Do note that there's a ton of media that is not very available via sailing the seas. For example, reality TV has very low availability, typically only currently airing seasons at best. Thus if you're trying to convince a family to cancel all the big streaming platforms, you may have a hard time when they learn that they can't watch old episodes of "The Real Housewives of the middle of nowhere" from 2012.

>Do note that there's a ton of media that is not very available via sailing the seas.

This is an argument for preservation.

i.e. everything should be available via sailing the seas. If something isn't, and you know where to obtain it, do your part.

Many films and records have been lost because nobody cared to do it.

> can't watch reality TV

And nothing of value was lost.

I've seen a few guides to setting this up but maybe you can refer to what you used to set your own system up? Right now I'm utilizing streamio plus debridio but I've read the plex + radarr/sonarr is much superior... I"m not too tech savvy so kind of hestiant to set up

The *arr stack was a pain.

You'll need prowlarr for downloading. And a Bittorrent client that works with it (e.g. Ktorrent doesn't).

Then you'll set up radarr/sonarr, and ensure they can talk to prowlarr.

Setting up Plex is straightforward. But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr.

It was definitely a pain, but once I had it set up it's been fine.

I followed this guide for setup and it was pretty straight forward: https://github.com/Pharkie/ultimate-arr-stack

I run Jellyfin on an UnRaid server, it was relatively simple with the containers just being “plug and play”. Think it took me about 2 hours. I did have some trouble when we moved into a new house, as I had to reconfigure all the local network stuff.

I have ended up in the past being in a state of “don’t touch anything, it hasn’t broken in 6 months”. Then an update releases and I have to learn everything again. Beats paying 120 a month for whatever streaming services we would need.

I just set this up like a week ago:

https://github.com/aldarisbm/local-k3s-cluster/tree/main/dow...

if you want to have an idea. I used a docker compose approach.

Should be self healing

>But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr.

Sort of. You tell Plex where your directories are for movies and TV shows. All you have to do with Sonarr/Radarr is have them dump the finished downloads into their respective directories.

Trash Guides [1] is your friend. Requires a bit of understanding whats going on but if all of these are going to be on the same computer this makes setting it up where data doesn't have to get copied around and waste time.

[1] - https://trash-guides.info/

To be perfectly honest, the seedbox provider had all of these installed and hooked into each other. I only had to add my various logins and configure some profiles. I would think most seedboxes offer a variation of this, so you’re not starting from scratch.

Used YAMS myself which is basically just a glorified docker-compose file.

I am tech savvy but hate toil. I just launched Gemini cli and ask it to install the *arr stack and it did everything for me to my satisfaction. Heck, it even recommended a few cool plugins I didn't know about. My only problem is I'm not a member of any private torrent sites :(

Me too

Gosh config of radarr and sonarr seemed impenetrable to me.

I've given up my streaming box because I find passive watching so draining and trying to focus on educational content/ course and exercise.

I was finding myself wallowing away hours per day passively watching endless episodes of the current biggest show.

Not to be "that guy that just says to use LLMs", but writing out how you want these things to work on your computer to something like Claude, or heck even Google AI mode without logging in with an account, allows you to describe your ideal "home server as a docker-compose.yml file" and for me it did a damn fine job doing it. I had done this all with a previous server manually, and with a new server I simply had provided that I was a Fedora Linux box, with these hard drives, with these containers, and these are the locations of the files, etc. It worked the first try.

This wasn't something that I didn't want to learn myself, but I have so little time with children and gardening on top of my super busy work at this point that I didn't have time to simply google everything. I did know enough about it beforehand to provide a general idea of what I want, so YMMV.

16+ years with my setup. Seedbox + Private tracker + RSS plugin + SyncThing + Dell MFF