I have been torrenting the same primitive way for a long time. Turn on a VPN, open up a browser I only use for this purpose, go to tpb or yts, grab my movie, and shut it all down when the movies over.

I've only updated my torrent client in this time, the method has not evolved.

Now im interested in self hosting jellyfin with an arr stack, with the end goal being to share it with friends and family outside my lan. I'd like to use docker containers so its all containerized, and of course keep it safe and secure.

What kind of set up, from hardware to software, would you recommend to get this going? Any guides in particular? I'm especially iffy on allowing remote access for non-tech savvy family (like a roku app), so any tips/guide recs for that would be helpful.

I've been searching around some and I've found a lot of resources but I'd like to get the opinions of people in here before diving in.

I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I'm wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)

Tldr: Suggestions or guides for beginner setting up jellyfin/arr/ remote access for family?

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[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Usenet is good for some things, torrents are still king for others

Like if I want a specific release of a movie in a certain quality, like a dv remux then I might pop on blu or ptp. 90% of the time I’ll just grab a dv/hdr10 remux on usenet though

Anime is all about trackers, ab/baka/nyaa destroy usenet. Animetosho makes usenet passable but still destroyed by the first three

Music is the same. If I want some basic mainstream release in scene quality then sure usenet is fine. If I want to be sure it’s tagged decently and actually a solid 16bit flac? Red/orpheus. If I want anything remotely niche, international artists, indie shit, like even singles and eps by popular artists? Or I’ll pop on soulseek but the downside there is I can’t figure out how to automate it

[–] airman@infosec.pub 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For music I would definitely agree with you. RIP What.CD

AnimeTosho covers the majority if not all my anime needs. Makes it easy for people to just add stuff to plex watchlist, and it gets automatically downloaded with the preferred quality and language settings.

I still have a (very) old Baka account. That site is a godsend. Nyaa comes in clutch at times, I won’t deny that.

Movies and TV shows, tho? Usenet. Specially western stuff.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Oh right I totally skipped tv shows haha

Depends on how picky you are as well to a degree. I’m an “archival” person - I download shit in remux and flac pretty exclusively. When it comes to anime I have some strong opinions about what fan subs are the best and what ones are total shit (to the point where I pretty regularly mux my own releases). If you can get an AB account I would highly recommend, imo best of the three

tv shows i agree usenet and western movies usenet most of the time. Unless you want a specific high quality release group (wildcats, 3L, etc) instead of framestor and random groups, who dominate usenet releases.

The only thing with tv shows and usenet: if you want a long running tv show, say the Simpsons. Torrents easier 100% of the time. If you’re manually downloading through an nzb site then it’s still faster because I guarantee you at least one torrent site you’re on will have a set of season or series packs that works; the season packs on Usenet are often the quickest things to die.

If you’re grabbing with sonarr I guarantee you will get a ton of shit that sucks, especially for an old show like that. Like some of the old episodes will be the ones they upscaled and stretched to 16:9 by zooming in and erasing a third of the image. A bunch will be in German, even with trash guide filters, because German dub people don’t tag their releases in ways that play well with any of trash guides regex. Even if you adjust your regex to scan for it (German in title, basically) then you have the occasional issue if the episode name has the word German (plus other dubs that are labeled poorly)

And for any hbo tv show and many Netflix tv shows (tho nf is far less aggressive) you will often find a sea of dead postings where torrents are fine. Like a remux of the sopranos? Better hope it was posted very recently, like in the past few days, because hbo monitors usenet like crazy. Netflix does too but not as strictly. Dmcas everywhere.

It’s still worth having of course and I use it a lot. Like you said it’s my go to for western movies and certain western shows. Especially when they’re actively airing. But there’s a lot of scenarios where it sucks