Help me transition from 2012 to 2025

I have been torrenting the same primitive way for a long time. Turn on a VPN, open up a browser I only use for this purpose, go to tpb or yts, grab my movie, and shut it all down when the movies over.

I've only updated my torrent client in this time, the method has not evolved.

Now im interested in self hosting jellyfin with an arr stack, with the end goal being to share it with friends and family outside my lan. I'd like to use docker containers so its all containerized, and of course keep it safe and secure.

What kind of set up, from hardware to software, would you recommend to get this going? Any guides in particular? I'm especially iffy on allowing remote access for non-tech savvy family (like a roku app), so any tips/guide recs for that would be helpful.

I've been searching around some and I've found a lot of resources but I'd like to get the opinions of people in here before diving in.

I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I'm wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)

Tldr: Suggestions or guides for beginner setting up jellyfin/arr/ remote access for family?

34 comments

May I a recommend a change in approach?
Ditch the torrents for Usenet. Faster downloads, fully encrypted, none of the risks of torrents.
I used to torrent the old fashioned way (and still do for some obscure stuff), but I switched over to usenet.
The arr stack fully supports usenet natively.
You can check out https://trash-guides.info/ for a massive amount of information.
The TLDR is:
get a usenet subscription. I use easy news, viper news and one more I cannot recall. Easy news unlimited, the other two are “block” accounts from an entirely separate usenet provider to “fill in the blanks” if any files are missing from my main provider.
sign up for several indexers. DrunkenSlug is my favorite. I am subbed to a few more as well. The more you have the more you’ll have access to.
set up your arr stack. Use Prowlarr to configure your indexers, which will propagate them to Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr.
set up your download client with your provider configuration. I used SABnzb
fine tune your Sonarr and Radarr. Try to prioritize releases/codecs/encodes/remuxes based on your needs. I just try to grab h265/x265 or HEVC to reduce storage consumption as much as possible. You can even specify if you want 5.1 audio, Dolby Atmos, HDR, etc. it’s all there in trash guides.
set up your Jellyfin. There is where I cannot help because I use Plex. I did set it up and it scanned my library quite well but it’s just not there yet for normal users (friends and family)
This is just a very high level overview. Feel free to ask tho I am not a Usenet/Arr guru by any means but my setup works.
Edit: you can still incorporate torrents into your workflow but you really don’t need to. In the off chance you can’t find something on Usenet and you find a torrent, just download it normally and throw it in your library. Jellyfin will pick it up and pull the relevant metadata for you. I do the same thing using YT-DLP for videos.
- While I'm sure usenet us all you say it is and more, I object at a philosophical level to paying for what is essentially a piracy service.
  
  And you know what? I do tend to agree with your view. It’s just that I’ve reached a point where I can’t be bothered with private trackers and some of the weird rules some of them have. Specially now that I migrated away from a seed box to an in-house (literally) server.
  The convenience is top notch tho!
  
  Yeah it’s not for everybody but the price is quite reasonable. You’re basically just paying for the bandwidth.
- Usenet is good for some things, torrents are still king for others
  Like if I want a specific release of a movie in a certain quality, like a dv remux then I might pop on blu or ptp. 90% of the time I’ll just grab a dv/hdr10 remux on usenet though
  Anime is all about trackers, ab/baka/nyaa destroy usenet. Animetosho makes usenet passable but still destroyed by the first three
  Music is the same. If I want some basic mainstream release in scene quality then sure usenet is fine. If I want to be sure it’s tagged decently and actually a solid 16bit flac? Red/orpheus. If I want anything remotely niche, international artists, indie shit, like even singles and eps by popular artists? Or I’ll pop on soulseek but the downside there is I can’t figure out how to automate it
  
  For music I would definitely agree with you. RIP What.CD
  AnimeTosho covers the majority if not all my anime needs. Makes it easy for people to just add stuff to plex watchlist, and it gets automatically downloaded with the preferred quality and language settings.
  I still have a (very) old Baka account. That site is a godsend. Nyaa comes in clutch at times, I won’t deny that.
  Movies and TV shows, tho? Usenet. Specially western stuff.
- Usenet is an excellent suggestion. I wish I wasn't too poor for it. I miss the days when it was included in an ISPs internet connection.
  It's definitely easier than trying to break your way into the private tracker game. Trash guides is top tier useful stuff.
  
