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Comment by Jhsto | Hacker News Reader

Given some of the people here might run their own servers, the self-hosted alternative is to have something like Sonarr PVR for newsgroups and torrents, alongside a tracker indexer like Jackett, and then Plex for the frontend. In this combination, you "subscribe" to TV shows and select movies on the Sonarr system, and then the downloading is taken care for you even when new episodes arrive. These will then appear on Plex which is refreshed by the pipeline automatically. The system integrates with private trackers and is capable of maintaining your seed-ratio if that's important.

I recently fell into this rabbit-hole while trying to organise my music. For music there is Lidarr, which also ID3 tags your music and reorganizes it into folder structures. This is convenient since organizing anything using Plex is a nightmare.

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Am i the only one who finds the *arrs to be.. not great? Be it UI, UX, deployability (C# .NET required magic reverse engineered stuff like Mono to work on Linux/*BSD where most people would run them on, and IIRC none of them are on .NET Core yet), error handling. I once spent an afternoon trying to get Jackett go work on FreeNAS due to some library mismatches due to the magic sauce required to run Windows software on FreeBSD. It baffles me 1) that software stack was chosen in the first place 2) it was reused for all other *arrs 3) it still remains in use today 4) there are no alternative tools using a saner tech stack. Not to mention the fact that I don't see the point in having different *arrs for music, films, series, when the functionality is 90% the same and it could just be different toggable tabs... I was so pissed i hesitated trying to rewrite all of it in Django or something.

The docker containers have been maintenance free for me and run great on intel and apple cpu.

They run great on arm, too! I got a raspi 4 running everything smooth as butter. The most problematic aspect is interfacing with the usb drives; I eventually had to move them to a powered hub to get the required current.

there's sickbeard, sickrage, couchpotato, and many others that have existed as long as Sonarr if not longer.

I've personally had no issues with the *arr's though, running on both Windows and Linux

It would be nice to have popcorn time itself allow the server URL to be edited, so you can either use public servers or your own private one.

I don't really see why the same code can't be used for both - it seems such a waste of effort to rebuild everything twice for the only slightly different usecases.

> It would be nice to have popcorn time itself allow the server URL to be edited

You can edit it. The option is in the settings.

I don't see it...

Check out Prowlarr, it's much nicer and more feature-complete than Jackett.

+1 for prowlarr. Used to run jackett but I much prefer the automatic updating of *rr services when I change my indexer settings in prowlarr. Currently running prowlarr with sonarr, radarr, lidarr, bazarr (for subtitle fetching) all from a single docker-compose file, no complaints.

I have exactly this setup except I also run Radarr for movies. And instead of using torrents I subscribe to a Usenet provider, with nzbget/nzbhydra2 handling all of it. I had a lot of failed downloads using torrents, almost zero over the years since switching to Usenet.

A free and open source alternative to Plex is Jellyfin, a Fork of Emby before it went closed-source.

I have been using it for years, and I'm pretty pleased with it.

With regards to your music library, how do you listen to your music on the go? I tried the self-hosted setup maybe 8 years ago and couldn't find a reliable way to stream to an iOS device. Is that something you've looked into?

I recently setup Navidrome (https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome) for listening to my music collection, and it’s pretty good. Kodi/Plex work, but their apps are really built for the video use case, music is different enough that I like having the specialized tool.

Navidrome supports the Subsonic API, so there are a number of native clients compatible with it. I chose Substreamer on iOS. It’s not free, but it’s a one-time cost that doesn’t try and drag you into any subscriptions or anything. There are free alternatives like iSub, but I found their UI lacking & decided Substreamer was worth the few bucks.

MPD plus MAFA works well with android and it has an IOS version. Personally I only use it around the house but it ought to work fine if you forward the port. Even though phone storage is ridiculously cheap now it is kind of nice not to worry about keeping it in sync in terms of both music and playlists and seamlessly switch from local playback to streaming.

I use Plex. There is a music focused player called Plexamp which I use on iOS. This allows also offline downloads. IIRC you need the Plex Pro subscription, but that's around $100 one-off payment.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plexamp/id1500797510

I use the android version and it is great.

Plex does music for free, and offline downloads are available if you get Plex Pass (and the lifetime plan is an incredible value)

I use vopono to run (only) Jackett through a VPN connection too.

It feels great when it all works together.

On my NAS I run a Mullvad/WireGuard container with a kill switch, and Jackett, qBittorrent, etc. share its network stack. Being able to do so with a single Docker Compose option (`network_mode: container:vpn`) is a killer feature.

So I download everything I can't legally access here, and don't have to worry about my IP leaking. Then on my TV I open Kodi and enjoy.

Cheaper than Netflix+Prime+Hulu+Disney+Apple+HBO and pretty low maintenance.

I'd love a writeup or a guide.

Best I can do is share my Compose files :)

https://gist.github.com/1player/dbdafdd197e1623f5831108fc0cc...

It's pretty simple overall: gluetun is the VPN container, qBittorrent runs inside of it and downloads torrents, Jackett is a torrent search aggregator, Sonarr&Radarr use Jackett+qBittorrent to download movies and TV shows when they release, Bazarr adds subtitles after the fact.

Everything goes into a media directory, which my NAS shares via SMB. Only effort required is paying my VPN subscription and updating the Docker images once in a while.

Thank you! Will definitely look into your stuff. Much appreciated.

Which line has the Killswitch?

Gluetun has an integrated killswitch: https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun

I used to use https://github.com/dperson/openvpn-client which has a killswitch option as well.

By kill-switch I mean iptables rules that don't let anything out if there's no VPN interface up. So you don't run the risk of leaking torrent stuff through your plain-text connection if the VPN goes down.

Organizing with Plex is a nightmare? I beg to differ. Plex is awesome.

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