What do you use to actually manage your stuff?
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:
All of that runs in docker containers on my NAS, using docker-compose to deploy the stack.
I dump everything into a single folder. Like a junk drawer. Because I really only save junk anyway 🤷🏻♂️
I use Prowlarr + Radarr + Sonarr + Jellyfin.
I have /data directory organised like this:
/data
├── media
│ ├── books
│ ├── movies
│ ├── music
│ └── tv
└── torrents
├── books
├── movies
├── music
└── tv
Files added from Sonarr goes to torrents/tv and that for Radarr torrents/movies. Once the torrent client has downloaded the files, Sonarr and Radarr hardlinks the needed files to media's respective folders. I have set media/tv for shows and media/movies for 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 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 media is 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 in torrents folder 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 torrents we have a separate and more clean directory for Jellyfin media.
TL;DR: to save space and to ensure your torrent client can keep seeding the files.
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.
Plex for my Movies, TV shows, and music (plexamp for music).
Kavita for books. Also nextcloud to a degree.
Games, honestly I have not pirated in a long time, so no need to manage. Gabe Newell was right in that piracy is mainly a service problem, and to be honest Steam and GoG are convenient enough for me that I don't feel the need to pirate anymore.
Plex is the big one. I have a Plex box that also runs qBittorrent and i can set that up to auto download and sorty new anime as they come out. I'm sure sonarr and radarr are handy, but they seem like a pain in the ass to set up. Plus everyone online who talks about them never educate on the pirate side, just the organization side. You just get cheeky nods and winks like ok... Thanks.
So I still very much manually pirate shit mostly. Like a chad.
Same here, set up a super old MacBook with a couple of old hard disks. Get everything I need manually and load it in as needed.
I don't keep any media. I use Kodi, a VPN, Real debrid, trakt to keep my lists and the seren repository.
Plex and Calibre
Throw it all in a folder mostly. I normally watch a series or whatever once, then delete it. No point hoarding stuff I know I’m never gonna touch again.
Surprised to see no mention of Playnite. I used to use Stardock Fences to categorize my games on my desktop, then I found Playnite and there was no looking back. It's a big game library with incredible features. Here's what I see when I load it up. (the games listed here are the games I have listed as "currently playing")
I really, really want to use it instead of having a bunch of launchers for pc and emulation but it's too damn fiddly. Cant get retroachievements to work, normal achievements tab is forever empty, no way I found to have a unified control scheme, most of the plugins I tried do absolutely nothing, like the deal finding one, I could go on.
Not saying it doesn't work, obviously it does. But it doesn't for me sadly. And I can't spend a week on trying to get it to work. Two days of following guides online, did nothing for me, so I just gave up.
I think some plugins rely on having a desktop theme made to accommodate them otherwise you’d have to do the themeing yourself. Thankfully there are plenty that already exist which can be downloaded and applied from within Playnite itself but I do agree that the experience can be a bit of a mess. I really can’t live without it, though. Just completely changed the way I organize and launch games forever.
sadly playnite is not on linux...so it's out for me 😥
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.
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.
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:
For library frontend stuff:
Haven't set up yet:
Doesn't exist yet/wishlist:
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.
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.
With my bookmarks atm. I'm new to self-hosting and stuff like Jellyfin, etc. So at the moment I'm learning and saving websites and guides. Once I have more money I hope to start the next step in this hobby/way of life.
Sonarr/Radarr + Plex has been good enough for me.
I have like 20TB+ worth of external drives right now that hold all my shit (movies, tv shows, audiobooks, anime, manga, roms, etc.) I want to buy a 4+bay NAS and eventually set it up for streaming. However, right now I just have a an excel file that is organized but each drive and what is contained in each one. I just connect my drive to my Xbox series X and just play it with Kodi. I do have Fen (and I think the Promise) connected to RD. I know I can stream practically stream anything but I really do like having the actual files (I may be a digital hoarder).
Jellyfin, Shoko + Shokofin (anime metadata/organizer), separate NAS to store my music and videos. Games are just stored on my desktop.
Same, freakin love shoko, anime is very annoying to organize otherwise
NAS hosting all media and running:
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.
Check out whatever the Lemmy equivalent to r/selfhosted is. Very nice group always willing to help.
Jellyfin for my media, and that's about it. I don't have local music, ebooks etc. As for games, I just use Steam but have backups of some of my GOG games.
I just use qBittorrents built in categories/subcategory system to sort movies, tvshows. Then Kodi is set up to automaticly scan for new content on startup. Works well, simple.
Sonarr/radarr with rdtclient(real-debrid torrent client) for public torrent links, Qbittorrent vpn for private trackers, and then sabnzbd for usenet.
I mainly use this all for anime because it's harder for me to watch on the fly through kodi. Jellyfin for playback
I also use Kodi with seren and Real-Debrid for everything I don't wanna store.... Which is most of it
I just use Real Debrid and Google Drive tbh
I only really run a server of TV Shows and movies. I use Jellyfin, just personal preference. It’s only really effective for use on the home network, but my smart TVs all have my own personal streaming service.
