What is your streaming setup like?

I'm on a bunch of private torrent trackers where retention is excellent. Jackett is interfacing with those trackers and exposes a unified "Torznab" endpoint that Sonarr and Radarr use to autograb whatever I'm interested in. Those in turn send their match to qBittorrent and get notified when a download is finished, and hardlink (very important to save time and hard disk space) the result to a destination folder in a nicely organized fashion. That folder is observed by Jellyfin, which matches the name with The Movie DB to show cover images of shows and movies.

I used to perform a manual search and pick the right release for me. Nowadays, my filters are good enough that I just add whatever is supposed to be released in the foreseeable future, and the setup is doing the rest.

I'm also archiving whatever I'm watching long term on a local 4x18TB RAID-5 NAS

It's crazy how well this software collection works in unison.

I've mostly given up on thrift. We have Netflix, Disney+/Hulu, HBO ("Max") (shared with friends), Youtube Premium, and Amazon Prime. In the past I've also used Plex a bit, but I make enough money that it's just not worth the effort to maintain when all of the above apps stream so seamlessly through our Chromecast.

Plex and usenet(using SONARR and RADARR) is the way for me.

I had subscriptions for sports but I sometimes get better quality from illegal streams. Other times I VPN into Poland and just stream from national TV if they have coverage.

I have homes in 3 different cities, so YoutubeTV is my goto streaming service. That replaced what was 3 different DirecTV setups which became outrageously expensive.

AppleTV for all theater releases and some special shows.

Netflix for their content

HBO Max is bundled with my AT&T account.

This just about covers everything our family could possibly consume or be interested in mediawise.

You have to pick your battles, and pay for stuff you want more of. All the different apps are annoying, and it’s possible to come up with alternative solutions, but it undermines your own long term benefits.

This crowd is probably the biggest target for SciFi, and also the one that can pirate stuff the most. So if you want more Star Trek Strange New Worlds, you need to pay for the app so they know it’s worth making more. If you pirate it, all the good will in the world isn’t going to pay for production of the next season. The fact that so much SicFi seems to have good reception but gets cancelled anyway seems to point to this audience being too tech savvy for their own good.

Pay for the apps, pay for the content. If you want to sign up, binge, then cancel, that will at least give them some stats on the type of shows that will get you to subscribe again.

Most of my streaming comes bundled. Through T-Mobile I no longer pay for AppleTV+, Netflix, nor Paramount+. I start and stop subscriptions all the time when my favourite shows aren't streaming.

Using a dedicated fileserver running Docker and PMS is one of a dozen containers. It sits atop a pair of 10TB USB HDDs whose primary function is local backups. This media library is comprised of my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection. While the physical disks are in storage my media collection has stayed with me across oceans :-)

This strike is going to be interesting. I remember the dearth of shows during the last writers strike. You had shows that just stopped midseason and never came back. Others simply finished on a cliffhanger. Media companies used reality shows to fill in for missing content.

Plex and Jellyfin run in parralel as the serving frontend. Plex gets the most attention though, both from us as maintainers/curators and from family member users. (My rule for access is "blood or rings" - you either share blood with me or you're within 1 "marriage hop" of me).

They read off a big ZFS array that's currently 2 x 2 stripe-of-mirrored-pairs that I plan to expand by adding additional mirrored pairs. Each pair is one WD Gold and one WD red pro (mainly trying to make sure I'm not going to get drives from the same bad batch since I generally buy them together.)

I also have Loki set up for log aggregation which helps sometimes when plex does something weird.

I have a handful of NVidia Shields. They are great little devices and go some way to integrating the front ends of the apps. They allowed me to decomm Chromecasts and Firesticks.

I subscribe to Netflix which is of questionable value.

I also subscribe to Disney+ which I don’t think we even use anymore.

I get Apple TV bundled when I buy iPhones and Prime Video with the Prime subscription.

I have Plex which I use for IPTV.

And then YouTube Premium which probably gets most use.

The fragmentation is annoying, but the whole setup is less than $50 a month (if I assume zero cost for the bundled stuff) and covers me across 2 properties.

Now I’ve written it down it sounds like a lot to say that we barely even watch TV!

I pay for various services and watch whatever is on them, because it is simple, easy and $50 gets you an astoundingly overwhelming amount of content that you could barely scratch the surface of. Also, $50 today is $25 in when adjusted for inflation since the 90s and this is much, much cheaper than the cable+video rental amounts a typical family would pay back then. I will occasionally hunt down some torrent of something if I really want to watch it.

https://jellyfin.org/

I also play Blu-Rays and DVD on an XBOX One. I also picked up a VHS player for $12 at

https://ithacareuse.org/

which sells tapes for 50 cents.

