Currently subscribe to a couple of Plex shares after getting tired of running my own server. This works well for the most part but I’m at the mercy of their infrastructure if anything stops working.
I subscribe to 2 providers for redundancy purposes as they have downtime a lot so it’s more costly than I’d like but still cheaper than running my own and way less time consuming. Not convinced it’s the best or most modern way to pirate / stream.
I’ve read about real-debrid and stremio or other apps. Sounds like torrents and having to wade through low quality releases?
What do you seasoned scurvy dogs use?
Are you set on not running your own server?
I was running Plex for ages, but got sick of their endless corpo bullshit. Now I run Jellyfin (with lldap for auth), Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, qbittorrent, yt-dlp-web-ui and Stash. Its probably not the best solution but its been working for me so far.
That’s similar to what I ran before although it was Emby and Usenet (sabnzbd) as I didn’t have access to any decent trackers for torrenting. Was fine just for me but I need to provide more of a Netflix experience for my non tech savvy household and the storage cost would make it painful
I mean, my family cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p so my storage cost is a non-redundant zfs array of $100 ssds.
If you use something like jackett/sonarr/radarr you dont have to be limited to just usenet or torrents. You can also look at things like Jellyseerr to give them something that they cant get on Netflix, the ability to request movies and shows.
I use Jellyfin even for my family they find it extremely easy to use. I have also included Ombi so if there is a show they want that isn’t there they can request it and everything is handled automatically without my intervention. The most I do is change what harddrive things save to when I run out of space and add a new drive
Real debrid with streamIO is the most painless option I have setup. My parents love using it and have stopped using everything else. You just need to remember to renew your subscription once you have set it up :) I get 4K releases for most of the things I watch, with no searching needed.
Nice, I had a play with this earlier and it seems to work well if you know what you want to watch. Did see a few ‘no results found’ for some obscure shows
Unfortunately that does happen. Real Debrid only keeps torrents cached for a period of time. If the files aren’t being accessed regularly, than they will dump the files. If you find an active torrent than you can usually pop it into real debrid, let it download, and access it through stremio. It’s definitely not ideal for a lot of people but it’s still a great service for popular titles.
Ah that makes sense, shouldn’t be too much hassle to get them in there then if I can find a good source of torrents. What’s the go to place for those?
1337x, torrentgalaxy, torrent leech (if you don’t care about hit and runs since RD does not seed files enough for private trackers). If it’s really obscure, than I gotta do some deep diving to find available files.
I’ve setup Stremio with Real Debrid and the Torrentio Addon for a lot of people and it all just works. SmartTube for YouTube replacement is also a goto.
I usually use a Chromecast but any Android TV will work. For a lot more work than it’s worth but I still do it is remapping the Chromecast remote buttons to open SmartTube when hitting the YouTube button and Stremio when hitting Netflix.
I’ve been using
Premiumize.me+Kodi+Tmdb Helper running with Seren and syncing with trakt.tv on my Nvidia Shield 4k Pro 2019.Artic Horizons 2 skin.
Only issue is playing some [Dolby VISION] .MP4/.MKV one of the formats, I can’t ever remember which, is simply all green/pink bad color and also tends to overrun CDN cache/buffers…
No issues for 720p-4kHDR/Stereo-[Dolby ATMOS] things otherwise.
And the shields upscaling is halfway decent.
Added bonus of not being sad when my Smart TV stops getting updates.
(I have a LG C9, webOS already stopped getting updates and I don’t care.) 🤗
Added bonus using
premiumize.meas a Seedbox for streaming torrents I download to it when things fail to be found/play through my normal means. So no needing a VPN.I only subscribe during Black Friday/Cyber Monday so it’s been $116/2 yrs service.
To sum up for anyone finding this later:
Running your own jellyfin server is best and free. Check out the servarr community to get started. Will take a bit of setting up but if you can figure out Lemmy, you can figure this out. I’d personally recommend some kind of Usenet subscription with this but some might prefer to use torrents.
You can do what I do and get an app share where someone else runs the server, downloads everything for you etc and you pay to use their service.
Stremio / Syncler paired with a paid real-debrid account seems like a good solution but you can use torrents if you don’t want to pay anything. This is seriously good and cheaper than an app share. I’m getting rid of my backup app share and using this in its place.
Thanks all!
I’m currently on my 2nd year of moviebox.pro, no issues so far. Like Netflix but for all the things.
