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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with Popcorn Time is that it doesn't run on my TV. I use a cloud server instead and Radarr/Sonarr combined with Real-Debrid(to download torrents) and Usenet to download content. I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.

This allows me to run Plex/Jellyfin on my TV and stream. Bonus points is that it even works on my mobile phone when I'm on the move!

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> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes

You do not have all movies >6 with a bunch of votes on just 16TB, unless the cutoff is like 100k+ votes and you're downloading 1080p max. I have a 73TB server at 99% capacity right now and I hardly have a movie library.

1080p is the way to go IMO

Depending on your tv/monitor. For example, 4K is clearly more enjoyable on my 40 inch ultra wide monitor with good color gamut. And good quality 4K, not something ultra compressed.

Lets say you want the IMDB top 500, most of those will not have a scan that is better in 4k than 1080 or even normal DVD (480p). The ones that do (like 4k77) are probably highly specialized.

What is the highest res 2001, godfather, solaris, alien rip that you can get?

3 out of the 4 films you mentioned have 4K Blu-ray releases

That doesn't mean they have a scan that benefits from 4K.

That also doesn’t mean they haven’t have a scan that benefits from 4K, but it’s a rather an indication that they benefit than otherwise.

I get TV shows in 720p and movies in 1080p. On my 75 inch TV, it's hardly noticeable unless I do a quick switch back and forth between a 4k and 1080 source of the same movie.

That's the thing. I can totally tell the difference between 1080 and 4K. But not once have I been watching a 1080 blu-ray and thought it would look better in 4K.

Most TVs have a ton of filter on any movies which you want to watch on them. You basically won’t enjoy anything how it was intended. I specified monitor and good color gamut for a reason.

I willingly avoid 4k media and 4k tvs. 1080p is fine, if the movie suck the additional pixels won’t make it any better anyway.

And 1080p os faster at everything: downloading, playing, streaming…

It’s exactly 30 seconds to start to play anything nowadays. Popcorn Time’s one main feature is to make it unnecessary to wait, but nowadays you can do this with anything basically.

That's kind of what I'm thinking, after getting my 4k HDR TV I was blown away by the filesizes needed to make full use of it.

Just the most popular stuff and limited to 1080p or less though... Yeah 16Tb is pushing it.

Instead of telling someone they're wrong you could just assume they mean 1080p. If we're talking 1080p encodes you can totally do it in that size. If you're using 73TB for barely a collection you're just wasting space.

>50GB/movie remuxes do look great though. I wouldn't say a waste of space. Storage is cheap anyway and getting big bitrates is also satisfying. This seems like the FLAC vs 320kbps "debate" where people claim to not see any difference, except with movies it's a much more noticeable gap between average and top quality.

Also the compact versions rarely have enough channels and bitrate for a good speaker setup.

Is it? If the guy has 73TB of storage let's say it's 6x 16TB disks (one redundant). Looking at Seagate IronWolf NAS disks that would cost over 2k. I guess you could get cheaper disks, but I still wouldn't call this cheap. This doesn't include the hardware to run it and power to keep it online.

Yep, most of the movies are 1080p h265. I run ffmpeg scripts to auto convert h264 to hevc and generate smaller files.

I do have 4K rips for movies I like and new movies, but by default download 1080p hevc only. I stay away from remuxes

I use https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay for this purpose.

the advantage of that is that it's all on-demand. no need to set up sonarr/radarr. Just set up a bunch of trackers to search from and pick from them on demand.

Radar and Sonarr here with Overseerr as an UI for my wife. Bazarr for subs, jackett as a client for torrent sites, unpackerr for unpacking zips. Good old Transmission as download client.

It's a shame unpackerr is needed. BitTorrent works better on large uncompressed files.

Interesting, why is that?

- Smaller torrent filesize

- Clients prevent forcing priority if there's only one file

- Checksum checking is built in

- Less work per client [0]

- Redundant decompression required by everyone that grabs the file

[0] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/everybody-loves-bittorrent/

What does the torrent treat a compressed uncompressed file differently? I would have imagined the torrent framework would be agnostic to the actual file encoding.

To clarify it works better with big files vs small files. Compression has no impact.

Is that just efficiency (per byte, etc) or would the network actually work better (faster real downloads for larger files vs smaller)? I’m imagining there’s some tradeoff at some point.

From what I've read the swarm works better on one large file vs many smaller ones. I am verbatim passing along what I've read and have no data to substantiate that claim. Hopefully someone that has a better understanding of the protocol and client implementations can weigh in.

I suppose Usenet is still in use and distributors can use the same release regardless of medium.

Why do you need a special program to unpack rars? I just use qbittorrent and put this command in the "run external program on torrent finished" box: 7z x "%F/*.rar" -o"%F/"

Unpackerr integrates with Radarr and Sonarr and can handle various archive types, retries, split archives, etc.

And how many of these movies have you actually watched? This just sounds like a text book case of digital hoarding. Most people I know that torrent do it on a distinct interest in watching vs might possibly some day maybe want to watch it so let's just get it ahead of time.

I'm not judging, just noting that it's a definite new "use case" to me

I‘ve recently heard the term „data prepper“, which I think nails it. I‘d probably qualify as one myself.

Sounds like a disease which would require some form of therapy. I couldn't imagine the sickness that would entice one to download and store/reseed content that I had no intention of ever watching like Kardashians or Twighlight or whatever content just because. I hope you get the help you need!

