They’re small services that you load your libraries into, and select content you want to get and the quality of that content. Then the service goes out and finds the torrents for you and adds them to your library.
Ah, my bad. I’m so used to it all that I can’t help but spit out jargon with no context sometimes 😅
I’m referring to apps like Sonarr, which basically keeps an eye on torrent/usenet providers and downloads episodes for you automatically. So you tell it you want some show, optionally set the quality you want it at, and it takes care of everything so that the episodes just show up on Jellyfin/Plex after they air and it grabs them. There’s also Radarr for movies and a whole bunch of related ones.
Tbh JF is faaaaaaaar from a ‘great UI’, it suffers from the ‘open source design’ of developers who have no idea how to design a good UI as the designers for the UI. I shouldn’t need to click vaguely in the direction of where I think the X (close) button is to make it appear in the first place. The settings for a user should be in the same location as the admin settings. The main screen shouldn’t look like it came straight out of 2000, it should have the categories all visible by default, it should be easier to setup https (plex was WAY easier in this regard), ota channel guides shouldn’t be outsourced to a paid project, there is no built-in import/export (I recently moved to a docker image and found that out, yay)…
It ‘works’, but fuck me it’s so rough around the edges that it draws blood. Plex has issues (downloading content from a server is wonky, metadata can grab the wrong movies, paid sub/lifetime etc) but it’s so, so, so much closer to what an all-in-one media platform should be, imo.
That’s because it’s a fork of Emby from 13+ years ago, still running 90% of that old code. They’ve kept it functional, that’s about it.
If you want something that’s actually still being developed/improved look to Emby or Plex. Emby is more focused on ‘personal’ media servers with your own content and users under your own control; plex is more focused on cloud services, integrating content they can run advertising on and requiring your users to authenticate through their public servers to be able to access your local/private server.
I’ve had plex running on my nas for 6+ years now, and have it set to where all the cloud stuff is available but out of the way, as I have a small collection so I don’t need to lean into the cloud streaming. I remember trying Emby in my evaluation of Plex, but as I recall the UI was bleh and it too followed a paid model. I know of Kodi but I haven’t looked into it in a long time, and I never ended up actually trying it.
Plex is fine for my needs, but I decided to get setup with JF just ‘in case’ plex takes a sharp new direction or something (I’ve had it installed since the whole ‘watch stuff free with ads’ kicked off), so if/when I can just be like ‘hey all plex did [stupid thing] so I just need you all to uninstall plex, grab this jellyfin app, and login with [credentials] and we will be all set’.
Emby used to be entirely open source, it’s free to use the base product (server software and the built in web browser based app) but requires a license for the installable apps and some server features so that the developers have some income from their work and incentive to keep spending their time+efforts on it.
Some people don’t like paying others for their hard work so they’d regularly fork Emby as it releases updates so they could remove those paywalls.
Unwilling to continue supporting this, Emby went closed source so their work could no longer be stolen. Jellyfin is the final fork of emby before it officially closed its source code. They have since kept it running, but have made little to no improvements or changes beyond that.
I’m not arguing that any of your complaints are invalid. I just want to say that I use jellyfin to organize my movies and TV shows and access them from other computers on my home network. It works, is easy, was free. I like it.
Yeah, there’s a reason I keep it installed and at the ready, but it’s just less user-friendly and that is essential when my users aren’t tech savvy, they just want things to ‘work’. If JF reaches feature parity I’ll migrate my users, but I can’t be asked to explain why they need to pay a monthly fee for ota guides or why everything looks different, if I also need to explain that features are missing and why can’t I move their watch history. It’s got to be easy for them, but also for me too.
I’ve found that most FOSS projects just have a “for us, by us” mentality where nobody cares about making things easy to use to the point that it’s not even possible if you’re not an experienced coder AND have strong knowledge of networking.
Not to mention the setup for hardware encoding which basically expects deep knowledge of the matter to even get it to run, let alone run well. Plex on the other hand hides it behind a license but it JUST WORKS, there’s no setup or anything.
