Everyone here is talking about how to get the latest and best stuff, but no one is talking about how they actually manage it 😜
So, how do YOU manage your Movies / Shows / Music / eBooks / Games?
I begin:
- Jellyfin: Media Center to stream movies, TV shows and music
- sonarr, radar, lidarr: manage collections and download, TV shows, movies and music, respectively
- transmission: torrent client, through VPN connection (NordVPN)
- Jackett: tracker manager
- stash: like Jellyfin, but for linux-iso files /s
All of that runs in docker containers on my NAS, using docker-compose to deploy the stack.
DOOM (see citation) folders mostly
I have a computer running TrueNAS Scale with a network drive accessable on my network from all my PCs and my TVs.
All of my systems can access the drive and play the content via VLC.
Is it efficient? No.
Would I recommend it? Also no.
Citation: DOOM stands for Didn’t Organize Only Moved
@Gormadt
Sergeant Murphys Laws of Combat Operations, 6: If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.
- Sonarr and Radarr for getting torrents
- Prowlarr for setting up torrent indexers
- Bazarr for getting subtitles
- Jellyfin for playback
- Tachiyomi (Android app) for Manga
Plex and Calibre
this is the only way.
I dump everything into a single folder. Like a junk drawer. Because I really only save junk anyway 🤷🏻♂️
Sonarr/Radarr + Plex has been good enough for me.
- Jellyfin + arrs for Media (TV, movie, music)
- Calibre for eBooks of all kinds
For managing my library on disk, I just recently made the effort to set up the *arr apps. I love having the metadata, tagging, organizing, and file naming all consistent and automated. Previously I used mp3tag and filebot to manage them and it was way more manual. Everything is set up with docker-compose and Ansible.
Library file stuff:
- Two Radarr instances, one for 4k and another for lower resolutions
- Sonarr for TV
- Lidarr for music
- Two readarr instances, one for epub/pdf and one for audiobooks
- Jackett
- deluge+openVPN
For library frontend stuff:
- Jellyfin for movies, tv, music, audiobooks
- Plex, for when Jellyfin is acting up
- Jellyseer for TV & movie requests
- LaunchBox for videogames and emulators
- Calibre + calibreWeb for ebooks & syncing to my Kobo eReader
Haven’t set up yet:
- flaresolverr
- unpackerr
- audiobookshelf
Doesn’t exist yet/wishlist:
- *arr app for emulator ROMs (I’ll have to check out romm, looks pretty cool!)
Why multiple instances instead of using quality profiles?
AFAIK you can’t have different qualities (4k/1080) of the same movies/series on the same instance.
Frankly because I haven’t figured out quality profiles yet and saw separate instances recommended a few places.
Is readarr really worth it? I’m a heavy reader, but i’ve not set it up.
Also, audiobookshelf is worth the effort. If you’re holding off because you don’t want to organize your library, the folder structure they use is really really good. I run all sorts of services, and I like jellyfin, komga, the arrs, etc. I love audiobookshelf. By far my most used app.
It’s alright. I have it tied in to my existing Calibre library so my metadata and library management workflows haven’t really changed. The process of finding and downloading new books has just been streamlined a bit.
Plex is the big one. I have a Plex box that also runs qBittorrent and i can set that up to auto download and sorty new anime as they come out. I’m sure sonarr and radarr are handy, but they seem like a pain in the ass to set up. Plus everyone online who talks about them never educate on the pirate side, just the organization side. You just get cheeky nods and winks like ok… Thanks.
So I still very much manually pirate shit mostly. Like a chad.
Same here, set up a super old MacBook with a couple of old hard disks. Get everything I need manually and load it in as needed.
Plex for my Movies, TV shows, and music (plexamp for music).
Kavita for books. Also nextcloud to a degree.
Games, honestly I have not pirated in a long time, so no need to manage. Gabe Newell was right in that piracy is mainly a service problem, and to be honest Steam and GoG are convenient enough for me that I don’t feel the need to pirate anymore.
Plex for playback.
Transmission for torrents.
Radarr for movies.
Sonarr for tv.
Lidarr for music.
Bazarr for subtitles.
Readarr for books.
Ombi for discovery and requests.
Tautulli for statistics and newsletters.
