I’m trying to set this kind of thing up. Any guides you can share? Plex is all setup but all the other stuff (integrating torrenting safely) I’m having trouble with!
I don't have much advice in the way of torrents. As I said, I am using usenet now instead. It's a direct download instead of p2p, so you're not seeding and you don't need a VPN to hide you as long as you're using SSL connections to usenet. Since it's a direct download and I pay for the connection to usenet provider, I can almost saturate my gigabit fiber connection pulling new content instead of waiting for enough peers to trickle kbps to me. To get started, you'll need at least one Usenet provider (paid) and at least one usenet indexer (usually paid) to help you find content. I'd recommend checking out the /r/usenet subreddit for more details. Especially their FAQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Usenet/wiki/faq).
For my stack, I've got a Synology NAS device which is running docker versions of the download managers Sonarr and Radarr, the download client NZBget, Ombi for user requests and Plex for streaming to devices.
I'm using the Synology DS1019+. No SSDs for disk or caching. I did have a lot of trouble when using SABnzbd as the download client. It would take much longer to unpack and verify files than it would to download them. After switching to NZBget I didn't have any more performance issues. Which aspect is slow for you?
Plex transcoding mainly and yeah SABnzbd would take an eternity.
The DS1019+ has no issue with transcoding from what I’ve read, and can handle even up to 4K right?
I since switched to an Intel NUC running Ubuntu + Docker. I was able to use bash scripts to auto update everything nightly so it’s thankfully (almost) zero maintenance now that it is setup and it stores everything on my Synology.
Running outta space though...
To be honest I’ve been slowly replacing my Plex library with iTunes purchases. A lot of movies come up on sale for £2.99.
Apple even upgrade HD purchases to 4K for free and I don’t have to worry about hosting anything. Think given how many £££s I’ve spent on my Plex homelab vs buying from Apple I’d come out even and if factoring in time spent curating a digital library (a lot of time) I’d probably be somewhat ahead.
Still hedging my bets by keeping my Plex library though!
Yep, I can stream 4k without any issues. I don't see any reason why you couldn't run the same stack on the Intel NUC though.
I'd be happy to purchase iTunes movies if I could play them back over Plex, so I can still access my content from one place and have consistency of features across devices. I don't think any commercial platforms really support that though. It's one of the reasons I don't use Lidarr and pirate music too. I'm okay paying for Spotify because it's my one source of music and with the family account everyone can sync songs with their devices. If I had to go to multiple platforms for music the way we do for streaming and movies I wouldn't hesitate to start downloading music again.
