Everyone here is talking about how to get the latest and best stuff, but no one is talking about how they actually manage it 😜
So, how do YOU manage your Movies / Shows / Music / eBooks / Games?
I begin:
I use Prowlarr + Radarr + Sonarr + Jellyfin.
I have
/datadirectory organised like this:/data ├── media │ ├── books │ ├── movies │ ├── music │ └── tv └── torrents ├── books ├── movies ├── music └── tvFiles added from Sonarr goes to
torrents/tvand that for Radarrtorrents/movies. Once the torrent client has downloaded the files, Sonarr and Radarr hardlinks the needed files tomedia’s respective folders. I have setmedia/tvfor shows andmedia/moviesfor movies on Jellyfin. Everything is automated, I love it.I have nothing to add to this. This is exactly how I do it as well.
I have this with a usenet folder as well, sub folder for game roms that I mostly manage on my own by manual hardlinking
I have a similar setup but without the hardlinks. Can you explain the benefits/reason for using the them? I think I understand what a hardlink is, but don’t quite get why you’d use it in this context.
The torrent client can get confused about the authenticity of the files if you make any changes to the files that were downloaded. It can also have trouble finding all the files required for seeding, so moving the needed files to
mediais a no.Once the torrent client finishes downloading the files, instead of copying the needed files among them to
media’s respective folder, we simply make a hardlink to it to save space and to ensure the authenticity of the files intorrentsfolder such that the torrent client has no trouble seeding the files.The seeded folder which contains the needed files can also contain media that can potentially confuse Jellyfin such that it shows it; furthermore, less useless files also decreases the scanning time taken by Jellyfin. So instead of directly linking the respective folders in
torrentswe have a separate and more clean directory for Jellyfinmedia.TL;DR: to save space and to ensure your torrent client can keep seeding the files.
Underneath the file system, files are represented by inodes. (Or is it multiple inodes? Not sure.)
A file in the file system is basically a link to an inode. A hard link, then, just creates another file with a link to the same underlying inode.
source: stackoverflow sym versus hard links
Making a copy simply makes another inode, doubling your storage usage. You can use jdupes to convert duplicate files to hard links.
Pretty much my method. On an unRaid server so that I can have a flat user space interface and expand as needed.
My collecting isn’t as automated and only my video media is aggregated into a viewing platform (Plex), but it’s pretty easy to find anything on a moments notice.
Would you happen to have any recommendations for any compete noob UNRAID resources? I have a GSA and I’m very interested in using UNRAID on that, but I haven’t played around with non-Windows or OSX OSes in over 15 years.
The unRaid forums are the place to go. TBH, it’s so bullet proof I only ever do anything with it when I rebuild my server. The last time was ~3 years ago.
The management is a nice gui, the docker setup is mostly automatic, but doing anything beyond basics is command line. I almost never use *ix but it’s really not that bad.
I’ll start there, thank you! That’s the only thing holding me back from having a home server, like I’ve always wanted. Well, that, and having to screw like ten 2.5” SAS drives into sleds. That’s too many screws.
Look for spaceinvaderone on YT. He has great tutorials for almost everything. One note of caution, the Unraid UI has evolved, so some things ma look different.
I also run Unraid with Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and Overseer running as dockers. Its a great system.
I second this. Sapceinvaderone has some great Unraid videos. I’d also recommend checking our IBRACORP, they have some videos about setting up Unraid just like @[email protected]
Mostly the same over here. I also run Jellyseer for automated show/film request handling, autoscan for faster Jellyfin scanning since my drive is a network drive not directly attached to the server, and unpackerr for auto-unzipping files from the occasional Usenet style download with a movie split into 60 RAR files.
For managing my library on disk, I just recently made the effort to set up the *arr apps. I love having the metadata, tagging, organizing, and file naming all consistent and automated. Previously I used mp3tag and filebot to manage them and it was way more manual. Everything is set up with docker-compose and Ansible.
Library file stuff:
- Two Radarr instances, one for 4k and another for lower resolutions
- Sonarr for TV
- Lidarr for music
- Two readarr instances, one for epub/pdf and one for audiobooks
- Jackett
- deluge+openVPN
For library frontend stuff:
- Jellyfin for movies, tv, music, audiobooks
- Plex, for when Jellyfin is acting up
- Jellyseer for TV & movie requests
- LaunchBox for videogames and emulators
- Calibre + calibreWeb for ebooks & syncing to my Kobo eReader
Haven’t set up yet:
- flaresolverr
- unpackerr
- audiobookshelf
Doesn’t exist yet/wishlist:
- *arr app for emulator ROMs (I’ll have to check out romm, looks pretty cool!)
Why multiple instances instead of using quality profiles?
AFAIK you can’t have different qualities (4k/1080) of the same movies/series on the same instance.
Frankly because I haven’t figured out quality profiles yet and saw separate instances recommended a few places.
Is readarr really worth it? I’m a heavy reader, but i’ve not set it up.
Also, audiobookshelf is worth the effort. If you’re holding off because you don’t want to organize your library, the folder structure they use is really really good. I run all sorts of services, and I like jellyfin, komga, the arrs, etc. I love audiobookshelf. By far my most used app.
