I am trying to set up my own server for movies/tv with all the bells and whistles to make it the most streaming service like where I can browse and have automatically torrented and downloaded for viewing. I am new to all of it so a guide would be really helpful.
I came across this guide but it is 2 years old and while it most definitely would still be fine I wanted to know if there is anything more current.
I will be using this mini pc to host the server and probably some other things like a lemmy instance.
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Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for!
You’ll want to look at either Plex or Jellyfin for your front-end streaming clients, personally I prefer Jellyfin for its customizability. For sorting media, you’ll want Sonarr for TV-Shows and Radarr for movies. To find the magnet links to send to Sonarr and Radarr you’ll need something like Prowlarr which will pull magnet links from the sources you’ll specify. With that out of the way you’ll need some way to take those magnet links and actually download from them and for my I prefer to use qBit, but any torrent client will work, just make sure to put it behind a VPN. Lastly, I’d set up Obmi to allow your users to make requests. In regard to the OS why not use something like TrueNAS compared to the guide which suggested Ubuntu, I’ve found the UI in TrueNAS Scale to be much easier to work with especially since all the services I mentioned are apps that you just pretty much one click installs.
how much effort do you want to put in? Personally ive been running synology but nextcloud or any number of other options are game. or you can just deploy stuff right on your hardware. I prefer UI’s so I usually run managers.
I’d prefer for it to be straightforward, I want the server to be local so that rules out any cloud offerings. Synology is a NAS right? Do you run your whole pirating server off its hardware?
I run a fairly comprehensive suite of *Arr apps off a Synology DS923+ and it was somewhat straightforward to set up. Note that there’s some setting with the 923 that doesn’t make it optimal for Plex and people prefer the 920 - I run Plex off an Nvidia Shield so that didn’t matter to me.
I wrote up a step-by-step installation guide for myself, mostly for reference / any future times I might need to make changes. tossed the PDF here in case you’d like to reference, though it’s a little out of date atm because I need to switch from Mullvad to ProtonVPN for port forwarding (which you can ignore if you don’t care about port forwarding): https://mega.nz/file/9pISRSqB#w_I-6gI8Ga2u_rvTGqTezmIk_-fxnmHfAr1FapFNpEM
Most of the guide was built using these two folks’ articles as reference:
Thank you for the extra info! One thing I have found missing from several of these guides is how to set up so that the torrenting runs behind a vpn. I want one because I really believe my ISP would cut off my access if they were to see me torrenting. I also saw that port-forwarding is a necessity for the vpn but I don’t really know why. You even seem to indicate that it is optional.
Glad to help! If you end up referencing my PDF and have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message.
Re: port forwarding, if you don’t have it, it’s kinda like a one-way mirror? Your torrent client can look out through the mirror, but no one can look in, and you’ll only be able to connect with other torrent clients that have a clear window - because your client can see them through the glass and send them a request to connect, and their connection is transparent so they can accept the message. So if there’s a lot of other people out there with one-way mirrors also, you can’t connect to them b/c you can’t see them and vice versa.
Port forwarding is basically setting your client up with a clear window instead of a mirror - it’ll be able to accept both incoming requests and make outgoing requests, increasing the number of other people you can connect to. Increased connections means more likely to find people on torrents with small amounts of seeders, and I think increased download speeds too.
Synology sells NAS but the platform they produce for it is OSS. It’s bascially a web-based system manager, like C-panel on steroids. I’ve found it really solid for personal stuff. The synolgy NAS systems are just Intel celeron systems with raid controllers and linux. My next synology will likely be a 1-u from microcenter since I can build it a bit cheaper than what they charge.
If you ever want to upgrade your hardware serverbuilds.net has some really awesome low-cost builds for media servers.