I really wanted to use Jellyfin, but there’s just too many pain points
I highly discourage 1337x. They got caught not banning a user who intentionally uploaded malware. Forgive the reddit link, but there aren’t a lot of piracy news sites.
Damn. Just learned that trusting 1337x and IGGGAMES was a bad idea. Trying to teach my little pirate how to be safe on the high seas only to find out the places and people I thought were safe aren’t so.
Realdebrid just finds the torrents for you though, right? You’d still need a VPN since you’re technically downloading the movie to watch it. I know a lot of ISPs send notices if you torrent a copyrighted movie
Nope. It also downloads the torrent for you and gives you download link or stream link to the video. Most of the time, the torrent is already on their cache, so it’s instantly available to you.
They’re more like a private storage server. You can’t see what movies they have. Technically you can only download what you ‘add’ there, but they cache everybody else’s downloads too, so your download is readily available. I’m not sure of all technicalities, but there are a few different debrid services, so there must be some way they are able to do this.
There’s now a whole ecosystem of applications to streamline the download of series (sonarr) and movies (radarr) using torrents or Usenet (prowlarr). Pair those with a good player like Jellyfin or Plex and you have a nice media center that for sure won’t stop working everytime your family tries to watch a movie…
But it’s totally free. You don’t need app unlocks, you can have as many devices as you want, and you can hardware transcode without paying for premium.
Paid ~$100 for the lifetime license 9 years ago. So less than 93 pennies a month.
Throughout that time Emby has constantly been developed bringing bug fixes, UI improvements, and new features; while also providing excellent support as needed on the forums.
TBH I think I’ve vastly underpaid and plan to donate to the project shortly.
In that same time, I’ve seen very few meaningful updates to jellyfin. Just scrolling through their changelogs it’s mostly filled with:
Facts. I run both but JF is not ‘family-ready’ and thus sits on my server, receiving updates and idling until that changes. Plex took 5 minutes of explaining and the folks have been happily using it for a few years now.
Plex and Jellyfin are two ways to host your own content. Basically, instead of streaming from a Netflix server, you’re streaming from your own server.
Plex was the original, and Jellyfin is the FOSS alternative. In short, you run the program on a computer somewhere, and tell that program where all of your media is stored. It’ll scan your media depending on the library type (movies, TV shows, music, etc,) automatically pair it with the appropriate metadata, and make it available for streaming via the computer.
You can combine this with the *arr suite (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) to have your torrent client automatically download new content as it comes out. Basically, the appropriate *arr program listens for when new content gets released, then automatically tells your torrent client to search for that content (based on specific rules like language, bitrate, capture method, etc) and download it automatically. This pairs nicely with Plex/Jellyfin because you can use automatic torrent management to drop the files directly into the right folders for your server to scan and make available.
It does have a few drawbacks. One of the most annoying is port forwarding. Lots of VPNs have stopped offering port forwarding, because some creeps figured out how to use it to share/trade CSAM anonymously. But Plex and Jellyfin require an open port in order to be made available outside of your network, and you don’t want to run the server+torrents without a VPN. Some VPNs allow port forwarding, but randomly assign the port every time you connect. So it may work fine for a while, but will require occasional attention when that port changes.
There’s also the issue with needing a computer that’s turned on all the time. Some people (like myself) just run it on their home desktop. But that means I needed to set up Wake On LAN to be able to boot my computer up remotely, or just be okay with letting it idle all the time and never sleep. Personally, I chose to enable WOL, so I just remote into my network and send a magic packet before trying to stream. But that’s an extra step some people won’t want to do every time. If you have an old computer sitting around gathering dust, it can be a great weekend project.
Plex is actually a fork of Kodi (XBMC). Kodi is still actively developed, and easily supports both local media (for example, downloaded using one of the *arrs) and streaming from various sources using addons.
