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).
Mostly Lemmy/Reddit/social circle recommendations
Download
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).
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).