I'm an old pirate — been at it since 1982.
I got my start swapping Commodore 64 games on 5-inch floppy disks, all done in person, twelve years before the internet showed up in our lives. Then came the golden age of MP3s and iPods. Back then, we’d physically exchange hard drives. You’d fill up a 40MB or 60MB drive with music, post an ad on eBay listing the artists and tracks, and wait for someone to message you before the post got taken down (usually within hours). Then you'd mail the drives back and forth. Music sharing, pirate-style. No social networks, no torrents and still I managed to build a collection of over 400,000 songs. Those were fun days.
About 20 years ago, I shifted to TV and movies. I was streaming in awful resolution long before it was mainstream. Now I’m downloading HD torrents and watching on a Windows PC hooked up to a big screen.
I just joined this subreddit and I keep seeing things like Radarr, Sonarr, and other automation tools. Clearly, the pirate fleet has upgraded its ships and I think it’s time I upgrade mine too.
So, help an old pirate out. What tools, setups, and best practices should I adopt to bring my operation into the modern age?
Full on self hosted media server. Jellyfin, prowlarr, radarr, sonarr for starters. You can run it on some old hardware, laptop, desktop...or something small like a raspberry pi, or spring for something serious like a NAS. Hook up some big beefy HDD's for media storage, external drives work in a pinch.
Then you can stream all your media...to your tv without having a pc hooked up in your living room, or to your phone while you are out and about, travelling or at work.
Thanks so mmuch
For movies and tv I’d just look at Stremio. It’s way easier than setting up a full on system.
Honestly, Jellyfin or Emby are great. As long as you have your machine on a same network as your TV and you added your movies and shows to them you will be able to watch them like on Netflix.
Plex sucks now btw.
For finding and downloading stuff just get qbittorrent, enable search, and pair it up with Jackett. Then use built in search to look up stuff you want. Browsing torrent sites is now dangerous in itself (not all of them and YMMV)and this is much safer and quicker.
Sign up for a good BBS and get to know the sysop.
Old good times. I wish you a feet of water under the keel
Many interesting answers so far, most seem over engineered for what you might be looking for, especially the "automatic downloads".
I have 5 (3) steps (pirating since 1982):
(optional) Get NAS for Storage (if you want to access the files from multiple devices)
Install Kodi on all the viewing devices (mobile phone, tablet, smart tv, xbox etc)
(optional) get a VPN (where I live I could get in trouble for torrenting)
Install qbittorrent
go to the most recent torrent site and just click "download" (ext.to for example.)
hello oldman ;)
One thing we didn't worry in the old times was DMCA and angry letters from ISPs, so if u're planning to download the latest movie/music you might want to invest in a VPN.
Also useful for having the option to "change" your location.
stay safe and have fun.
Quick reminder: the beloved https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/
+1 on a vpn. I would like to add to this that when looking for a vpn to try and find one with the option to port forward, so you are more connectable and can achieve faster down/upload speeds.
Def add Overseerr to your setup
I use a VPN on my bittorent client only. As it's the only one that is going to get flagged by the ISP.
My setup consists of a small PC with an 8 core i7, 128gb ram, dual 10gb Ethernet, LSI RAID controller, 8 18TB HDDs, and 2 1TB SSDs. OMV installed on the SSDs. Docker installed in OMV Jellyfin, Jellyseer, Radar, Sonarr, Readarr, Lidarr, and Prowlarr containers in a stack in Docker QbittorrentVPN container in its own stack
I just hit Jellyseer whenever I want to add something to the media collection, and let the rest of the system do what it do.
For PC: get qbitorrent and Jdownloader2. VPN too if you have a hardass govt. Get mulvad VPN or something similar after seeing what's in your budget, and bind to your browser.
You can get the sites from our wonderful megathread here.
Debrid
Why bother with downloading and storing movies and tv shows? When you can stream the same or better quality?
But a Ugreen DXP4800 Plus and a ram upgrade plus four big hard drives (as big as you can afford). Install TrueNAS on it, and on TrueNAS deploy docker container apps for all the Servarr suite apps. Follow the TrAsH guides for how to configure the apps. Read up on Usenet and spend a few bucks on tracker subscriptions and avoid torrents and all that jeopardy entirely. Administer it from a browser and it’ll all work automatically.