Surprised to see no mention of Playnite. I used to use Stardock Fences to categorize my games on my desktop, then I found Playnite and there was no looking back. It’s a big game library with incredible features. Here’s what I see when I load it up. (the games listed here are the games I have listed as “currently playing”)
sadly playnite is not on linux…so it’s out for me 😥
I really, really want to use it instead of having a bunch of launchers for pc and emulation but it’s too damn fiddly. Cant get retroachievements to work, normal achievements tab is forever empty, no way I found to have a unified control scheme, most of the plugins I tried do absolutely nothing, like the deal finding one, I could go on.
Not saying it doesn’t work, obviously it does. But it doesn’t for me sadly. And I can’t spend a week on trying to get it to work. Two days of following guides online, did nothing for me, so I just gave up.
I think some plugins rely on having a desktop theme made to accommodate them otherwise you’d have to do the themeing yourself. Thankfully there are plenty that already exist which can be downloaded and applied from within Playnite itself but I do agree that the experience can be a bit of a mess. I really can’t live without it, though. Just completely changed the way I organize and launch games forever.
Do you happen to have a good guide I could follow? I really like the idea behind playnite and how good/useable it can look, but I get lost every time.
If not for the rest, at least for emulators/retro gaming.
I used to maintain a Jellyfin server for my media, but moving to university put a stop to that - the campus network is cringe and makes it impossible to dial in from the outside. So… just boring old folders for video, and Calibre for my ebooks.
(I did make an attempt at moving Jellyfin to my VPS, but transcoding is… not possible on one core, to put it lightly.)
Does tailscale work on the uni network?
No, which is a shame. It would be a pretty elegant solution.
Wireguard from your server to the vps, proxy from the vps to your server.
.
That’s surprising. They are pretty good at their NAT traversal
impossible to dial in from the outside
Cloudflare Tunnel
Unfortunately you can’t stream media through tunnels on a free plan. I also don’t like how it requires Cloudflare to do TLS termination - not like I’m sending anything sensitive, but it still bugs me.
Sure you can its not like they are doing anything to stop you until your use is very excessive which I am assuming it’s not
Can you use the VPS to create an exposed network and retain the jellyfin server on the device at home? I did that in university in a similar situation
I use plex, I configured plex so server was “located” my VPS address and the VPS routed back to my computer (which was behind a double NAT so I couldn’t port forward)
I’m on a dynamic ip and I’ve been considering doing this just to stop my remote services from being glitchy whenever the ip changes.
But I need to setup pfsense or OPNsense first so I can route everything properly.
I use Prowlarr + Radarr + Sonarr + Jellyfin.
I have
/datadirectory organised like this:/data ├── media │ ├── books │ ├── movies │ ├── music │ └── tv └── torrents ├── books ├── movies ├── music └── tvFiles added from Sonarr goes to
torrents/tvand that for Radarrtorrents/movies. Once the torrent client has downloaded the files, Sonarr and Radarr hardlinks the needed files tomedia’s respective folders. I have setmedia/tvfor shows andmedia/moviesfor movies on Jellyfin. Everything is automated, I love it.I have nothing to add to this. This is exactly how I do it as well.
I have a similar setup but without the hardlinks. Can you explain the benefits/reason for using the them? I think I understand what a hardlink is, but don’t quite get why you’d use it in this context.
The torrent client can get confused about the authenticity of the files if you make any changes to the files that were downloaded. It can also have trouble finding all the files required for seeding, so moving the needed files to
mediais a no.Once the torrent client finishes downloading the files, instead of copying the needed files among them to
media’s respective folder, we simply make a hardlink to it to save space and to ensure the authenticity of the files intorrentsfolder such that the torrent client has no trouble seeding the files.The seeded folder which contains the needed files can also contain media that can potentially confuse Jellyfin such that it shows it; furthermore, less useless files also decreases the scanning time taken by Jellyfin. So instead of directly linking the respective folders in
torrentswe have a separate and more clean directory for Jellyfinmedia.TL;DR: to save space and to ensure your torrent client can keep seeding the files.
Jellyfin for movies/shows,
Calibre for ebooks
Retroarch for ROMs
iTunes for music (so I can put it on my iPod)
I Thought u were a FOSS activist till I saw itunes 😂😂… Cheers mate.
Lol I really am, I’ve just been too lazy to install rockbox
