Look into the Servarr suite for a weekend project. Sonarr for TV, Radarr for movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for audiobooks, Prowlarr to index torrent sites, and Overseerr to handle media requests.

It starts with Prowlarr. That is what allows you to automatically search relevant torrent sites. You set it up with your preferred torrenting or Usenet sites, and it allows you to automatically run searches.

Then you tie those automated indexers into Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr/Lidarr to manage your library. When something is requested, they’ll search for it, queue it for download via your preferred torrent/usenet client, automatically rename the files to a Plex/Jellyfin friendly naming scheme once the download is done, and move the renamed files to the correct folders for Plex/Jellyfin to find and add to your library.

Finally, you use Overseerr to manage content requests. The most straightforward way to do it is simply by tying it to something like your Plex watchlist. So you add something to your watchlist, it automatically gets requested via Overseer, which sends it to the respective download manager, which cues the download, renames the file(s) when it’s finished, and adds it to your library. You can also set up individual users in Overseerr with their own request limits, size limits, etc…

By the time it’s all set up, you just add the request, and it appears on your Plex/Jellyfin server as soon as the download is done. It takes some time to figure things out and set it all up, but by the time it’s done it’ll be much more noob-friendly than torrents. Because it’s basically automating the hardest part of torrenting, which is doing it all manually.