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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I recently had my first foray into this setup and I have found the arr stack to be all but useless on public trackers. I haven't setup flaresolvarr so that I can use 1337x and maybe that is why it is so terrible for me but prowlarr couldn't even find a fast and furious movie that is a popular, well seeded film.

Maybe the addition of 1337 would make it much better but I'm skeptical as to how much difference that one place can make.

I ultimately now just find what I need manually and add the torrent to my server via the web interface then leave it and everything else sorts itself, which I'm fine with doing.

Maybe I'm missing something but I think the arr stack is massively overrated on public trackers. I'm going to look into Usenet next as someone else suggested but it isn't anything I've ever used and I don't have the money to pay for any right now anyway.

[–] Brodysseus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What do you use to clean up the files for jellyfin, or does that happen automatically? I mean things like cover art, consistent title format, etc

I appreciate this take. Maybe I should keep it simple

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

Don't get me wrong I don't regret setting it all up as it was a good, if somewhat steep learning curve for me as someone with no Linux experience beyond installing a couple of distros and using them solely as GUI OS's. In all honesty though keeping it simple and having full control over the files I'm getting is working absolutely fine for me and I don't feel the need to make it any more complex with the various arrs, the only exception being I want to look deeper into bazaar as I need subtitles for everything.

Anyway I do absolutely nothing to clean up the files. I copy my magnet links into qbittorrent and set which folder I want it to download to, movies / shows etc. Jellyfin libraries are set to each of these folders by their respective type and then when some new stuff is downloaded I'll just access my jellyfin dashboard and scan all libraries.

So far with zero file cleaning jellyfin has detected 85% of things correctly regardless, for anything not detected it takes barely any time to go into the identify menu, search for the correct title and choose the relevant correct info.

I'm running proxmox with 3 VMs, one for docker with the arr stack, qbittorrent and gluetun to direct all that traffic via my VPN. One for a Plex server (which hasn't failed to detect anything so far without file cleaning) and one for the jellyfin server.