What happened to not judging from 30 minutes ago? Now you're saying it requires therapy.

I'm not going to go out and collect in this manner, but I have ended up with a rather sizable collection of discs I might watch someday. I had pretty much stopped buying discs because streaming was easier and I can mostly ignore the difference in quality; but I've been bitten by too many things becoming unavailable... if the discs are cheap, I'm going to get them and maybe one day watch them.

> What happened to not judging from 30 minutes ago? Now you're saying it requires therapy.

because it's not the same person, and the person i replied to sounded much more comedic by using an air quotes term, so i followed suit.

> if the discs are cheap,

but you're not collecting discs. you're collecting files. if you were collecting discs, it would be even more of a hoarding situation.

also, I can have the opinion that something needs therapy without judgement.

There has been dozens of times I heard about some classic and wanted to watch it. When I look it up on <streaming service> it is not available. If it's an old movie it can be hard to find a good torrent for it. Having an extensive local library of movies of general interest sounds nice, especially going forward when content will disappear and become more fractured between paid services.

No need to reseed when you just hoard Linux ISOs.

yeah, cuz that's exactly what people are using Popcorn Time 0.5.0 to do <facepalm>

I think it's a joke, "Linux ISOs" is a known euphemism for movies/porn/etc on /r/datahoarders.

16TB is a single hard drive these days. It's easier to grab everything at that point instead of picking through, and having everything gives you a nice easy claim you can make.

16TB on a single drive is just asking for more faith in the tech than I can muster.

You can split it into two drives at about the same price. Or add a backup drive to minimize the risk.

Though I would say that thinking you need a certain amount of data safety is more of an unhealthy thought pattern than saying "sure, give me all the movies for my $250 drive".

> Though I would say that thinking you need a certain amount of data safety is more of an unhealthy thought pattern

WTF is that? anybody that doesn't think about data safety deserves having their data lost. and if you come back with "just download it again" just proves why you don't need to have it downloaded locally to start

> deserves having their data lost

That is toxic. That toxicity is worse than "wasting" a single drive.

> and if you come back with "just download it again" just proves why you don't need to have it downloaded locally to start

How about "you can get most of it back, and it's okay to have a collection that's at risk of partial loss (good luck making any physical collection immune to loss)"

You're trading off the time to get things back and the percent you can get back for the cost of [redundant] backups.

> need to have it downloaded locally

Nobody suggested it needs to be downloaded. Do you only have data that you need to have?

I wouldn't do it for myself but I live in a big household with kids.

I expect many other "hoarders" are in a situation where what they are actually trying to do is provide a good discovery experience for others where it is not entirely clear what they would want.

You can use overseer/jellyseer and they are great but not as nice as just picking something from media browser.

DataHoarder is a very active reddit community devoted to this “hobby”

Edit: moved response to correct/intended comment

I’m not about to do this myself, but I can totally see why someone would. With the way some movies just fall off of streaming services and even rental services and just become unfindable, I’m glad there are people out there keeping independent collections.

It’s quite amazing how much you can do with a working self-hosted setup and a decent amount of storage. The open source community around self-hosted services is stronger than ever.

A few of my favorite lesser known self-hosted projects are Audiobookshelf, Komga (comic/manga reader), and Kavita (ebook/comic/manga reader).

I have a similar setup (32TB NAS + Jellyfin). I use three different Radarr instances (1080p/4k/Anime). Every movie that I've liked on LetterBoxd gets downloaded automatically in 1080p / 4k (1080p for streaming outside my home). Jellyseer allows me to give access to friends and they're able to request stuff easily that's not on streaming. I also use Infuse on AppleTV which has support for Dolby Atmos / Dolby Vision. Absolutely amazing once you get it setup, I've been slowly rebuilding my blu-ray collection digitally too.

Stremio with Torrentio plugin functions exactly the same as Popcorn Time and runs on TVs

Real Debrid is worth the price if you want a better experience.

> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.

That seems like a lot of movies. How many of those 16TB are used by all movies with IMBD rating > 6 ?

Depending on the quality of the media.

The highest bitrate of 4k Bluray Remux movie in my library is ~90Mbps which translates to 50GiB~80GiB per movie.

> The highest bitrate of 4k Bluray Remux movie in my library is ~90Mbps which translates to 50GiB~80GiB per movie.

I feel like my sub USD 500 television is not worthy of such high quality.

~90Mbps? That's super high. Admittedly, I haven't been in the shiny round disc game for more than a decade and a half, so maybe they bumped up the bitrate for 4K content??? According to Sony[0], up to 100Mbps is supported. This is just way higher than anything I had ever played with, and find it difficult to think that HEVC would even need that bitrate. Seems like the same logic in using gold Monster cables makes the audio sound better when using such a high video bitrate.

[0]https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00190648

Here's an example: https://www.1377x.to/torrent/5969105/Trainspotting-1996-Crit...

I'm not saying I have this in my library FWIW.

4K UHD remuxes are basically straight rips of the source Bluray, hence the high bitrate and file size.

There are even hybrid remux releases where multiple sources (e.g., WEB and Bluray) are fused together to get the absolute highest quality possible.

you use real-debrid and plex and not plex-debrid? https://github.com/itsToggle/plex_debrid

Downloading movies is for the stone age!.

Plex shares are harder to find now but on Discord you can find servers with 100s of TB of movies and TV show to stream straight from your devices with no work and just a small monthly payment

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