I figured with the ever-increasing cost of streaming services and the constantly changing landscape of providers that we should have an all things digital video thread to share our experiences.
I’ll pin this post and use it as a one-stop shop for resources and websites
IPTV
Whatsapp +442080401064 (was on Aliexpress, Jubal uses this one)
Try this discord for a number of vetted and curated services BroadCastaways
NZB tracker
Nzbgeek.info
Usenet host
astraweb.com.
Movie Torrents
yts.mx
This is my current setup, everything runs on a Synology NAS with 32Tb of arrayed storage, but you could run it from any kind of PC with enough storage, the only manual parts are movie downloads and TV show initial selection, everything else happens automatically.
I’ve included the cost of every service or license that gets used.
For TV shows I use the TV calendar to identify shows I want to download
I then add them to Sonarr and it finds and triggers the download of each episode as it comes out, defining the required resolution and preferred codec and even the preferred release group
SABNZB then downloads it, and renames it to my standards and places it in the file structure for Emby to read, so new episodes pop up in Emby automatically as soon as they’re downloaded
For IPTV I route my provider via IPTV Editor, which adds very complete, accurate and time-shifted EPG for your channels, lets you choose which channels to include in your IPTV app and how you want to structure them (So you can get rid of all the ones you’ll never watch and bundle relevant channels together) and lets you fix the channel icons to make them consistent and accurate. You can automatically update the EPG and it will flag newly added channels by your provider so you can decide what to do with it. If you have IPTV, this is a complete game changer and works with any provider. You can even refresh the titles of the PPV channels automatically so you can see which PPV channel is playing what.
I feed this into Emby using the free IPTV and live TV plugins and it works fantastically well
I’m looking at a way to see new movie releases and flag them for automatic download as they become available, but haven’t found anything that works as well as I’d like.
Outstanding
I use a similar system and have Radarr for movies, which is basically the movie version of Sonarr.
I have used Plex for years but it has added a lot of bloat that I dont need so now looking for a simpler option.
I use Jellyfin which works fine for what I need it to do. Only issue is it loses posters for some reason which is frustrating. There is probably a way to fix it but I usually just re-scan.
I’ve been struggling with Radarr for a while, mostly around getting the right sized files, the interface for size constraints is fucking horrific
But what I’m really missing is a curated list of new digital and dvd releases that I can use to trigger downloads.
I dumped Plex for Emby a few years ago, never looked back, it does what I want and works on every device I want it to, very little bloat.
Jellyfin will stream 4K HDR content from my slow ass PC without needing to pay for plex pass, so it gets my vote purely for that reason alone.
I now need to buy some 12tb hard drives as a result though…
To be honest, I’m just too lazy these days for anything too elaborate.
I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass years ago (and I don’t even really use Plex much either.
Back in the day I did the whole Home Theatre PC under the TV thing packed with TV tuner cards, Window Media Centre, Harmony universal remote, with all sorts of hacks for commercial skipping and EPG stuff.
But I also liked to build my own PCs and there was a reason I eventually switched to more appliance-like MacBooks: I no longer had the time or patience to fuck around with it all. Especially with TV when the minute something fucks up, you’re copping the stink eye from the rest of the family.
So while I’m happy to vicariously look at and admire theses sweet setups, I’ll continue to fork over money to the grubby streaming services purely for convenience & laziness.
1000%
I think I’m in almost the exact same boat.
I’ve dabbled too. But I have a wife and 4 kids that, unless the setup works exactly as well as Netflix, will never engage with this stuff unfortunately.
Love looking at other people’s setups though.
My family have always used whatever Home Theatre setup I’ve been running, the kids grew up almost never watching broadcast TV and I’ve always had very stable setups.
Sport has been the one area that I haven’t had a solution for till recently, now with the IPTV integration and proper EPG, I can find whatever I want and if it’s on at an inconvenient time, I can record it, I’m recording the British GP and the Toronto Indycar races overnight tomorrow night so I can watch then on Monday, and I’m watching the Lions - Wallabies rugby right now.
Nice post, the only thing I can add is getting onto private torrent sites and then integrating them with radarr. That saying I really don’t like radarr so I just use Medusa. It’s got great integration with private torrent sites and it allows me to get the filez I want with the quality I want.
A word of warning it’s a slippery slope, Once I started I was only on 2-3 TB now I’ve got 76TB of storage. I just run everything on unraid and docker containers.
Don’t I know it, I have 32Tb of storage and am waiting for 16Tb drives to drop to under $300 so I can start replacing the 8Tb’s I currently have.
if you’re mentioning apps or sites or tools, chuck the URL up as well so I can put it in the pinned post
Why spend so much on storage as opposed to paying to stream the content?
Because I get to decide what I can watch and when, not some streaming company, they have a bad habit of dropping content, also, to be able to watch anything I want, I’d have to fork out at least $100 a month, so the storage pays for itself in a year.
Take 10 shows I’m either watching, waiting for a new season or regularly rewatch
The Sopranos - Max
Red Dwarf - Stan
Justified - Stan
Drive to Survive - Netflix
The Wire - Max
The Ultimate Fighter - Disney +
Severance - Apple TV+
Fargo - Stan
Tulsa King - Prime Video
Kin - Not available in AU
I’ve watched episodes or entire seasons of all of these in the past 2 weeks.
I’ve optimised the sources to minimise the number of services I’d need and selected the tier that offers equivalent capability (multiple concurrent streams. min 1080p, 5.1 audio and downloading for offline viewing)
Costs
Max - $22 a month
Stan - $17 a month
Netflix - $25 a month
Disney+ $21 a month
Apple TV+ $13 a month
Prime Video - $10 a month
Total is $109 a month, with zero guarantee that they’ll have what I want (nobody’s carrying Kin or a lot of other UK TV shows) or that they’ll have all seasons. And I haven’t even considered movies, which are a royal pain in the arse,
Kin is available on SBS On Demand
Really?, glad something’s on a free source… for now.
Very much for now. Just checked and it expires in 2 months……
Similar to what other people have said, I wish I had the planning ability and the time to set up something like this, let alone the time to watch any of it… but:
I’ll save you some time by saying the British GP was like two weeks ago so you don’t need to wait till Monday…
Of course, for some stupid reason I thought there was a second UK race.
To be honest, I really didn’t plan it, it kind of grew organically, starting with manually downloading TV shows and movies to sit behind an HTPC front-end. Then I started adding automated tracking and downloading and it snowballed from there.
It was a useful exercise for me to create the diagram so I can see how it all fits together and how much it costs…
The next obvious evolution will be dumping the NAS and using cloud storage, but we’re about 2 years of price drops away from that, 35Tb is about $500 a year at best, needs to be around $300-350 to