It’s alright. I have it tied in to my existing Calibre library so my metadata and library management workflows haven’t really changed. The process of finding and downloading new books has just been streamlined a bit.
In general just creating folders and keeping everything organized.
- Jellyfin: Media Center to stream movies, TV shows and music
- sonarr, radar, lidarr: manage collections and download, TV shows, movies and music, respectively
- transmission: torrent client, through VPN connection (NordVPN)
- Jackett: tracker manager
- stash: like Jellyfin, but for linux-iso files /s
All of that runs in docker containers on my NAS, using docker-compose to deploy the stack.
DOOM (see citation) folders mostly
I have a computer running TrueNAS Scale with a network drive accessable on my network from all my PCs and my TVs.
All of my systems can access the drive and play the content via VLC.
Is it efficient? No.
Would I recommend it? Also no.
Citation: DOOM stands for Didn’t Organize Only Moved
@Gormadt
Sergeant Murphys Laws of Combat Operations, 6: If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.
I have a pretty stable setup now. I mainly focus on TV and Movies but I have the following:
- Plex for streaming
- Overseerer for media requests
- Radarr and Sonarr for Movie and TV acquisition
- Jackett for indexers
- Gluetun for vpn
From there I basically let radarr and sonarr handle the organizing for the most part. I have a movies folder and a TV folder in my NAS that they save to. I really only have to go in and clean things up every few months or so.
What sort of cleaning up do you have to do?
Unregistered torrents (from upgrades to season packs or nuked releases) and the occasional upgrade paths that don’t always work.
My own upgrade paths tend to pull in some versions which get made redundant so every so often, just ensuring there’s no multiple copies as a result of said upgrades
- Sonarr and Radarr for getting torrents
- Prowlarr for setting up torrent indexers
- Bazarr for getting subtitles
- Jellyfin for playback
- Tachiyomi (Android app) for Manga
NAS hosting all media and running:
- Sonarr for grabbing and managing TV shows
- Radarr does the same for movies
- Lidarr just for an overview of upcoming/missing music releases
- Navidrome to stream music (replaces Spotify)
- Jackett to manage torrent indexers
- qBittorrent via OpenVPN
Plus a VM running Nicotine+ (Soulseek client) for music sharing.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but every time I open a guide on how to set it up I get overwhelmed.
Here’s the breakdown, so you won’t be. Set up gluetun (for your VPN) with docker compose. Use another docker compose file for your torrent apps, and put them all behind gluetun (gluetun wiki is very easy to follow). Once they’re running, you just tell each one where to find the others, and enter their respective api keys.
Before you download anything, grab a torrent ip check magnet link, and make sure you’re getting something other than your own ip. It’s super simple, and if you follow a guide you won’t even have to keep track of where you are in the process.
Check out whatever the Lemmy equivalent to r/selfhosted is. Very nice group always willing to help.
I dump everything into a single folder. Like a junk drawer. Because I really only save junk anyway 🤷🏻♂️
- Jellyfin + arrs for Media (TV, movie, music)
- Calibre for eBooks of all kinds
Plex and Calibre
this is the only way.
I used to maintain a Jellyfin server for my media, but moving to university put a stop to that - the campus network is cringe and makes it impossible to dial in from the outside. So… just boring old folders for video, and Calibre for my ebooks.
(I did make an attempt at moving Jellyfin to my VPS, but transcoding is… not possible on one core, to put it lightly.)
Does tailscale work on the uni network?
No, which is a shame. It would be a pretty elegant solution.
Wireguard from your server to the vps, proxy from the vps to your server.
That’s surprising. They are pretty good at their NAT traversal
.
impossible to dial in from the outside
Cloudflare Tunnel
Unfortunately you can’t stream media through tunnels on a free plan. I also don’t like how it requires Cloudflare to do TLS termination - not like I’m sending anything sensitive, but it still bugs me.
Sure you can its not like they are doing anything to stop you until your use is very excessive which I am assuming it’s not
Can you use the VPS to create an exposed network and retain the jellyfin server on the device at home? I did that in university in a similar situation
I use plex, I configured plex so server was “located” my VPS address and the VPS routed back to my computer (which was behind a double NAT so I couldn’t port forward)
I’m on a dynamic ip and I’ve been considering doing this just to stop my remote services from being glitchy whenever the ip changes.
But I need to setup pfsense or OPNsense first so I can route everything properly.
Plex for playback.
Transmission for torrents.
Radarr for movies.
Sonarr for tv.
Lidarr for music.
Bazarr for subtitles.
Readarr for books.
Ombi for discovery and requests.
Tautulli for statistics and newsletters.
Sonarr/Radarr + Plex has been good enough for me.
- Movies / Shows. Self-hosted automated Jellyfin media streaming stack
- eBooks. Calibre
- pictures. Hydrus Network
I hate Calibre and Hydrus because they make copies of files instead of keeping track of them wherever I want them to be.
- porn. Stashapp
Thanks for those recommendations…cough cough
Completely agree Calibre creating its own copies of files drives me crazy, but I still use it.