You can literally say the same thing about any fork, and yet nobody ever does. I’ll reiterate, Kodi is XBMC - there was no fork, no split in development, only a rename.
Higher quality and more reliable. I spent like 2 hours trying to find a site to stream the show I’m currently watching that didn’t have excessive audio issues. Were I a true pirate, I could simply download the highest quality available, and watch it whenever I want.
I wouldn’t want to use Plex, though. If you know what you want to watch and it’s already downloaded, just throw it on a flash drive or transfer it to your phone, no need to stream. If you want a netflix-style 2 terabytes of stuff that you may or may not ever watch, just… Spend the money on Netflix. Your time is worth more than that subscription fee. If Netflix doesn’t have the show you want, do the thing I said in the first paragraph.
Last Exile. I like obscure old anime, so it’s been on my list for a minute. I needed something to watch, so I checked Hulu. At some point in the last few months, they stopped streaming it.
So I definitely didn’t go to theindex.moe, and I super didn’t click on every damn streaming site they link to. I “promise” I didn’t settle on animeflix dot live, and I definitely didn’t put up with awful audio issues until I realized that the default server it streams from is in SD so you have to click the gear and set it to one of the HD servers instead.
Which sites are those? From my experience it’s hard to find 4k/Dolby Vision on those free streaming sites, which is where pirating and streaming your own stuff is the better option.
The main benefit for me is the app accessibility (easier to search through an app than a file system), the convenience of not needing to carry around a bunch of data all the time, and the ease of sharing it with family.
If I understand your setup, when you decide you want to a new movie you have to download it, pull the hdd over to the machine, transfer it to the hdd, rename, perhaps even transcode, and then put the drive back on the TV.
In the type of setup described above or like mine, I can pull out my phone and using a very simple search all of the file handling and such is taken care of for me. I don’t ever have to worry if I have the right filetype for the device I’m on, and I can watch that from any device on my local network, or just about any device that has an internet connection. Also, while I’m watching one thing, several other people can be watching whatever else they want on their devices.
I have a smart TV where you can just plug in a NTFS formatted USB drive and it plays perfectly. Never had to rename or transcode anything. It plays 4K files more smoothly than most computers I’ve had.
The only problem I’ve had is when I’m watching a foreign film and the subtitle file is in the wrong file format.
That covers a small subset of the reason a lot of us set it up the way we have. I mean, if that is working for you, great. But you still have to move a physical device, and the ability to watch media is still limited to the location of said device.
The better free streaming sites are my go-to, because I have plausible deniability, I don’t with a torrent. And unfortunately my VPN throttles you unless you start paying. Which I am thinking about going ahead and doing.
I’ll tell you, I have my setup to the point where I go to one website, subscribe to a show, and episodes of that show appear to watch on my TV same day they are released.
I also set myself up to get email alerts telling me what new episodes I have to watch when they are done being downloaded.
… Setting all that up took me awhile and will take tech skills. But now that it’s set up, it’s zero touch aside from adding new shows.
Plus, I never have to worry about trying to find where to stream at it and even if my Internet goes out I can still watch my shows
(even if the computer is yours, whereas you have created your own ‘mini cloud’. I hate that term, it’s just a machine running software. It’s all just machines, consuming us all. screams … anyway)
Where can I find good tutorials for the *arr suite? I have Jackett installed for easier searching in Qbit, but I half assed that somehow into working. I would love to have auto downloads for content, especially those shows that still release episodes like a drop feed. An almost fully automated Plex would be amazing the TV show requests I get.
I’m like you, hadn’t pirated outside of games since early 2000s and just started again. Wait until you see the shit we have now, it’s mind-blowing how far it’s come.
And with Jellyfin if you have the upload speeds you can even host for family etc, so anyone sharing your Netflix now can just login to your Jellyfin server, for them it will be a comparable experience.
I’m still maining plex, and at least there, they just create a plex account, you grant access to that account, and that’s it. Don’t even have to open ports. My guess is with JF since there isn’t a central account host, you’d probably have expose some ports on your network to be able to login without a VPN.
