this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory... requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it's a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it's impossible, just I haven't found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren't mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don't even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
So you are mostly wrong here, I'll let you know my setup that costs me $15 a month.
A 4 core 8GB VPS: $5 a month. Unlimited cloud Storage: €10 a month.
I have Emby (Use jellyfin, I haven't changed out of laziness), Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr all running on a VPS with caddy running a reverse_proxy to point a domain at emby via HTTPS.
No need for VPNs, but you can run OpenVPN on your VPS for maximum value for money if you want to use a high speed VPN.
It's all very straight forward to setup on Ubuntu 20.04 with lots of documentation. My server has been up for 3 months now and I have had 0 issues, friends use jellyseerr to requests shows and movies. Everything else is automated. Can even import lists from IMDb.
Make sure if you want to save space to use h.265 encoding where possible. Additionally, if you don't want to torrent you can use newservers. But that will cost an additional $10 a month.
When you say VPS, do you mean like an AWS or GCP virtual machine?
Ionos, but I have been grandfathered in with price so you won't be able to get my deal
AWS/GCP is an order of magnitude more expensive for those specs. And they would ban you for downloading copyrighted material without a VPN. So I wouldn't recommend that. I was able to get a similar set up using Linode but the specs were way worse and I couldn't do transcoding, and I didn't torrent using the $5 a month VPS.
It depends on what hardware the host is using, my VPS is capable of transcoding around 4 streams simultaneously.