I hate Calibre and Hydrus because they make copies of files instead of keeping track of them wherever I want them to be.
Completely agree Calibre creating its own copies of files drives me crazy, but I still use it.
TV/Movies: lookmovie2, sflix, 9anime (I only stream)
Music: Deemix and Musicolet
Manga: Kotatsu
Books: Libgen and Book Reader unless my local library has it.
I download almost everything using Premiumize. It essentially downloads the torrents for you, so you're only downloading things from them at drastically faster speeds, and never connecting to the actual swarm. You just send them the torrent file.
For the actual organizing, I use TVRenamer mainly. It's an extremely underrated tool that not only organizes your shows and movies, but does a great job of helping you identify what you're missing, like missing episodes or specials.
I use tdarr to reencode all my stuff to x265
Plex is mainly how I watch stuff. I like kodi a lot, but most the time Plex is a lot more streamline.
For comics I use comicrack. Best way to do comic organizing by far
I recommend trying out prowlarr as a modern *arr replacement version of jackett
I'll check it out!
Thanks for the suggestions, this encouraged me to try and get a better setup at home. Now I've got Jellyfin running on my pc and can stream to other devices like my laptop or tv etc.
Out of curiosity, why go for Emby rather than Jellyfin as the server?
I have had it since way before jellyfin was a thing and have never had a reason to change. I got a lifetime sub something like 10 years ago.
Jellyfin for movies/shows,
Calibre for ebooks
Retroarch for ROMs
iTunes for music (so I can put it on my iPod)
I Thought u were a FOSS activist till I saw itunes 😂😂.. Cheers mate.
Lol I really am, I've just been too lazy to install rockbox
I use much of the servarr set for core functionality. Radarr for movies, Sonarr for TV show, Bazarr for subtitles, Prowlarr for indexing. Those are the management tools for the media. If I want to delete something off the HTPC, I delete it from Radarr/Sonarr and let them handle cleanup of the library.
Qbittorrent does the downloading, and the free version of Serviio handles DLNA streaming to display devices. All I want is software that streams to display devices while handling transcoding if needed, and Serviio does that. I've tried Plex and Jellyfin in the past, but I felt like they both attempted to do more than I needed while actually accomplishing less than I wanted. It's been a while since I tried either of those though, so things might be different now.
All of this is running in an old HTPC case containing the parts from the prior incarnation of my gaming PC, plus half a dozen 4TB hard drives. It's wildly over-specced for what I ask it to do, which has given me plenty of headroom to play around with self-hosting stuff like ViewTube and SearXNG.
How's Romm? It's available for truenas and I'm looking for a good way to store and play. Looks really pretty but doesn't seem to have any emulsion built in? Not looking for anything heavy just backing up all my GB/GBC/GBA, PS1, PS2, Xbox, and GC.
But to actually contribute plex has been our time sink. The lady has so many dvds and blurays I've just been working through all of it. About 8tb deep right now and it's been working great.
Romm doesn't have any emulation built it. It is not made for that. It's simply to catalogue all your stuff and make it easy to manage and download them on any of your devices. That's it.
On the roadmap there is a savegame manager aswell but i don't know when this comes and how good it will turn out. I don't even think i'd use this but let's see...
I just use Jellyfin for movies and shows. I don't listen to music or read ebooks, and I buy all my games through Steam because I use Linux.
Launchbox for roms, Komga for comics, calibre for books, kodi and plex for movies. Organizr for the cacophony of webapps.
Plex for movies/shows. For music spotify premium.
In general just creating folders and keeping everything organized.
Movie/shows download via pyload since one-click hoster is cheaper than Usenet. And I collect them in german/english. Torrents are not so wide spread for that combination.
Kodi for tagging.
Music per Lidarr/Jackett/Deluge/nzbget/OpenVPN primarily Usenet + occasionally torrent.
Tagging by beets because of its discogs plug-in since it is much better than musicbrainz on obscure music.
I have to disagree on the movie/shows part here. IMHO Usenet is way cheaper than this horrible file hosters. And one needs more than one file hoster too. There are also plenty of German private torrent trackers out there. File hosters lack automation, it's just horrible annoying to download everything by hand and solve Captchas all day AND EVEN PAY FOR THIS EXPERIENCE.
I agree on the horrible experience. However h264 rips in Usenet lack in quality from my perspective. Data rates for 1080 are often too low and close to 720 rips. For me rips 8-12GB in size deliver the best ratio for my screen solution, and are efficient for storing.
H265 would be better but my hardware lacks in decoding capability (raspberry 3).
Everyone has different requirements driven by storage, hardware etc.
One click Hoster costs 50 EUR/year for 170GB per day.
Usenet indexer 5Eur/Month + 25EUR for 150GB
Glad if you can advice on cheaper solutions. And good private trackers!
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.)
