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!

  • gila@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    I’ve used real-debrid in conjunction with the seren add-on for Kodi for years. I have the same setup on all my PCs, my phone, my Chromecast. I would say it works identically on everything but I had playback issues using the Kodi app on my Xbox (well documented issue related to that system)

    1. No, you just scrape the debrid cache on demand upon selecting an episode/movie, as long as someone has already cached that release it’ll just start streaming. If not, you can add it to the cache inside the add-on, rescrape and try again
    2. There’s no encoding happening, it’s just direct streaming whatever release you selected. For release of duplicate titles when you search it will show the IMDb/tvdb thumbnail and you just choose the one that looks right. The only releases that weren’t exactly what I was looking for was when Barbie just came out and some cam rips were floating around, the first result I scraped was for the animated Barbie Netflix series. No porn, I’m confident enough of that to have set this method up for my mother also.
    3. Sounds redundant. If you wanna try this method for ease of use, a simple netflix-esque experience for any content, there is no comparison. If you wanna spend time watching your logs auto scrape the episode you’re waiting to drop, this isn’t the method. The only mechanism needed for routing your search to a matching file in the debrid cache is scraping a magnet link (via a search, or trakt recommendations etc) which matches a file previously cached on the server. “It just works”
    4. Not if you’re using a standard implementation with A4kScrapers. Google how to set up seren on Kodi. You may run into some P2P release for older stuff, for most people this is totally fine

    All in all as someone that has pirated music, tv shows and movies for several decades now it actually aggravates me how user-unfriendly the Plex/emby/jellyfin experience really is. I can certainly understand people getting enthusiastic about a new hobby of library management, but that shit gets old and I just want to watch my shows. The only reason I can imagine why people don’t do this is because it costs money. I struggle to imagine how these same people aren’t already paying money for tv/movie content and getting way less value/$ to boot.

    As a honourable mention I authd this setup on my mother’s Chromecast to my real-debrid account, and we have no issues both using it simultaneously. However, one time when I was downloading a torrent using the debrid on my PC with VPN, while streaming on my TV without VPN, and my mother also simultaneously streaming in a different city, it booted us all off and I had to reauth. No issues since, mum calls it the dodgy box

      • gila@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        No problem, I was drunk waiting for the train home so not very well written response but I’ll always jump on the opportunity to recommend this method to someone. There’s no downsides I can think of, just make sure to set your audio language / subtitle defaults in the Kodi settings (not addon settings)

        It does have the general drawbacks of the scene such as different subtitle formats for different releases / tv networks, e.g. conflicts between English and English (SDH). You can install the opensubtitles addon to resolve this same like with Plex