Thinking of creating a local media center for my home. Any ideas/collaborators?
With the growing fragmentation of online streaming services, I'm thinking of setting up a local media server for my home that I can use over Kodi to stream movies/tv shows to my chromecast. I might go Monkey D. Luffy for the content itself.
Basically the basic plan is to have some base features and some add-ons as follows.
Base:
- Create a media server using a Raspberry Pi and some storage to serve as the base for all my viewing
- Setting up Kodi on all relevant platforms to consume data from (1) [This should be trivial]
Add-ons:
- Create a python script to check for new episodes of any existing show available on the net (Imdb, moviedb, wiki can be starting points to check this)
- Automate download of shows from 1. Can be setup to run at some daily interval
- Download subtitles for shows from 2.
- Maintain some Github list to add new movies/tv shows that user might be interested to download. Script from 1 should be able to consume this.
I used Popcorn time was a software that was able to do most of this at some point, but I remember reading that there were some security issues identified with it. I never really checked it afterwards, but happy to be corrected if it's reliable.
Edit: Thanks folks, I did not know that the RR-sphere already solves most of these problems, will look into it. I was looking forward to the scripting, but I'm guessing these solutions handle security much better than I would at my end.
You should check out Sonarr for your second part. That should cover most of your bases. I've been running it happily for several years now.
Unless the scripting is part of the goal I'd also recommend against reinventing the wheel.
Sonarr works really well for shows.
Radarr works really well for movies.
Lidarr is decent enough for music.
Prowlarr works great as a tracker, though Jackett is also still a good option.
Bazarr can handle subtitling.
Readarr can do books.
There's a bunch of solutions already within the "RR-sphere" that work well, have a consistent and clear UI, and gets frequent updates.
You mean the RRing?
I prefer “the ARR mateys.”
Oh my goodness - is that the etymology? I feel so silly.
I honestly have no idea if that's the actual etymology or not. To me, it's always felt like a deliberate wink and nod, but it also feels like the kind of thing that wouldn't be explicitly documented or written down -- in the same way everyone talks about torrenting in the context of Linux ISOs.
https://wiki.servarr.com/ + https://theme-park.dev/ is a nice little combo
Thanks, will look into this. Makes my life a hell lot easier.
I would second Sonarr. I set it up last week and was surprised at how awesome it has turned out to be. Depending on your preference for media size, you’ll probably want to tweak the Quality settings so you aren’t getting 40Gb tv shows.
Is the correct Synology ds918+?
If so, I was looking for probably something cheaper than this.
Do you think I could host something similar on Meerkat by System 76
Edit: Actually, nevermind. I think I was looking at the wrong websites, this is much cheaper than the cost shown on NewEgg
I have a similar DS918+ setup as the poster above, but if you want to build it yourself and don't need 5+ TB of storage you should consider a Lenovo ThinkCentre mini or the equivalent HP Prodesk mini: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185845218485
At least my ThinkCentre M700 has an M.2 slot AND a 2.5" slot. I've got a cheap 1TB SSD in the first one and a 5TB spinning HDD in the latter. Works like a charm and I can run bunch of stuff on it, not just Plex.
Even if you need more space later on, you can just get any NAS and mount the storage to the mini pc via NFS for example, or have your archive (movies, old TV shows) on a Plex instance in the NAS and use the minipc for fresh stuff.
Yeh I paid like £450 for it back in 2018/9. Started with a couple of 6TB hard drives and slowly expanded as time went on.
I think the 4 bay synology is up to ds923+ as it’s been update. And costa roughly the same.
I started my home media server maybe 10 years ago as a raspberry pi and xbmc (now kodi) as I loved tinkering. The synology dsm software along with docker just makes everything waaay easier and robust.
I'm doing the same thing as @beret4, but I'm running the Synology DS220+. All of my clients are CCwGTV (Chromecast with Google TV), so all of the video direct-streams (occasionally need to reencode audio tracks, depending on the device or audio stream).
The 220+/420+ models are discounted, but the new equivalents are the 223+/423+. I'd probably recommend going with the 423+, even if you only plan to start with 2 disks so you have room to expand down the road.
That’s likely just because the DS918+ is discontinued - the last two digits are the model year, and they tend to refresh with incremental but worthwhile updates every 2-3 years.
Synology are pretty good for product support and software, and really that’s what you’re paying for with them, so it generally makes sense to buy the latest just for the longer OS update lifetime. If you only cared about the hardware you could DIY it for around $300. The DS9xx+ series (currently DS923+) should be $500 - $600 new.
