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Comment by lugged | Hacker News Reader

We already cut Netflix from our budget. Torrenting is faster and easier than dealing with Netflix's shitty interface that keeps trying to serve up old shows I've already seen or clearly don't want to see.

The amount of stuff I want to watch and isn't on Netflix is very large too, probably about half or more of what I watch is not available on Netflix here but is elsewhere in the world.

All that tells me is Netflix is part of the mafiaa.

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The inflection point for Netflix's utility was when they removed the star ratings. It went from being an industry leader in catalog surfing to being one of the worst, seemingly overnight. They'd later make it difficult to narrow by genre, and similar catalog-hiding changes.

It was a shame. I found that I enjoyed interesting combinations like "Campy Science Fiction with a rating between 2 and 4". Now Netflix seems transfixed on shoving shitty daytime dating shows down my throat.

Interestingly, the old Apple TVs still have the star system so you can still tell if a show is any good or not.

What's your stack for this? Do you use plex? I'm thinking about making the jump.

Plex is ok but feels like it's trying to meet Plex's need for revenue moreso than providing software people want. But for better or worse they're the 1,000 lb gorilla in the space.

The real game changer is getting a reliable sonarr&radarr set up going

Not the parent poster, but I'm running a stack of Sonarr (series crawler) + Radarr (movie crawler) + Lidarr (music crawler), + Bazarr (subtitle crawler) + some torrent client (Deluge) + Jellyfin (you could also use Plex, but Jellyfin doesn't ask for money) + Jackett (indexer) + a VPN. I've also configured a Telegram bot to send me updates about download progress. You add the content you want to *arr, those programs query your indexer(s) for sources, and pass them on to your download client(s). Downloaded files are automatically moved to the right place with a useful folder structure so that media servers (Plex, Emby, Jellyfin) can pick them up. Non-torrent sources for *arr (newsgroups etc.) are also available, but I haven't tried them.

There are various pre-designed docker-compose scripts available online [0] that basically allow you to create such a setup by simply entering your VPN username and password and specifying a storage path. If you have any experience with Docker, they're dead easy to set up and they work flawlessly.

In my experience, Netflix honestly works better and streams more reliably than Plex or any other self-hosted alternative. The Jellyfin project has been making progress, but your mileage may vary.

[0]: https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box

Piggybacking on a reply to this comment, if you want to go an alternative (or additive) route of Usenet you can look to add NZBGet (or SABnzbd) with NZBHydra to manage Usenet downloading and indexer search respectively.

In respect to this my setup for this (on Docker) looks like: radarr, sonarr, nzbget and nzbhydra. I serve my media using Plex (there are a lot of great alternatives to Plex out there also but I'm still very happy with Plex even as a non-paid user).

Not the person you're asking, but I run the same thing. Here's my setup:

Plex/Jellyfin for watching content.

Sonarr(TV)/Radarr(Movies)/Lidarr(Music)/Readarr(Audio/Books) - For searching/organizing/starting downloads, monitoring for new releases and so on

nzbget/qbittorrent - for doing the actual downloads

prowlarr - to handle various indexers/search providers between *arr apps and downloaders

overseerr - to make everything foolproof for people who are not tech savvy. They can see what's downloaded, and request new stuff and they get an email once its been downloaded.

On top of that I have watchtower which does automatic updates, as everything is running as docker containers.

Honestly it seems like complicated setup, but it's really not, and once set up it runs without any issues. I've had this for a few years now, and there's been maaaybe a handful of times where I needed to fix something.

Fedora on an old gaming machine in the lounge and a wireless kb/mouse.

I've messed around with Plex but honestly find using a computer easier. Watch a lot of YouTube too but almost prefer the tv app for that.

Gigabit internet helps, everything is watchable almost instantly.

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