How to begin setting up a media center?

agame@lemm.ee to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 116 points –

I have 16TB NAS dedicated to storing TV shows. It is just a cabinet with ryzen 2600 and no graphics card. I have installed openmediavault in it to access it via smb to other devices. I am an absolute noob in setting up a server. Please tell me how I should go on about turning it into a media consumption machine.

P. S: I usually use VLC on android and MPV on linux to consume the media.

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This is a guide someone on Reddit gave me years ago. Hope this will be helpful

I imagine most of your integrated torrent searches involve "linux distros" in 1080p and 4k. I'm a step above that because I have not even touched the qbittorrent app in months. It works automatically.

An *Arr stack is a collection of software that tracks, adds, searches, organizes and downloads your media collection. My stack consists of

Radarr - For tracking and managing movies.

Sonarr - For tracking and managing series and episodes.

Lidarr - For tracking and managing music albums, artists and songs.

Readarr - For tracking and managing books.

Prowlarr - Containing torrent tracker information to automatically add to the above 4 apps.

Ombi / Overseer - Requesting media - Movies, Series, Books, Music

qBittorrent - Downloading stuff.

All this runs on a "home server" as Docker containers. Thy all have web interfaces that you can access, even qBittorrent. Your workflow is as follows:

Say, you want to watch a movie that comes out in 3 months. You go to Ombi and put in a request for that movie. Ombi forwards the request to Radarr where the movie has its metadata downloaded and analyzed from IMDB and TMDB. Radarr tracks its release and once that happens it starts searching torrent trackers for a torrent meeting your search criteria like size, quality, etc. To search torrent trackers you need special queries that are handled by Prowlarr and distributed to all other *arr apps.

Once a suitable torrent is found, it's sent to qBittorrent where it's downloaded automatically. qBit plays very nicely with the *arrs. After downloading, the file is moved, renamed, pampered by Radarr in the media library. A movie is no big deal but imagine you are downloading and renaming a series with 9 seasons.

You can top that off with something like Jellyfin (like Plex) and you have your own homegrown Netflix. It sounds very complicated but it isn't. Eventually you have to go to Ombi to request and to Jellyfin to consume.

And it really pays off in the long run. For example The Witcher S02E01 leaked a few days before its official release date on Netflix. I found out about it when I opened Jellyfin and saw a new episode waiting for me. It's set-and-forget.
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