for it. I miss the days when it was included in an ISPs internet connection.
It’s definitely easier than trying to break your way into the private tracker game. Trash guides is top tier useful stuff.
Usenet: you missed the window but Black Friday and Labor Day are in my experience the best time to sign up. I pay $35/yr unlimited.
Private tracker: it’s not as hard as you think
Get in red: either via invite (easy mode) or do their interview (not that difficult). Once you do you need to upload 25gb of stuff and have a (I think) 0.7 ratio (maybe 1.0?).
Easiest way is to rip songs from streaming sites: https://github.com/nathom/streamrip and upload. If you’re fast and get a hot album you can literally get it in like 2 days. Don’t bother with insanely popular albums like if charli xcx or Tyler the creator or whoever drops something. Old heads on the site will have that shit scripted and dropped so fast. Or browse requests with bounty and upload whatever.
Then you open up the invite forum. Then you ask for invites to wherever. Then you maintain ratio to not fuck over the person who invited you. Then you’re done, basically
In that case, do the exact same thing and ignore Usenet.
You can still automate everything and do everything I said with torrents!!
Btw, there are excellent Usenet discounts. I currently pay approx… 50ish dollars a year for both providers and indexers? But I understand it may not be feasible. Just sharing the options.
You can definitely still integrate the whole stack with both public and private trackers
I appreciate you writing all this out. I experimented with moving over to usenet around black Friday sales and I found it pretty difficult. I tried a few free trials for indexers and couldn’t get a popular movie to download and play. I eventually just torrented it, and that worked fine.
I’ll look into it again, a lot of people love it so its worth considering. Thanks again.
Open; iiii>!!<e