Pirating games is basically unheard of for me, unless it’s a product not readily available on a modern storefront.
Nintendo has a problem with me playing Pokemon Omega Ruby on a 3DS emulator? they are free to offer a switch version.
This is because steam is not an asshole, which is a big reason why I kind of got disappointed when they stopped offering movies. I like having those on the same platform
Nevermind that shit, Stremio + Torrentio + Real-Debrid. I’m fucking done with these greedy-ass companies. I was paying Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, Paramount , MLB.tv and HBO, and pretty content to do so, and they all continually removed content and adjusted their pricing to reduce what I was getting for my money. They finally pushed me beyond my tolerance limit a few months ago and I’ve been back to sailing the high seas for the first time in 20 years.
I have more content now, all at acceptable quality options, all with good subtitles instead of the mess HBO was, and all on the same platform instead of having to jump between 7 different apps. I’m done with them and I’ll stay done with them until they pull their heads out of their asses.
Edit: if you get a cheap computer, a Chromecast, a FireTV, or what I have - an Nvidia Shield TV, then you get even get a nifty remote controller and a good standard browsing platform for everything.
Just set this up on a cheap Onn 4k box from Walmart. Works fantastic. Also setup the Trakt integration to keep up with what I watch across multiple devices.
I’ve tested jellyfin this week on my dedicated server. It’s cool but most of my files need transcoding to be played on the browser, which my weak server CPU cannot handle. The best option I found to stream any file format without eating up all server resources on this machine is to set up a simple nginx server with autoindex streaming the files to VLC. I use the “Open with VLC” browser extension to quickly open the links. Playback performance is quite good (scrubbing is fast) and everything plays well.
the ‘download’ offering is funny because you know it’s not a real download you can have faith in, it’s some fake bullshit where they’re allowed to let you hit a button
Customers cancelling over the shrinkflation, and leaving the feedback as to why you’re cancelling, is really the only thing that companies will respond to. Because of their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders, their share price is all that drives these decisions.
Don’t worry, we’ll shovel more garbage reality shows into your app and wreck the ux even harder. Here’s 40 seasons of people having diarrhea on airplanes. Expect price increases in 6 months.
For music, to avoid this with record companies, I use a youtube downloader to rip songs from youtube then go to shows or buy shirts. Admittedly probably harder with movies or games, though.
Max would be in my cancellation list if it wasn’t because I get it for free because my cable provider from 2013 is too incompetent to update their database with the fact that I haven’t owned that condo since 2015. Netflix is hanging on by a thread.
I currently pay for Paramount+ (great value) and Dropout (support indie creators). Prime doesn’t count because I pay for it for the shipping, but once they start with ads, I’ll stop watching it.
We’re back to that place where the hassle of piracy is worth it again. The problem for studios is that technology has come a long way since the last time people had to think about “cord cutting” through piracy, and it’s just too easy to do it now. The second golden age of television is coming to an end.
Netflix lost me when they stopped letting you share your login. The only reason we were still subscribed was because my son and my mom used our account. Neither of them will subscribe on their own, so they didn’t gain two new customers, they lost a customer of 15 years. I made sure to tell them exactly why I was cancelling and included the fact that they’re greedy and shortsighted. Actually everyone lost me when that happened. That was the straw that pushed my ship back out to sea.
You can get Paramount+ free if you don’t mind putting in a promo code and cancelling once a month. There are usually several out at a time to promote their shows. Haven’t ever paid for it, but had it since before it was Paramount. Codes almost all work with the showtime bundle, too. You just reactivate your same account with the promo code.
I wouldn’t call paramount+ a great value considering the application is such a complete piece of garbage regardless of platform. You couldn’t even pay me to use it.
I get HBO Max through my wireless carrier, but there’s no way in hell I’d pay for it on its own. The Max app is just straight, unadulterated hot garbage.
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