The Synology boxes are definitely a NAS first and foremost; even with the Docker support to go beyond that, they're primarily about storing data and I'd kind of see anything else as a bonus. Between that and DIY, it depends what you're looking for: off the shelf NAS is plug and play, well tested, regularly updated, and sensibly configured by default. DIY will get you more flexibility, a wider choice of task-specific hardware, lower costs (or much more hardware for the same cost), and more granular control over what you're doing.
For context, my own setup has a DS420+ NAS - primarily for work and personal files, rather than media, so I really care about robustness, reliable offsite sync, avoiding any gotchas in config files, and otherwise basically never needing to think about it - as well as a couple of cheaper & more powerful mini servers running Proxmox for all the stuff I actually want to tinker with.
If that data were less important, I'd quite possibly have just thrown some hard drives on another box and installed TrueNAS; in the other direction, if I had an absolute ton of critical data and I were investing thousands I'd consider going for "serious" DIY and taking on the admin & maintenance as part of my workday. As it stands, for a handful of terabytes and a couple of hundred dollar overhead I'm happy to pay for the peace of mind.
Assuming you've got the knowledge and time to DIY at all, which a lot of people don't, both options have their place - and if you're doing IPTV streaming then you're probably more in it for the server part than the NAS part, which says DIY to me. Sounds like a really fun project, too, I saw your post about it in the other thread!
You might not need a full 918+, I have a 418play (now discontinued) that's only 4 bays but I have it set up for 16tb of total storage. The DS223 (two bay) and DS423 (four bay) are good options for smaller total storage.
The 418play has been powerful enough for me to run Plex and torrents, stream even 4k video to my smart TV (no transcoding, just direct stream), and run docker containers with no issues.
Not sure about Meerkat, but Synology is very good for having a nice easy to use solution that has an easy to use GUI for everything you need it to do (setup, backup to things, configuration, sharing, permissions, RAID management, etc.), and has a really wide userbase on the internet for support. I would heavily favour it over doing the management on something more DIY yourself.
I second using a NAS running Plex to do this. It's probably the least fussy way. You just get a Synology and throw a bunch of drives at it.
Synology's software is excellent for managing all the packages on the backend. Plex is an excellent media browser. Those two together work about as well as you can expect with very few papercuts involved.
@r_se_random I would actually just splurge on something like this to be honest. A big part of a home media server is just minimizing hassle so you actually use it and it isn't a pain every time you want to login or make adjustments. It might end up being a few hundred extra dollars, but that translates into a lot of time and frustration saved. Once you have a media center, your brain is going to suddenly come up with 1,001 additional uses for that media center you didn't think of before. When that happens you'll be glad you had the capacity to grow what you have instead of needing to start again.
Many years ago I used some old hardware to put together a FreeNAS server (now called TrueNAS). TrueNAS has pretty much one-click plugins for Plex, and Arr apps (Radarr, Lidarr, Sonarr). It took a day or two to configure everything, but a plex/radarr/sonarr/transmission setup can handle downloading all of the things automatically, and providing a pretty painless web ui or app-based interface to stream the media anywhere in the local household.
Is Transmission supported by TrueNAS? I'm using qtorrent right now and it sorta works, but Transmission is 10x better imo.
I've been self hosting media for probably six or seven years now? I use Plex with a lifetime pass (not required at all, I just got it very cheap on a sale), it has great metadata and is just very smooth overall. Some others will recommend Jellyfin/Emby both are quite good and both work with Kodi so no issues there.
Hardware depends on the raspberry pi you have. I don't think anything less than an rpi 4 can do decent Plex these days and even with a USB 3 SSD, still a bit slower than if you just installed it on an old computer. Jellyfin may be more optimized, I'm not sure as I don't personally use it.
I originally ran my Plex on windows and then migrated it to Linux running on an old workstation with a second gen i7 and have now moved it to ironically, the same computer I had it running on windows except now it's a virtualization host and I run a Linux server inside of it with Plex hosted there. It runs so much faster than it did on windows and I like being able to integrate it with Sonarr, as others have pointed out. You may also need Jacket to help build rss feeds.
Feel free to ask questions about any of the above, I'm happy to help when I have time!
I recently tackled a similar task, albeit with a small PC rather than a raspberry pi. I used, and would recommend, yams. It's a script that sets up most of what you'd need or want: Sonarrr, Radarr, Prowlerr, Lidarr, torrent client (for your linux isos), VPN manager, subtitle service, docker containers for everything, and a service to monitor the containers. It's certainly opinionated on how to set things up, but offers choices in the set up process for things like Kodi vs Jellyfin and which VPN services to use.
