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Comment by codegrappler | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s also helpful to point out that the pirating interfaces have gotten _really_ good. Using Overseer, Radaar, and Sonaar together with Plex created such a seamless experience I was blown away the first time I saw it. Any movie or show across any service at the push of a button. It doesn’t even feel like pirating. It feels like any other service.

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there is also real debrid -> don't even have to store any content locally just stream

Could you please high-level describe how you use all these together?

What hardware are you using for this? Would a raspberry pi connected to the TV work?

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.

So it's like the FBI warning not to copy DVDs?

In general, it’s better to run Bazarr for subtitles.

Just a small note: any media server is the core component. Plex is one popular option, but Emby and Jellyfin (open source) are viable options too.

Overseerr/Jellyseerr is for automatically handling requests. This is only useful if you share access to your server with family or friends.

Sonaar:

- 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.

https://wiki.servarr.com/

Some more details on how the flow works:

- 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.

Why do you torrent instead of using Usenet?

That's just my personal preference, but this whole setup can be done with Usenet too.

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.

you can find many examples like this and also tutorials, using last decades search engines

https://gist.github.com/Webreaper/81ecda3ecc45fa61a16dfc90cf...

The interfaces are great but the setup process is still far beyond “plug and play” so the mainstream pirate probably still do it the cumbersome but simple way

I think the clunkyness of getting into torrenting media is a necessary evil to keep it from getting cracked down on. It's like antibiotics: the more people use them, the less effective they become.

That's not a great metaphor since they become technically more effective since p2p performance improves as the network grows assuming a minimum seed/leech ratio

Syncler is pretty plug and play, just need to enter your subscription code ($2/month) and your torrent streaming service (realdebris/premiumize, $5/month)

It really isn't that bad either, though.

The key part is that after I spent a couple of days getting the servers stood up, my tech illiterate husband can just go to this website, search for a movie, and it pops up in his jellyfin app after an hour or so.

I have a fairly complex system. I have a VM that tunnels traffic between my local network and my VPN. A second VM hosts all my radarr and torrent servers, which only has network access through the router VM. Files get stored on a shared zvol and jellyfin just automatically detects the new files.

The hardest part was the VPN routing. Setting up all the servarrs is basically plug and play. You run the installer script and then copy a key into all the instances you want talking to each other. It really couldn't get much simpler.

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