I’ve always liked the idea of having a media server. I had seen quite a few threads about it on Reddit.
One day - I was sitting on the couch with my oldest daughter and she wanted to watch something on Disney+. Cool, so I gave her the remote and let her choose what she wanted. That’s when I noticed the 2.5 minute long ad slot.
My first thought was - Disney+ has ads now?! Second thought, absolutely not.
Let’s be honest here. The concepts I’m going to talk about in this post walk a fine line. Torrenting isn’t illegal, but downloading copyrighted content is. Make sure you take the appropriate steps.
That night I started setup on my server. It “worked” that night, but took me about a week of tinkering to get everything working together. In total, there are 6 different softwares that have to talk to each other. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it.
So, what’s my setup like?
Plex
Let’s start with how we access our media. I was split between Plex and Jellyfin when reading about setup, but ended up going with Plex. I installed it on my Windows machine and was up and running in no time. I created Movies and TV Shows categories and pointed them to the folders that would hold that media.
For the most part - Plex has been great. However, they did recently update their pricing model to be a little more.. aggressive. For example, they introduced a “Remote Watch Pass” which would be required of someone watching media from a Plex server that doesn’t have a Plex Pass.
That being said - I have a Plex Pass. I paid for the lifetime plan before they bumped up the price. I felt that Plex had been worth it to me, so I went ahead and paid for it.
Audiobooks
I wanted to note this real quick - I recently got into having my own media for audiobooks as well. I use Plex for this as well, but it’s not very good at it. Like, at all. It basically treats them as a music album, which isn’t ideal. There’s a fantastic guide by seanap on Github that walks you through how to set things up.
I’ve seen many great things from Prologue - so I’ll probably check that out soon.
Jackett, Sonarr and Radarr
These three softwares do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Jackett is an indexer. It’s job is to acts as the go between for Radarr/Sonarr and the torrent sites. In Jackett, I set what sites I want to use. Whenever Radarr or Sonarr are searching for something, they will send that information to Jackett who then searches those sites.
Radarr and Sonarr keep track of the media. Raddarr for movies, Sonarr for TV shows. They manage the media and also let me search for new stuff. If I find something that I want, I can add it and it’ll kick off the search/download process.
Bazarr
I wanted to mention Bazarr, though I haven’t implemented it yet. Bazarr works with Radarr and Sonarr to download subtitles. I don’t know about you, but I love subtitles because I’m deaf as hell. Plex has a built in way to do this, but I’d like for it to be automated.
Transmission and Proton VPN
Transmission is my download client, and Proton VPN is my.. you guessed it, VPN. After Radarr/Sonarr and Jackett do their thing, they send the torrent file to Transmission to download it. Transmission integrates with Proton VPN to make sure that every download is secure through the VPN tunnel.
Seeding
I currently have a 3:1 ratio set up in Transmission for seeding. Meaning, I’ll seed to others 3 times the amount that I downloaded. During the day I have upload capped so it doesn’t interfere with whatever I’m doing on my PC. At night, I let it loose to upload as much as it wants.
Some people have some permanent seedboxes; I just don’t have the means to do that at the moment. Maybe in the future?
There it is
That’s all I got. I did this quite a while ago and it’s been great. There have been some hiccups - like trying to find a good torrent for older content; however, for the most part it’s been amazing. I had it set up for about a week before I bought a 11 TB hard drive to store everything on.
It’s also super addicting to watch things pop into Transmission and download.
Also
Do you guys ever just sit and think about all the cool, open source shit there is out there and how they talk to each other? Like.. it’s amazing. The work that goes into these softwares.. it’s SO COOL!
Thanks for reading!