Setting it up was really easy and using it has been a breeze as well. If you're stoked about writing a bunch of scripts, then it might take some of the fun out of it, but it could still be a good reference for one way to do things.
Thanks, this definitely seems to be one stop solution for most of my requirements. I might end up contributing to the project itself rather than writing something from scratch.
Please do! I actually was thinking of doing something similar myself, the bash script is case sensitive when entering Y/N, so I was planning on fixing that when I had some free time - feel free to beat me to the punch :)
I suggest a setup with Sonarr, Radarr and Jellyfin. Jellyfin works somewhat better than Kodi.
The last time I switched hardware a raspberry pi couldn't handle transcoding. My conclusion was that I could throw Linux on an old or cheap machine and get better results.
I love raspberry pis, but at some point they start looking like a hammer in need of a nail. I use one for home assistant and one for my pihole. I don't use them for transcoding media and I don't use them to make iot devices.
I would agree that a Raspi isn't an ideal choice for this. You're much better off using an old PC or a NAS, which will have the benefit of having a case, SATA interfaces for cheaper or better quality mechanical hard disks, and enough power to do transcoding or whatever else you might want it to do.
As most people have said already, Sonarr and Radarr do what you want to do and are fairly straightforward to set up (there are a few guides online). I did this recently as a complete beginner in Linux so thought I'd share some struggles in case they help. I used a raspi 4 with Plex and set up everything in a docker (can't remember why) with files stored on a synology NAS. I use Jackett and Transmission, as well as Radarr and Sonarr, and then Watchtower keeps everything at the latest version available.
Things that kept me up at night:
Hope that helps!
I've been doing this for over a decade now and my setup for the past few years has been:
Whenever I think of something I want, it takes me about 90 seconds to find it on my private tracker of choice and download it to my seedbox. It's all automated from there.
Happy to answer questions if anyone is interested in learning more.
Do you think something like Meerkat by System76 be up for the task. I'm realising that I might be asking too much from a raspberry Pi for the media streaming.
That’s probably overkill, especially considering the $500 entry point. If you’re specifically looking for something with an i5 (say to run some heavier VMs alongside the media server) there are great options on the used market, mostly ex-corporate thin client machines. Project TinyMiniMicro has some great advice on what to look for there.
If you’re just looking for more power and I/O than a RasPi (and/or need x86 support) then the Celeron N5105 chipset is a good middle ground bet right now. You’ll get anywhere from 3x-5x the CPU performance of a BCM2711 and an order of magnitude more PCIe bandwidth available to you - full machines built around the chipset start from $120 on AliExpress.
I’d say if it’s just media file serving, RasPi is more than enough for you. If you want to throw Proxmox on there and have, say, a media server VM, a Home Assistant VM, a PiHole, maybe some other lightweight self-hosted odds and ends, go for the N5105. If you want to run VMs that do actual number crunching on the content of the files you’re working with, then it’s maybe time to look at the i5 based machines.
What do you use for storage on the mini?
I use 2x 16tb WD Elements external HDDs. One runs 24/7 as a dedicated media drive, and I plug the other in every couple weeks for backups (syncing the whole drives via ChronoSync). Nothing fancy or elegant, but it works perfectly for my use case.
Lots of excellent advice here. I’ll add a few things to consider.
Host all the arr applications on a remote server/seedbox if you can afford too. Its relatively inexpensive and I believe a little safer. Then setup rsync jobs to pull new media down to your local server, encrypted off-course.
For media server software. I used open media vault for many years but over time it became less reliable for me. Switched to unraid about a year ago and couldn’t be happier. Rock solid, incredibly easy to setup, install dockers in 1 click etc.
I’m currently using Jellyfin as my media server and I recommend infuse as your client if you have iOS devices. Infuse for Apple TV app is the best way to get 4K native HDR & Dolby Vision playback.
The R Pi is probably underpowered, particularly if any transcoding is going to be necessary. (e.g. you probably don’t need it if your clients are PCs or high end mobile but otherwise I think it will)
My media server is a tower PC I picked up at our reuse center, maybe it cost 2x what the RPi costs but the performance difference is bigger. I did upgrade it with a NVIDIA 1050 card which in theory helps with transcoding but I do get files that it glitches out on.
For storage I have two 14TB hard drives in a RAID 1 with ZFS. The machine is not just a media server but it does some IoT coordination too and supports software development from time to time.
I'm not too familiar with it myself but my buddy has a local server setup like this with Plex and we can request anything we want with plexrequest. As a user pastatool is also very useful. He's trying to move it over to jellyfin because Plex does have a bit of glitchiness (for me there's almost none on smart TV, some on desktop and most on mobile).