Find a media server, Plex/Emby/Jellyfin are the 3 big ones, plex is the biggest and most widely used, but their business model is kinda shitty, Emby is the second biggest and a much better model, Jellyfin is open-source and completely free but more of a pain to set up remote streaming if you plan to share your server or watch away from your LAN.
The Arr stack - Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Readarr, Prowlarr, Huntarr. (The 3 big ones are Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr)
These are the workhorses for your server, they monitor RSS feeds of indexers that you supply (through Prowlarr) and will fetch movies (Radarr) and TV Series (Sonarr) automatically for you, send them to your download client (Qbittorrent) and organize them with proper file structure and naming scheme to be read by your media server (Plex/Emby/Jellyfin) All done automatically, you just search for the movie/show in the applicable app and it does the rest based on your custom formats and quality settings that you set up.
Ombi/Overseerr/Jellyseerr - This is a request function that is mostly used for people who share their server with others people (friends/family/etc) But does have its uses for a solo server, it essentially lets you browse a Netflix-like UI for movies and TV shows to send to the applicable arr suite with a click of a button. You can also add things that aren't even out yet and as soon as your arr stack finds a release of it, it will automatically be grabbed and uploaded to your server.
As for hardware you need.
PC - Doesn't have to be a PC but depends on your server load, I use a Beelink S12 Pro mini-pc, was like $150 and I have zero issues running everything with 10-15x concurrent streams.
NAS or DAS - Both are essentially the same thing, but this is where your storage is kept (Note you don't NEED one but if you want a large server (think 40tb+) it will be very nice to have, it's basically an external harddrive that let's you plug in several internal hdds to expand storage. Look into both of them and decide which one works for your needs.
HDD's - Self explanatory, you need storage to store your content, how much? Depends how much you want to store, if you plan to delete stuff after you watch etc. If it's a solo thing and you're going to delete and curate after you watch something, something simple like a 4 or 5tb external hdd will be fine for you (in this case skip #2)
Network - You'll need a good-ish network connection with reasonable upload (depending on the bitrate of content you plan to have) Or if you plan to share your server with others. Since all streaming goes through your network you need to have a good enough connection to handle it all.
I'm sure there's more stuff im forgetting about, but this is the gist of it, it's relatively easy to get setup, just takes a bit of work, there are things you can configure on your server PC to automate reboots and power cycles for power outages too in order to really make it hands off but kinda depends on your use case for it.
One of the best and most succinct explanations I’ve seen.
Interesting! But, why not just have a NAS, install Kodi on everything and use the most current torrent site to get your stuff? (am pirate since 1984, C64 times).
Kodi is just another client you could use it instead of Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, I have no experience with it so I'm unsure on how it handles media, but if I understand it correctly it would pull data from your NAS and package it nicely for you on the screen without actually running on a server PC, which means you have nowhere to run your arr stack unless you're planning on running it on your regular desktop.
Ultimately it depends on your use-case, for me with my Emby server having over 30 users that use it regularly, having a fully automated setup was basically a must, I would get 40-50 requests a day of movies or shows to add to the server, now my users can add it all themself and I don't have to lift a finger.
If it's only you using the server for LAN streaming then you could definitely do something barebones like that and get away with it
I'm willing to learn, googling "arr" doesn't get me the results I want, could you point me in the right direction?
Regarding Kodi: it does not need a server backend, it's just a nifty Media Player that accesses the Media Files via SMB and gets TV Show / Movie Information from thetvdb and presents it in a pleasant way.
Trash guides
*arrs
This is the way
Personally I use Jackett over Prowlarr (though I don't know much about Prowlarr), and I think Jellyfin gets more of a bad rap because a lot of people don't know networking, and because it used to have a lot more problems a few years ago. If you're comfortable putting up your own website with your own stack, then Jellyfin is pretty simple. If you want a simpler, more all-in-one solution, then I get wanting to use something else.
Imo all this isn’t worth it compared to the service offered by stremio + debrid service
Thanks