  Usenet: you missed the window but Black Friday and Labor Day are in my experience the best time to sign up. I pay $35/yr unlimited.
  Private tracker: it’s not as hard as you think
  Get in red: either via invite (easy mode) or do their interview (not that difficult). Once you do you need to upload 25gb of stuff and have a (I think) 0.7 ratio (maybe 1.0?).
  Easiest way is to rip songs from streaming sites: https://github.com/nathom/streamrip and upload. If you’re fast and get a hot album you can literally get it in like 2 days. Don’t bother with insanely popular albums like if charli xcx or Tyler the creator or whoever drops something. Old heads on the site will have that shit scripted and dropped so fast. Or browse requests with bounty and upload whatever.
  Then you open up the invite forum. Then you ask for invites to wherever. Then you maintain ratio to not fuck over the person who invited you. Then you’re done, basically
  
  In that case, do the exact same thing and ignore Usenet.
  You can still automate everything and do everything I said with torrents!!
  Btw, there are excellent Usenet discounts. I currently pay approx… 50ish dollars a year for both providers and indexers? But I understand it may not be feasible. Just sharing the options.
  You can definitely still integrate the whole stack with both public and private trackers
- I appreciate you writing all this out. I experimented with moving over to usenet around black Friday sales and I found it pretty difficult. I tried a few free trials for indexers and couldn't get a popular movie to download and play. I eventually just torrented it, and that worked fine.
  I'll look into it again, a lot of people love it so its worth considering. Thanks again.
- Open; iiii>!!<e
Maybe I'm a foagie, but this method is still pretty great.
setup rclone sync with one way sync from seedbox to network storage
download torrent with seedbox
seedbox automatically syncs with network storage
use tiny media manager to format metadata and move from sync folder to media library folder
purge torrent
It's mostly automatic. Only thing I have to do is add the torrents and purge the torrents, because everything else runs on a schedule. Why break what isn't broken.
- What's the benefit of a seedbox over a VPN?
  
  Ephemeral. If my VPN is off for whatever reason, I don't still get letters in the mail from my ISP. So it depends on how much you fear that, I guess.
- Do you manually format the title, cover art, etc of your downloads or is that handled automatically?
  
  https://www.tinymediamanager.org/docs/commandline#movie-module
I have an arr stack with jellyfin set up on an old PC running truenas scale.
This is the guide that helped me through it.
I don’t know where you live but in some places of the world ISP couldn’t give a sack if you torrent or break into the fbi computers. Here All these local guys next door want is monthly cash and no angry calls during Christmas slowdowns
Someone sends some notice to them it probably would land straight into trash bin or would simply lay there unopened for years, irreversibly damaged with zero sugar coke
That is of course if the mailman manages to even deliver it. It could plainly disappear in the sorting center as if dematerialised by a chaotic force of underfunded bureaucracy.
Still I am convinced they just throw these into the trash or assign spam tag. Unless of course they are local movies then they are scared those ISP fresh CS students and maybe they will comply if they are sober and memory still isn’t completely ravaged by years of academic abu… pursuits
I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)
The answer to this question is you can setup a docker system (or podman) so that all the traffic in that pod (don't know the docker term for this) will route through the vpn. A good image to accomplish this easily and successfully is gluetun -- and it will only affect the traffic in the containers, not the rest of your computer.
Personally, my setup is much more like yours and it works fine for me, except I use a VM. So all the activity gets confined to the VM and that makes a bit idiot-proof. Using automatic management in the torrent client, completed torrents get put in the correct directory. You could combine this with Jellyfin if you desired.
My own problem with Jellyfin is if I ever use it for anything I want direct playback on all relevant devices, because my computer is not good enough for transcoding (and why waste the energy and time on on-demand transcoding, anyway?) so it requires some massaging of the data to get everything right. I only use it infrequently, practically on-demand. I don't use Jellyfin for myself.
- Thanks for taking the time to write up a detailed response I appreciate it. What is your vm workflow/setup?
  
