I currently have a very comfortable lil home server with the arrs and plex (would like jellyfin but it’s not there yet for me, currently fielding emby given how Plex is going), basically all sources are usenet.

I’m nearing a point where I either have to delete some stuff or expand space, which is not cheap, and some of my older drives are likely due for some failures too. So after seeing the popularity of debrid I’ve been wondering if it’d be worth to instead spend the money on it, but would like to ask some questions. I spend maybe around $70/year on the various bits for Usenet and I expect I’d have to spend around an average of $80/year on drives for just expanding storage (obviously assuming I don’t just delete stuff). And that’s with avoiding 4k just for storage reasons (my internet could take the streaming tho)

Even just the price of Usenet seems to be more than the price of a debrid subscription though and from what I understand I’d not need new disks with it either.

From what I understand debrid is a shared download space for Torrents/direct downloads where if someone adds something it’s available for everyone (presumably it gets deleted if noone accessed it for some time and would have to be re-downloaded?). It’s possible to mount the content via WebDAV to make it accessible to clients/media servers to stream directly from debrid.

My questions are…

  1. Is there still a point to sonarr/radarr with debrid?
  2. How is the quality? (both in terms of media quality and in terms of file organisation so things are discoverable and accurate, e.g. chances of things explicitly named wrong so you think you’re about to watch Brooklyn 99 and instead get porn)
  3. I would likely go the path of using zurg and keeping with Plex/emby - any experience with how well does this work (any recommendations for or against)? What’s the mechanism for picking what is available in the mounts to the media server… or is it just… everything on debrid?
  4. I don’t really use any torrents at the moment, from what I understand that’s primarily how you get things on debrid. Would I have to start looking for good trackers to get content or is there no need because chances are someone will have downloaded/shared most things?
  5. I guess, am I assuming this works very differently to how it actually does? Any experience from people who did the swap from Usenet/arrs to some debrid + media server?

Many questions in a wall of text, I’d be grateful for any answers to any of them! Thanks!

  • myliltoehurts@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    8·
    10 months ago

    It’s a bit nitpicky to be fair but:

    • chapter API (skip intro/credits), I know it’s in the works and there is a plugin but I’ve found it work much better in Plex (actually emby has this and it’s alright)
    • the android apps, particularly on TV. I find the jellyfin one somewhat meh for UX. Not huge gripes but just things like how in a list you have to press a button at the top of the screen to display the alphabet shortcut (i.e. jump to all moves starting with a letter). On a TV this is pretty awkward IMO. I know there a bunch of different screens around this, e.g. the one you get with smart screen to go “by letter”, or setting the list direction to horizontal allows getting to the button on top easier but it feels clunky to me, so many screens which could be replaced with 1 better designed one.

    I do think eventually I’ll end up on jellyfin, probably once the chapter API arrives and skipping credits and intro has first party support tho.

    • FischEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      There’s also Findroid on Android and Delfin on Linux. I use both of those clients and I think they’re much better than the official one.

    • Naate@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      The android tv app is why I switched to Emby. I mostly liked jellyfin everywhere except the one place I would use it the most.

      A few of the fixes for things that strongly turned me off were added as feature requests, but the devs seemed to blow them off as unnecessary or “impossible” (even though the “impossible” is done in every other android tv app, including Emby). Their perceived attitude really turned me off of it.