I have been pirating games for about a year now, and with the recent Netflix changes want to get into pirating TV and Movies as well. I have Kodi on my fire sticks, but streaming links are so unreliable.
I see on the Mega Thread there are plenty of sites to direct download shows and movies from, what sites from the mega thread do you all prefer?
Also, I get that I download them to my computer, but what service do you all use to get them on your TV? I have fire sticks on every TV, I think Plex is a free one that people used to use (and may still) but I don’t really know how any of it works. Would love some experienced advice.
I have an Arr setup with Plex and it’s great. Basically I add a TV series or movie to Sonarr/Radarr, they will then use Prowlarr to find torrent, then it will get sent to my torrent client, and then Plex will eventually show the content. It’s one of my favorite things that I have setup.
I started pirating 30 years ago, sharing floppies. Since then I’ve gone through every method imaginable, from IRC to eMule, from Mega to Usenet, and the Arr setup is the very first time I can delegate downloads to another family member sitting on the couch: that’s how smooth it is.
The only difference to your setup is that I use Jackett instead of Prowlarr, configure NZBGeek directly on Sonarr/Radarr, and use Kodi instead of Plex.
Ah, and nzb360 (or LunaSea) on people’s phones. That’s what makes it so any normie can use it. So long, streaming service salad!
I use nzb360 with my server. It’s been great but the hard drives fill up fast
I have never found a good guide to set up Sonarr/Radarr that simplifies it enough for me to do it. I’ve had a plex server running on an ASUSTOR NAS for years but I’m afraid of causing havoc with it if I try to install those. Do you know a good guide?
I just installed them through docker and winged it from there. It seems like their wiki has a good in-depth guide. https://wiki.servarr.com/
Sonarr
Radarr
qBittorrent
Jellyfin
Sonarr lets you ‘subscribe’ to TV shows. Radarr lets you ‘subscribe’ to movies. They grab the movie/TV Show as soon as they’re available and match the quality profile you choose. They find the torrent (searching on sites that you’ve configured) and send it to qBittorrent. Once the torrent is finished it downloads metadata, formats everything and puts it into a media folder structure that Jellyfin can read. They then poke Jellyfin to tell it to update it’s library with the newly downloaded content.
Jellyfin is a media player, it can be accessed by a web interface or you can install Jellyfin apps which exist on basically every platform.
You can host all of this at your house or you can host it on a seedbox (I’m currently using Ultra.cc). The Seedbox provides you with a very fast connection for accessing bittorrent (50+ Gb) and 20TB of upload bandwidth per month. The seedbox I’m using doesn’t count your Jellyfin usage (or downloading via the FTP/SFTP server) towards your bandwidth so you can stream as much as you’d like or download the files to your home media storage or both. They have different levels of storage (my ~$35/mo plan has 8TB of storage)
A seedbox also lets you join private trackers easily (as you can maintain ratio thanks to your massive upload speed and excess bandwidth). Private trackers will generally have torrents on faster hosts so you can download them quickly and the quality/selection can be better.
It’s a little bit to get everything setup but once it is setup it basically takes care of itself. I have Ombi installed also, it provides a simple user interface for my non-technical users so that they can add things to Sonarr/Radarr without having to much around with their interfaces.
Thank you for this. I’ve been using Kodi for years but have been considering something different, and this is the first time using sonarr and a seedbox has made sense to me.
There’s a plugin for Kodi to access Jellyfin content so you could get it all setup and it’ll just plug into your existing front-end Kodi system.
Kodi and Jellyfin are great alternatives to Plex. Look around a bit.
As a further question to OP’s above- does anyone have any recommendations for sites that have movies/tv that are in decent quality (1080p) but aren’t necessarily blu ray quality so that I can fit more on a HDD? For instance, I want to download certain films in 4k that I absolutely love but for stuff that I’m indifferent on or I don’t need to be in 4k (sitcoms like the office) I want them to take as little space as possible
You’ll generally want to look for h265 or HEVC in the description. These are newer codecs that preserve more quality in smaller file sizes. Neither will play on a Raspberry Pi if that’s a concern.
it is not. I would love to do a raspberry pi setup but I can’t find anywhere that either a) has them in stock or b)has them in stock and doesn’t charge an arm and a leg.
I really appreciate it though, I’ll definitely check this out for some of my series that I don’t need in 4k
I think they do actually work with a 4, but not the 3b that I tried on.
oh nice, thanks for letting me know!
1337s is probably the best public tracker for h265
Real-Debrid is a paid service, but for ~ $3 a month you can get much more reliable results from Kodi and its plugins. Basically it has the torrents downloaded on its servers and sends you a streaming link so you don’t need a VPN or anything. Imo its worth it no doubt. Been using it for a few months now worth every penny! Movies/Shows are easy to find in most cases.
For anime i’ve found it easier to add the shows manually from subsplease or nyaa using the Unchained app on android
I have VLC on my phone and my computer. If I don’t need subtitles then I simply use VLC on my phone to cast the video file on my computer to the television.
All devices are on the same network. If the file has subtitles I need then I use Videostream but that requires some additional downloading to get it to work on the network so I only use that when subtitles are absolutely needed.
Stremio! it’s like the netflix experience - but better. Pick from some of the free addons, setup a Google drive addon or link it to real debrid.
In terms of an app to stream on Android TV, I currently use OnStream: https://onstream.to I would recommend installing it on phone, then create an account, then link it to TV app if you want sync and watch list.
For sources, as others recommended, use Prowlarr. I am using all the free public indexers along with Radarr and Sonarr.
Onstream downloads keep failing, is there a way I can find out why and how to fix it? I’ve looked and can’t find any answers so far
I’ve only streamed using the app. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
