My setup is a conglomeration of a quite a few different pieces; but they are not all required. I’d encourage you to explore, start small and expand into new pieces/areas when you feel comfortable. I started this ~8 years ago with basically 0 knowledge of hosting web services; and just built up the knowledge through exploration over time.
If all you’re looking to do is watch movies, and you’re happy to play the downloaded media directly on your pc (or move the files around manually, just like manual torrenting); the only piece you need is Radarr.
Once setup; You tell it what movies you want to watch, it searches for those using the indexers you’ve given it (YourBittorrent, TPB, and BadassTorrents for example), choses the best results out of them all based on things like upload date, seeds, quality descriptors in the title, etc. Then passes that to your torrent/usenet client. Finally it will rename and sort the files into nicely organized media folders for you, once the download client has marked it as complete.
I want to organize and automate movies at some point, but the cost of managing additional hardware feels intimidating. How do you handle it? Doesn’t arr stack require lots of processing power?
The arrs are pretty light weight; the memory use can add up when you run several of them with really large libraries alongside other projects, but otherwise I hardly notice them running in the background. You don’t need any sort of special hardware; this stuff will run on an old laptop you shove in the corner and ignore.
The part that really takes processing power is transcoding media between formats when streaming it to clients, but that’s Emby/Jellyfins job.
Ideally you use Hardlinking - This creates a ‘copy’ of the file that’s just a link to the original data, instead of actually duplicating it. This only works when both ‘copies’ are kept on the same drive/filesystem; but gives you two versions so you can leave one available to seed and have one renamed and sorted away.
Failing that, it can fallback to plain duplicating the files. One copy kept to seed, and one copy sorted away.
Personally, I’ve switched to usenet for 99% of downloads, so seeding isn’t really a thing. It’s there as a fallback though.
My setup is a conglomeration of a quite a few different pieces; but they are not all required. I’d encourage you to explore, start small and expand into new pieces/areas when you feel comfortable. I started this ~8 years ago with basically 0 knowledge of hosting web services; and just built up the knowledge through exploration over time.
If all you’re looking to do is watch movies, and you’re happy to play the downloaded media directly on your pc (or move the files around manually, just like manual torrenting); the only piece you need is Radarr.
Once setup; You tell it what movies you want to watch, it searches for those using the indexers you’ve given it (YourBittorrent, TPB, and BadassTorrents for example), choses the best results out of them all based on things like upload date, seeds, quality descriptors in the title, etc. Then passes that to your torrent/usenet client. Finally it will rename and sort the files into nicely organized media folders for you, once the download client has marked it as complete.
I want to organize and automate movies at some point, but the cost of managing additional hardware feels intimidating. How do you handle it? Doesn’t arr stack require lots of processing power?
The arrs are pretty light weight; the memory use can add up when you run several of them with really large libraries alongside other projects, but otherwise I hardly notice them running in the background. You don’t need any sort of special hardware; this stuff will run on an old laptop you shove in the corner and ignore.
The part that really takes processing power is transcoding media between formats when streaming it to clients, but that’s Emby/Jellyfins job.
This is slowly what I’m working on
There’s a ton of people happy to help on [email protected] if you run into troubles :)
When it renamed them… Do you continue to seed (in the case of torrents)?
Torrents have two options:
Ideally you use Hardlinking - This creates a ‘copy’ of the file that’s just a link to the original data, instead of actually duplicating it. This only works when both ‘copies’ are kept on the same drive/filesystem; but gives you two versions so you can leave one available to seed and have one renamed and sorted away.
Failing that, it can fallback to plain duplicating the files. One copy kept to seed, and one copy sorted away.
Personally, I’ve switched to usenet for 99% of downloads, so seeding isn’t really a thing. It’s there as a fallback though.