With the recent password sharing crackdown, I decided to ditch my Netflix subscription and try piracy. What I miss about Netflix is scrolling through content and finding something to watch. With piracy I need to know exactly what I am looking for.
So I am wondering if it’s possible to have a Netflix like GUI but powered by piracy? And as this is the pirate world, it shows shows and movies not just from Netflix but also from the other streaming services? And finally it is available on TVs ( Samsung tizen in my case). Something like this would be the best case scenario. Wondering if someone has a similar setup?
Protip - If you like scrolling for inspiration on what to download, check out JustWatch. It’s a site with clean UI that catalogues shoes across streaming platforms.
No piracy, you do that yourself with Plex and the *Arr.
The only one here answer the question about looking for content. The rest are great (plex + *arr stack myself) but it didn’t solve the issue of WHAT media to add to plex/kodi/stremio/etc.
Need to be an *arr or another program we can docker to basically be Just Watch with a click and torrent search.
Front End:
- You can have multiple users,
- tracks your progress in a series,
- gives you imdb and soundtrack info,
- metadata and cover art.
- Automatically handles discoverability - Log in with your account and it’ll find your server wherever you are in the world!
- Great app support across mobile, tv, web, and desktop.
- Automatically syncs to films/tv folder(s) when new shows are downloaded.
Back end:
- Versatile and stable torrenting client.
- Can control up/download speed
- Online front end can be a lifesaver when diagnosing issues remotely.
- FOSS
- Automatically discovers torrents for your chosen shows and movies, and forwards them onto torrent client.
- Can track unreleased content, downloading it as it becomes available.
- Supports user-configurable quality formats to weed out torrents that don’t meet your quality or space requirements.
- Automatically searches multiple trackers - If one tracker lacks a show, it can try another!
- FOSS
- Indexes thousands of known torrent trackers for all kinds of content, with sonarr/radarr-ready configs.
- Add tracker to Prowlarr and it syncs to Sonarr/Radarr clients automatically
- Add your own private trackers too with a simple interface
- FOSS
Operating System:
- Debian-based server OS with powerful terminal interface for managing and starting your first streaming server
- Rock-solid stability of debian, paired with a curated packaging system that reduces risks of breaking configurations
- Popular services are auto-configured to align with best practices, such as Nextcloud, Plex, Sonarr etc. all installing and configuring their own databases at install
- Powerful utilities for managing disks, files, power management and other server necessities with minimal existing knowledge of the command line
- Can be set up in a day on a raspberry pi, and be streaming torrented content by the evening!
- Great support, both with hardware and software. The devs are active and helpful on github if you have problems.
- Loads of tutorials for installing every single service you could need for a piracy server, from VPNs to linking services together and accessing them remotely.
- FOSS
DNS:
- Link your IP to a friendly domain name for free.
- Like, free. I can type in my domain anywhere on earth and access my rpi server easily.
- Loads of choices available
- Just log in once every 6 months to keep the DNS listing active.
Is it possible to have such a setup without the torrents but rather using a streaming website? Also does are there prepackaged setups with all these ready to use for example a raspberry pi os built with everything. I just hook it up with my NAS for storage and am good to go?
Dietpi is pretty good to get up and going in a day or so. Loads of videos on youtube for setting up various services too :)
Open media vault might be an option over dietpi but I’ve never used it myself. Again, lots of youtube documentation:)
If you want to stream torrents, you can use stremio and torrentio which let you stream the content of a torrent instead of download, but depending on the media you watch youll find it difficult to get enough seeders to download it fast enough to stream.
The benefit of running the downloads over streaming is that a poorly seeded torrent won’t ruin my viewing experience since by the time I view it’s stored locally.
Using docker containers is a lot easier to manage than installing all the packages directly to the OS. Using docker compose simplifies this even more. You have a simple docker-compose.yml file and it’s usable to any other Linux environment! Just have to be aware of where your drive mount mappings are.
Everyone always recommends the torrent solutions, plex and the arrs, but unless it’s something I’m really excited about or want in extra high quality, I find it’s easier to just use the browser streaming sites. In Firefox with ublock there’s no ads, it has subtitles for multiple languages loaded automatically usually, and a nice ui that shows most popular show/movies, and has a good catalogue. There’s lots to choose from, I think the guide has a list, but the ones I use are:
Bflix.gg Hdtoday.cc Fmovies.to
Quick, simple and painless.
I cna vouch for fmovies and there’s also goku dot SX. Firefox plus adblock is the way to go. A lot of these sites also give you imdb ratings and a bunch of other things that regular streaming sites don’t.
The files these sites rely on are generally the lowest available quality in their resolution, that’s why they aren’t recommended often. Fair play if you don’t care about visual and audio quality, but I find them unwatchable most of the time. The artifacts and distortion detract from the experience significantly.
This is fine but doesn’t work unless you’re watching on a device with a decent and usable web browser. Most people are using android boxes and Apple TVs etc so that’s not a viable solution.
The option to cast a stream from a phone to a Chromecast, Roku, etc has been pretty functional for quite some time now.
That’s just another not ideal situation though. Casting is crap, that’s why people buy media boxes. They get a remote, a UI, apps, etc.
https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases/
It’s a torrent client with a Netflix-like interface. It hides all the torrent stuff from you and just shows movies and shows in a nice format. It downloads and plays on the fly, it also grabs subtitles as needed, you can pick 720 or 1080, and you can choose to keep or delete the stuff you watched after you’re done.
Keep in mind that under the hood it’s still a torrent client, so if you have trouble with that kind of thing in your country you may want to use a VPN and all that jazz.
You could install Overseerr which also integrates nicely into sonarr & radar
It doesn’t have a TV app though.
You can set it up to monitor your Plex watchlist, which essentially turns Plex into your Overseerr TV app
TIL
Thanks! I still kind of like the overseerr UI but a great option to have.
For the tv app part:
You can use jellyfin to host your media, it has apps for many types of television. The jellyfin-specific fork of overseer is called jellyseer.
Yeah but you have to delve into developer tools and build the app from source for TizenTV
That was the reason I went with Plex instead of jellyfin for me
