That is exactly what happens. Encryption on the protocol doesn’t do anything but hide what you’re downloading from your ISP. It doesn’t prevent someone from downloading the same torrent and matching your IP to it. That’s why people recommend that you use VPNs if you’re going to do this from your house.

Most of the time I just copy/paste the terminal output and say ‘it didn’t work’ and it’ll come back with ‘I’m sorry, I meant [new command]’.

It isn’t something that I’d trust to run unattended terminal commands (yet) but it is very good when you’re just like ‘Hey, I want to try to install pihole today, how do I install and configure it’, or ‘Here’s my IP Tables entry, why can’t I connect to this service’ … ‘Ok give me the commands to update the entry to do whatever it was you just said’.

pihole, wireguard, qbittorrent, sonarr/radarr, Jellyfin, syncthing, NFS.

I’ve considered Airsonic but I haven’t found a good client that looks good and doesn’t behave weirdly. I had one launch about 500 threads trying to transcode the same song which ate up my CPU time on my server resulting in a stern e-mailing from my host.

Chatgpt is a camp for just YOLOing off into some new software. Unless it is after the knowledge cutoff it’s pretty accurate about configurations and such. It makes mistakes but it’ll get you started a lost faster.

Great post, one of my few saved posts

All of my invites come from people in a gaming community that I’m a part of.

You use a local DNS resolver that can handle encrypted DNS and also does ad blocking. pihole-ftl is what I’ve been using. Then you just set your DHCP server (your router usually) to provide the pihole server as the DNS server.

It caches entries so things you access often will resolve faster than anything you can get online, it supports all of the privacy options you could want and it also has ad blocking lists so you can block ads and trackers at the DNS level.

Yeah I also have a home array that syncs from my seedbox’s array, longer term-cheap storage (16TB and growing)

The seedbox mediaplayer setup is for remote family. I have the 4k library hidden for them because most are not using 4k HDR capable TVs or media players that can handle tone mapping so rather than bother trying to get them to fix their player->display stack or transcoding the content for them (the seedbox provider does not have hardware for transcoding and you’ll max your account’s CPU time if you try to transcode using the CPU) I simply ensure that my 1080p quality profile is SDR and x264 for compatibility.

How much storage/bandwidth do you get for $10/mo? I’m getting 8TB storage, 20TB bandwidth and unmetered Jellyfin for ~$35. It’s a managed host but I can handle an unmanaged host if it’s cheaper.

I’ve been using qBittorrent to run an unrar command (which fails if there isn’t any rar files), it works MOST of the time but it usually extracts the sample first then Sonarr see an MKV and tries to import it, which fails because it doesn’t fit the file size requirements of my quality profile.

I’m using a managed host and they don’t offer unpackerr. I’ll probably end up writing a python script to handle it and all of the weird contingencies. It isn’t really annoying to me, since I can just SSH in and fix it in a few seconds but my family members that add things via Ombi will complain when S01E02 is missing from Season 1.

Usenet isn’t bad but for the same price I just ended up paying for a seedbox which is in a country that doesn’t care about a DMCA notice, is on a 50Gb connection and a beefy Linux server so it handles bittorrent easily and also serves the media via Jellyfin.

Wow, I haven’t used the old school P2P programs in over a decade. I honestly didn’t think they existed anymore for some reason.

I use non-FOSS for work, but I have a work PC where someone else pays for all of them.

FOSS and buy games.

I used to pirate games because I was a high school/college student but buying them from Steam is just more convenient.

I pirate media though, I used streaming services when Netflix was basically the only game in town but now that there are 25 different platforms all wanting $10/mo, f that. I can setup Sonarr and Radarr on a seedbox for cheaper and it provides more flexibility of use, no limitations on sharing (seedbox provider aside) and no annoying DRM or unexpectedly getting a 720p stream instead of a 4k HDR stream because I didn’t install the latest firmware on my TV.

I’m paying for music streaming because Spotify is basically music Netflix but I’m experimenting using scrobbling/Lidarr/Airsonic.

I’m only using TorrentLeech, what’s some other good ones? I have a seedbox and procuring an invite or interview isn’t an issue. I don’t really have a problem with TorrentLeech except that sometimes movies or TV shows are uploaded as rar which chokes Sonarr and Radarr until I go and manually fix it.

Usenet is very nice for home use. I used it for years. SSL encrypted, no need to use Bittorrent over VPN. Always max download speed. The parity part was annoying on a HDD but now that I have a Gen5 NVME it is incredibly fast.

I’m back using the same setup on a Seedbox and private trackers. I share access to my media library and I have Ombi setup so my family can add their own things to Sonarr/Radarr. Since it’s on a 50Gb connection it can handle bittorrent with no issue so I don’t bother paying for Usenet.

yt-dlp

It supports YouTube playlists also, so you can just give it a massive playlist and let it go

I believe it is a video series.

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.