The first, is a 'searcher'. Here, that is sonarr (for finding TV series) and radarr (for finding movies). There are some alternatives. Most notably couchpotato for movies. You simply tell these programs what you want to see, and they look through torrents and newsgroups to find that content.
Next, you need a downloader (or 2 if you use both torrents and newsgroups). For this, it is important that your 'searchers' can talk to the downloader, so things happen automatically. Basically anything should work here.
Finally, and optionally, there is a viewer. Plex is the biggest here. It allows you to view your media anywhere with an internet connection, it also tracks your library, and what you've watched. You can set up your searchers to export all downloaded files to plex.
For starters, I'd set up a simple searcher-downloader system, and build up from there.
Then once you have Sonarr and/or Radarr setup for TV/Movies you can use something like Ombi to allow family/friends to request content and have it automatically downloaded and added to Plex.
The gleeful attitude many have to pirating makes me sad. I've downloaded shows too, but whenever possible I use legal methods to watch. I believe it is content worth paying for, and if a show disappears from Netflix it's probably available somewhere else. It's at least worth checking before you go to your friend for Plex access.
He has a 42" tv and from 12 feet away he finds it quite difficult to notice any difference with HD. Maybe he's alone in this?
Fortunately, I don't get too much from say 1080p over 720p, and hevc at 1080p seems to do very well, even at the lower quality (relatively) settings... so I'm getting 1080p content saved at file sizes sometimes half 720p avc.
In any case, I still pay for netflix/amazon, just got an NVidia Shield TV and love it so far (though had considered DirectTV Now, but they don't support Android TV for no reason). I cut the cord a while ago, and other than the Superbowl (next year just going to a bar), haven't missed it.
May setup Plex eventually as well, for now, kodi over the lan works great.
Encoding speed? Does it really save that much space?
Holy crap. Is that using Pied Piper compression or something?
One of the first things I noticed when first seeing DirectTV and DVD quality, for example was the pixelation of things, usually in the background... to this day it sometimes distracts me... that alone is about enough for me.
The way regions are selected for compression is also better, but I'm not into the technical details enough to explain well... all I know is I can get about 5/3 to 5/2 more content in HEVC while at an equivalent or better quality. So yeah, it's a big deal...
So 2500 movies per year time 100 years time 4 GB per movie is 1 million GB, 1000 TB or 1 Petabyte.
And that's just movies. If you also want TV shows, it's probably going to be several times that (though until recently, they were produced at lower resolution).
Still 125 TB is a lot.
I often think our resource usage as a species is insane. In an age when you can download anything in minutes at any time of the day we (well, some of us) fill terabytes of hard drive space with endless duplicates of movies and tv shows we'll probably never watch, albums we'll never listen to and more recently books we'll never read. And that's just digital, don't get me started on raw materials
I guess I missed this story. You can no longer access Netflix via a VPN? I would be curious to know how they are detecting this. Does this mean you can not access your Netflix content when you take a trip abroad?
This is a pretty crappy situation and I guess you can vote with your wallet.
I am surprised that Netflix which increasingly relies on their own content would feel the need to placate this Hollywood greed?
I'm also curious what heuristic they are using to decide if I am on a VPN?
EDIT:
From: https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-vpn-crackdown-a-year-of-fru...
>"It is still unclear how Netflix’s IP-blacklisting works. A few providers have noticed that some of their IP-ranges were already banned before they were active, suggesting that Netflix automatically flags IPs from certain organizations"
And that's on top of the pathetic selection when you're trying to be honest with them and not fake your country. Screw that.
I imagine the number of people that care about rooting their phone is small enough that it doesn't really matter to their revenue.
I prefer watching Netflix on my TV rather than a tiny phone screen, but if I did want to watch it on mobile, I'm a bit worried how they might treat my Fairphone.
I believe they are not specifically going after the nerds. They need such heavy protection only because otherwise some nerds will make circumvention tools which the average person will then use.
You can't expect to be able to collect a 9+ figures from a random individual
Could have fooled me.
Nor do I, but the app was useful for sending the video to chromecast.
That said, I find chromecast painful and restrictive in terms of streaming content from other regions using VPN. Chromecast is very uptight and locked down to your native location. I stopped using Chromecast for that reason after not finding a workaround. When I was only watching my region's content (Australia) the Netflix app was useful. Unfortunately, Australia's Netflix content library was too weak, so I needed other regions to make it worthwhile.
With a decent router you could configure it to connect to the VPN of your choice and then route requests from your Chromecast's IP over it. The Chromecast would probably not know the difference, and you can also route anything else over whatever VPNs you like.