From the traditional streaming services I only have Prime Video because it comes with Twitch Prime.

Other than that I'm on a well-sourced private tracker + https://nyaa.si/ for anime.

A service or two are a mainstay, the rest are added when a show happens to be worth subscribing and then cancel immediately after watching it. I've found Youtube content and mediocre quality Netflix creations fills in gaps with "I wanna watch a _____ show" types of needs.

For example I used to like watching stuff on cable where builders would have a project car to refurbish or things like that. There is a ton of content like that for free on youtube these days. As I've aged I've grown tired of formulaic shows, this isn't some holier-than-thou attitude I just don't find them entertaining anymore and it takes a bit more to hold my attention.

I don't watch much if anything, it's more music for me than movies and TV, but my setup works like this:

- search content in torrent-csv on phone

- download content using a VPN and libretorrent

- plug in to a PC via USB and copy the file over

- hook the TV up to the PC with an HDMI cable

- profit.

For music, similar except for the copy to PC plug in HDMI part.

Works really well for me, and there's virtually no overhead. I keep talking about jellyfin and NAS and all that, I used to have a NAS but since TV isn't a big part of my life it's just not worth the effort. The most I do is back things up to an external drive.

For things I really love, I buy second hand dvds or Blu-ray's, rip them with makemkv, transcode with an ffmpg script, and serve with Plex. I now have nearly 1000 movies and some TV series.

I have Netflix (for me and wife) and Disney+ (for kids) most of the time, and add other services temporarily if there's something on them I really want to watch, and then cancel.

I never rent or buy online content, I'd rather buy second hand media and add it to Plex.

It differs from cable in one key respect: it’s easy to cancel and restart. No truck rolls, no equipment, no techs, no phone calls. Get Hulu, watch your Futurama, cancel Hulu.

Most of these are solved problems on the "server" end, but make sure however you play your content is beefy enough.

Can't speak for Jellyfin, but Plex effectively can't "Cast" in a meaningful way. Invest in an Apple TV and it can play every media format, quality, etc. Trying to cheap out using an old smart TV app or a fire stick and you'll end up in transcoding hell.

I subscribe to a "Plex share": I pay some guy a few bucks a month for access to his streaming setup with thousands of pirated shows and movies.

Plex being Plex, sometimes it's flaky. But I get to just show up and watch stuff like it's any other streaming service.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I don't mind paying for streaming, and I have in the past.

I just want everything in one place.

Small HP Gen10 server running Portainer, containers for Jackett (mostly public trackers with 1-2 private ones more niched to sports), Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qbittorrent and Emby in containers, smart TVs have the native Emby app an streams with no transcoding h256 videos, more problematic with streaming to phone.

The biggest problem is storage, I must admit. 16 TB fill up rather quickly.

I mostly get everything free as benefits from other services, but for what I don't, I just pay a month, watch everything I want, and pause the subscription. I don't have to watch anything right away, so for those weekly release shows, I just wait until the entire season has been released, and then I have a month to watch it all.

"My friend" pays for a couple of debrid services and an internet connection. She uses Kodi/Stremio/iptv players to watch anything she wants. Currently these run on an old ubuntu laptop with an hdmi cable hooked up to the tv because Nvidia shields are too $$$ and firesticks SUCK. Not fancy but it does the job.

IPTorrents, Couchpotato, SONARR, Plex, JACKETT

For you Plex people, where do you actually host your content?

I have tried to go down this route before but don't know where the best place is to actually store stuff. Do you have a home server? Or pay for cloud storage somewhere? If you do the cloud thing how do you integrate it with Plex?

Bazarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent behind a VPN as I can't upload due to having a shitty local ISP.

Tiny NUC to run it all in containers, and a Synology w/ 40TB.

I get a popup when a new episode is downloaded. Movies are requested via Overseerr.

Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+. Nothing else. If TV show is not on these, I simply do not watch it, I waste enough time on TV as it is. I have no TV set or cable subscriptions.

I rent a movie I want to watch from Apple TV+ once or twice per month.

Netflix, D+, HBO Max, Viaplay, SkyShowtime and given gaming and work related stuff are enormous time sinks anyway that's enough for me.

I use https://emby.media along with private trackers and Usenet.

AppleTV and plex w/ a seedbox. I would've loved to pay for hulu or hbo max, but no dice in Germany.

One streaming service + DVDs from the library.

Torrent -> NAS -> Plex -> My TV

plex + unRaid server + appleTV