This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/piracy by /u/MommyNyxx on 2024-09-10 06:22:19+00:00.

I saw a post on /r/plex asking how people who use Plex app their only streaming service are doing it. I got halfway through writing up a response detailing my server setup before realizing I was on the Plex subreddit, not the Piracy subreddit, and that I was being a little too detailed for polite company.

It’s a good response though though, and I wanted to share it, so I’m posting it here.

I cancelled everything and only use Plex now.

After I got a laptop, I used the parts from my gaming PC to upgrade my server, so it has a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of ram, and a Nvidia GeForce 1050. The video card does a good job transcoding video, especially for people watching from outside the house, as there are multiple external users. The CPU is useful for doing sonic analysis on my music to have better radio stations in Plexamp, as well as other tasks like generating video preview thumbnails.

I put two 12 TB hard drives in for a total of 24 TB. The two drives are in a single ZFS pool mounted at /mnt/data so I can access all of the data from one mount point. I’m planning on adding two more 12 TB hard drives soon because I ran out of storage while building my music library.

I know keeping everything in a single pool with no parity is bad - I plan on getting more drives one day and using a raid config with proper parity, but for now I just have a backup script that syncs my personal files and media that is hard to find to Backblaze B2, probably about 12 TB in total.

I have a docker container that runs transmission and routes all traffic through ExpressVPN. I also run NZBGet, a Usenet client, set to use Newshosting as a provider over an encrypted connection.

I’m running Radarr (for movies), Sonarr (for TV shows), and Lidarr (for music). All three of those have NZBGeek and Nyaa.si as an indexer. For Lidarr, I also have Headphones as an indexer. I run Jackett so I can add 1337x and a couple of semi-private trackers as an indexer. They are all set up to use Transmission to download torrents over VPN and NZBGet to download files from Usenet.

I use nzb360 pro on my phone (Android) to manage the collection and downloads. I can add TV shows or movies to Radarr or Sonarr in the app, and then Radarrr or Sonarr will search my indexers for the files, send them to transmission or NZBGet for download and import them when they are done.

I can add artists to Lidarr the same way, but most of my music comes from import lists. I have an import list that syncs with my Spotify playlists and followed artists, and import lists to grab the top 200 artists of several last.fm tags. The result is a couple hundred thousand songs, mostly from artists I’ve never heard. They all have sonic analysis done by Plex, though, so I have an amazing ability to discover new music from the radio and “similar tracks” feature.

I know there are a lot of improvements that can be made on this system. Jackett and NZBGet have better alternatives, using tidal-dl, ect, and I plan to explore all of those soon. I also want to run something like calibre-web and get things like books, audiobooks, comics, and manga. But it’s been really fun just to get it this far, it’s the only thing I use for video now, and it’s pretty close to replacing Spotify, too.