Plex is the core component. It allows you to turn a personal collection of digital media into a Netflix-style streaming service available on any of your devices. The UI is very polished and many of the more modern features you'd expect are there as well (such as automatically queueing the next episode of a show). You can also invite friends and family to access your library. Plex provides all of the metadata about the media such as artwork and even subtitles so you don't have to manage that yourself.
The rest of the things mentioned in that post are for discovery/finding and downloading media automatically. Overseerr is for recommendations (? never used it), Radarr and Sonarr automatically get new movies and shows from public trackers and add them to your Plex server.
You can run Plex server on a variety of hardware depending on how many streams you need to support simultaneously.
Subtitles downloaded by Plex are vulnerable to “poisoning”. One set I downloaded was parroting conspiracy theories at the intro and when the credits rolled.
- You add the TV shows you want to track, and when new episodes are released (or when it detects you're missing episodes/seasons) it automatically pings the torrent search indexer/s you've connected to find the torrent for that show.
- The indexer then sends back the torrent magnet info to Sonarr, and Sonarr then sends that to the torrent client you've connected it to which starts the download.
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Radarr does the same thing as Sonarr, but with a focus on movies.
In terms of connecting torrent indexers to Sonarr + Radarr etc, you'd want to use either Prowlarr or Jackett to handle that.
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So a general flow could be
Sonarr (tracks show and requests new episode) =>
Prowlarr (searches torrents and finds the torrent magnet link) =>
Sonarr (takes torrent magnet link and requests the download to start) =>
qbittorrent (starts the download) =>
JellyFin (scans your media downloads and gives you a media center/streaming interface to watch your shows on your devices)
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Overseer is meant to combine the TV/Movie tracking with content discovery into one interface. This way, you can track your shows and find new ones, and it handles sending those requests over to Sonarr/Radarr.
- Sonarr/Radarr periodically scans the RSS feeds for all indexers you have configured and looks for episodes or movies you’re missing (or that can be upgraded).
- If it finds something you need, it grabs the item (magnet/torrent/nzb) and sends it to the appropriate download client. Note that you can configure multiple torrent or Usenet clients.
- Sonarr/Radarr monitors the download progress using the download client’s API.
- As soon as it completes, Sonarr/Radarr copies, moves, or hardlinks (best option for torrents) the file over to your library.
The key thing to note is that your *arr app is the central controller for the entire flow. The app will only stop looking at a particular media item once: a) the item cannot be upgraded any further, b) you have marked it as “unmonitored”, or c) you have removed the show or movie.
Because torrents have a very low bar to entry. I love piracy! But, I've tried a few times to get into the Usenet scene and I always get annoyed.
1. I have to pay for access to a usenet server. The entire point of piracy is that I'm not paying.
2. I need special, poorly documented, and practically undiscoverable tools to: access Usenet, download a file split over 2million posts, reassemble that file, extract the file from whatever esoteric compression algorithm the uploader decided was best that week.
3. I need to find a Usenet server that carries binaries, then, I need to find the individual groups that have the content I want.
On the other hand, thepiratebay has 99% of everything I want, and what it doesn't have I can usually find pretty quickly though Yandex or sharemania.
1. 10-15 dollars a month is not exorbitant and quite worth it with a media server.
2. sabnzbbd or nzgget are hardly poorly documented or undiscoverable.
3. you need to get an indexer which handles all those files over 2 million posts. the software in 2 will put them together for you with minimal effort.
i would recommend a premium indexer as they are quite cheap but there are free available.
i would also like to note that since you're not using a torrent you can't be done for distribution of copywritten material to the same scale as you can for a torrent.
The rest of the things mentioned in that post are for discovery/finding and downloading media automatically. Overseerr is for recommendations (? never used it), Radarr and Sonarr automatically get new movies and shows from public trackers and add them to your Plex server.
You can run Plex server on a variety of hardware depending on how many streams you need to support simultaneously.