  The VM is Debian Linux with a basic XFCE UI (for a system tray + notification widget) via QEMU/KVM which I run through virt-manager. Most unnecessary packages are removed or not installed in the first place. This is so that I can browse the sites, again, in a fool-proof manner. I share a directory from my host OS to the VM, which mounts it on boot in the fstab. This prevents me from downloading into the guest VM's disk image and having to keep dealing with that file getting overly big. In the past I've done a Samba share but recently I've just been using direct shared memory/filesystem and that seems to work OK, too.
  As a bonus to this setup, I can use Microsocks in the VM to also proxy a profile in Firefox to get VPN coverage in a specific Firefox profile. I use this when watching on streaming sites instead of trying to watch within the VM, since there is considerable overhead to doing that.
  And that's it, really. My VPN killswitches the VM if it ever experiences a connection interruption. And Qbittorrent is set up to use the VPN interface, as well. I use the aforementioned automatic torrents management feature to sort things when they're done downloading.
  I should state that there are some obvious downsides to this setup. The first is now I have to overcommit disk space and RAM to keep and run a guest VM. You want enough to be able to run updates and the software in the VM without running into a wall. The second is that there does seem to be a CPU penalty when downloading files (maybe it's because of the way I'm sharing the downloads directory into the VM with virtiofs?)
I recently had my first foray into this setup and I have found the arr stack to be all but useless on public trackers. I haven't setup flaresolvarr so that I can use 1337x and maybe that is why it is so terrible for me but prowlarr couldn't even find a fast and furious movie that is a popular, well seeded film.
Maybe the addition of 1337 would make it much better but I'm skeptical as to how much difference that one place can make.
I ultimately now just find what I need manually and add the torrent to my server via the web interface then leave it and everything else sorts itself, which I'm fine with doing.
Maybe I'm missing something but I think the arr stack is massively overrated on public trackers. I'm going to look into Usenet next as someone else suggested but it isn't anything I've ever used and I don't have the money to pay for any right now anyway.
- What do you use to clean up the files for jellyfin, or does that happen automatically? I mean things like cover art, consistent title format, etc
  I appreciate this take. Maybe I should keep it simple
  
  Don't get me wrong I don't regret setting it all up as it was a good, if somewhat steep learning curve for me as someone with no Linux experience beyond installing a couple of distros and using them solely as GUI OS's. In all honesty though keeping it simple and having full control over the files I'm getting is working absolutely fine for me and I don't feel the need to make it any more complex with the various arrs, the only exception being I want to look deeper into bazaar as I need subtitles for everything.
  Anyway I do absolutely nothing to clean up the files. I copy my magnet links into qbittorrent and set which folder I want it to download to, movies / shows etc. Jellyfin libraries are set to each of these folders by their respective type and then when some new stuff is downloaded I'll just access my jellyfin dashboard and scan all libraries.
  So far with zero file cleaning jellyfin has detected 85% of things correctly regardless, for anything not detected it takes barely any time to go into the identify menu, search for the correct title and choose the relevant correct info.
  I'm running proxmox with 3 VMs, one for docker with the arr stack, qbittorrent and gluetun to direct all that traffic via my VPN. One for a Plex server (which hasn't failed to detect anything so far without file cleaning) and one for the jellyfin server.
- If AirVPN supports OpenVPN (it probably does), there is a way to have an OpenVPN connection that is not actively used unless you specify it for the app which you want.
  For instance with qBittorrent you can select to use the VPN network interface in the settings. This has the nice advantage that it also acts like a kill switch.
  It is a little bit finicky to set up for the average user, but if you have some basic tech skills it should be easy with the right guide. If you're interested I canl try to find it.
- Gluetun works great with AirVPN
Maybe it's less of an issue these days, but about 10 years ago I tried Usenet and most things I tried to download would give "missing articles" errors (or something along those lines). This was with a paid Usenet account (don't remember the name).
- Had the same issue 6 months ago, probably a me thing but more money/time than I would care to spend
Set up split tunneling for your torrenting program only.
When I setup the *arr stack with docker compose the specific images I used are the Hotio ones which provide a very easy way to make sure qBittorrent and Prowlarr are both forced to be through a VPN (Prowlarr is an index manager for all of the other *arrs).
I found these 2 sites to be the most helpful: https://wiki.servarr.com/ https://trash-guides.info/
I'd probably start with Prowlarr here (wiki.servarr.com)
Help me transition from 2002 to 2025
I have been torrenting the same primitive way for a long time. ~~Turn on a VPN~~
arrr

34 comments