Torrenting with a seedbox for me. I’m aware of Sonarr/Radarr and other automation tools but I don’t feel like I have the need for them. Some part of me enjoys the manual search and management. Never touched Usenet though it’s in the mental “maybe try later” bin.
That part of you that enjoys wasting your time doing easily automated tasks will die the minute you set them up and see how easy it is to get your time back.
I'd recommend giving Sonarr and Radarr a try at least. Setup is pretty straight forward but it goes way in depth if you want to work out the little intricacies of managing your media.
Because setup is easier, Docker basically sets up a completely new environment for the app to live in mostly isolated from your main system, so all the stuff you installed on your system has no effect on it.
Not OP but: they are apps to schedule automatic downloads. Like Star Trek Strange New Worlds but don't wanna go every week and download it manually? Set it up in Sonarr and when you wake up the new episodes are waiting for you. Radarr is the same for film, prowlarr for aggregating torrent trackers all in 1 spot, bazarr for subtitles, and there's a few others. Can also be set up with usenet in addition to torrents.
Prowlarr is infinitely better because it integrates directly with all the "arr" apps (and mylar and lazylibrarian as well) and will set up all the indexers in those apps for you. That way you only need to maintain or edit them within Prowlarr and then it does the maintenance in the rest of the apps for you.
I did, it was very little time to invest, and it's pretty cool that it integrates to sonarr & radarr and sync's your configuration from a central place. Also the web UI seems to have more information and stats if you ever need.
The only thing in jackett that I miss when using prowlarr is support for a selfhosted magnetico instance, because otherwise I don't think there's any way to add magnetico as a source for sonarr/radarr. Granted I don't miss it much because my magnetico postgres DB shit the bed and I've been putting off recovering it because my DB is 100 GB and I kinda don't want to deal with it.
I do like that prowlarr will connect to sonarr/radarr using their API and can be set to sync all the indexers set up in prowlarr into both sonarr/radarr automatically based on which ones support movies or TV shows, so that's what drew me to it. Makes adding and removing torrent sites less work.
Yeah I switched after Jackett kept having issues with RARBG before they shut down. The biggest change is the fact that adding a tracker to Prowlarr will automatically add it to radarr, sonarr, and the like rather than having to duplicate everything manually yourself.
Both these give you a simple way to search for things you want. They use IMDB and the like to give you a big list of results. You add what you want to your collection and in the background they scurry off to torrent sites or usenet and downloads it. Then they name everything nicely and stuff then in your Plex library.
You can set them up to use specific torrent sites. Download specific qualities, or more likely an order of qualities by preference and all sorts of other tweaks.
Can they tackle my existing 20tb of Plex media (shows, anime, movies)? Somewhat organized but I’ve been relying on Plex to identify and sometimes manually fix matches. But that’s about it, doesn’t even rename or organize anything.
Sonarr and radarr manage downloads for TV and movies in a nice way for Usenet and actually torrents as well. You can set up quality profiles and choose which shows and movies you want to download and they will grab torrents/nzbs that meet your preferences, automatically start them in your torrent app or Usenet downloader, and then organize them in folders with appropriate metadata for Kodi/Plex when the downloads complete. They automate the process very nicely.
Edit, I’m a Usenet guy if that wasn’t already clear lol
How is Usenet for privacy compared to torrents, e.g. if a usenet service you are paying for is compromised at some stage are they likely to be able to identify you based on payment data for example?
Private trackers have great speed and reliability as well. I've been using sonarr and radarr for years but have never bothered with Usenet due to the added cost. They all work great with torrents even though they were originally designed for Usenet.
Private trackers can be a real pain in the ass. Usenet is set it and forget it, no sweating over your ratio or what the special rules are on a particular tracker.
I'm using torrents much less since fmovies. I just stream my shows and movies now. Music is also getting harder to find so I went back to Soulseek. For everything else, I'm using Tribler, an open source torrent client using onion routing.
Torrents. I don’t really find Usenet worth the money. I can get most of the stuff I want on public sites. Some others I can get on private trackers. Never really felt the need to use Usenet. And as others have pointed out, the arr apps work great with torrents.
And honestly, I find it a little scummy to pay for content to people who don’t own them. I don’t think piracy in itself is unethical, but I if you take money for stolen content, that’s not cool in my book.
I get what you are saying about paying someone who doesn‘t own the content.
However I‘d argue that you are not paying them for the content, but just for hosting it on their servers. So its more like a tool, as is your VPN if you are torrenting. And most people wouldn‘t mind paying a VPN just to pirate content.
Usenet, I agree, might take you some time to get invites to the good indexers, especially if you don‘t want to pay immediately, but in the long run it‘s definitly worth it.
I havn‘t played arround with torrents for quite some time, whats the most popular setup for torrents atm?
Not sure about the most popular setup, but I use a docker container that has qbittorrent-nox and gluetun in it. It’s connected to some other containers with arr apps and such.
And I think it’s a bit different than just paying for VPN. You can use VPN for many other reasons. But here, you know exactly what you’re paying for. I’d never pay to use any private tracker for the same reason.
Sonarr and radarr can use torrents just as much as they can use usenet. I used them for both, now I dropped usenet altogether.
I find it easier to either DDL or torrent, plus a lot of the stuff I’m after recently proved hard tto find on usenet for whatever reason.
It’s more hassle to search usenet for my usecase and while it’s true that maxing out download speeds is awesome, I’m not in a hurry. I let the .arr apps do the work while I’m busy with life and when I get back home I have it all ready anyways.
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