So I need a bit of advice. I’m planning a media server for parents who are not at all technical. The distance (we live in different countries) makes it a bit difficult for me to experiment a lot, so ideally I’d like to get this right the first time and hence this thread.
Requirements:
- A media server that will download movies from somewhere. And either:
- I would have control over exactly which ones are downloaded ( remotely ) so I can filter out either garbage or potentially malicious content ( I’ve seen too many fake torrents before )
- Or some automatic alternative for doing the above that I can trust.
- A library with movies that are not yet downloaded until my parents want to watch them is also acceptable so they can just browse. But beginning the download should be super simple, basically a 1 click thing.
- Subtitles - integration that requires no intervention from my parents at all. Perhaps something that will automatically look for subs on opensubtitles.org and apply them to the movies they select or something like that.
- Storage - nothing complicated. No NAS, maybe an external hard drive connected to the Pi 4 at most. I can send this to them. Watched movies can be deleted.
TL:DR The use case for my parents is to just start something, browse movies like its Netflix and automatically have subtitles loaded for them without having to do ANY work for each movie.
What I have available:
- At my parents’, there is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu Server 22 from a MicroSD with SSH access and no external hard drive (but option to send them one and plug it in for media storage)
- A 4K TV with multiple HDMI INs and I definitely saw an Ethernet port though not sure exactly of the extent of the TV’s network capabilities
- The ability to send hardware to them, such as hard drives if necessary
- Programming skills (Mainly Python) and decent experience with Bash. So I can whip out something or configure anything a bit more complex, so that’s not a constraint.
What is the most straightforward solution and ideally something I can setup remotely with a bit of help on site from my parents to plug things in. They can plug in an HDMI, Ethernet cable, external HDD, etc. If it’s as simple as LEGO, they can do it.
I’m going to keep it brief since documentation exists for all of these if you want to understand how they integrate.
Media server: Plex. Alternatives exist(emby, jellyfin), but Plex just works on nearly any client.
Content: Radarr(movies), Sonarr(TV shows). Automated content grabbers for usenet/torrents.
Subtitles: Bazarr
Requests: Overseerr
Several guides here: https://trash-guides.info/
Hopefully this can get you started and some others might chime in with more detail.
Rare_Lead241 covered the most common and feature full stack (plex/jellyfin + *arr stack). Another option It is not self hosted but, it might be worth looking in to stremio + real-debrid in this use case.
You will find plenty information about it online including Reddit.