re: flushed kodi down the toliet. back to ol' reliable plex

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I rather Kodi for one watch type situations. I don't see why we need to put our eggs in one basket like CAD seems to want to do. Why not use them all?

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because kodi is always an exercise in frustration for me. the streams are shite. i never see HD streams anymore.

its easier to just fire up Showbox or CartoonHD on my phone and cast to the TV. those almost always work for streaming 100% of the time and ZERO hassle. its like 3 clicks to an HD stream on my TV.

i don't have the patience to spend 30 minutes trying to coax a decent stream out of kodi.

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What is plex? How do I get it? How do I use it? Please explain it to me like I'm an idiot. TIA.

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Plex is a media center program that comes in 2 basic parts: server and client. You get both parts by just downloading them. To run the server, it's best to run it on a dedicated computer, though you can install it on just about anything. You can get the various client apps by searching for Plex in your device's app store. Android, iOS, Roku, FireTV, etc., just search and install.

If you aren't familiar or comfortable with installing software on a computer, then getting the server set up might be challenging, but it's really not all that difficult. You just follow the instructions.

Once everything is installed, running, and you're all signed in, your client apps will find your server, and you can then stream your local media using an interface similar to Netflix.

Acquiring your own local media is a topic for another discussion, and setting up tools that automate the process of acquiring your own copies of media is for yet another discussion.

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illegal streaming is a clusterfrick and its a constant game of chasing the good sources and stuttering videos

honestly what i always imagined it to be, and therefore never attempted it. i can see its value if i was back in college struggling for every dollar, but seems like a headache of constant up-keep.

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There, I fixed it for y'all. Used as designed and supported, Kodi is not a clusterfrick. That's why I was puzzled by this thread. CAD was comparing Kodi as an illegal streamer with Plex playing local content and condemning Kodi as shite. The real comparison is between illegal streaming and local content. The programs involved are incidental.

Plex unsupported apps works Ok with Roku. The firestick / Kodi was much easier personally because the Roku would have to reboot to connect with Plex.

point taken.

i did NOT try to set up my library in kodi; only was referring to the *ahem* various plugins.

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I use Sonarr (TV shows), CouchPotato (movies), and SABnzbd (downloader) to keep my Plex server stocked. I don't torrent, but I subscribe to a usenet host. I also subscribe to a usenet index.

Once you get it all set up, I don't think there's a more seamless viewing experience. All of your shows just appear in Plex when ready, and you don't have to sift through any trash or do any searches. CouchPotato is smart enough to wait until the Blu-ray comes out before grabbing a movie (you can override of course) so it's a very rare occasion to get a poor quality rip.

It's like Netflix for everything.

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bump can we talk about this a bit more?

do you VPN?

what do you find yourself needing usenet for you don't get via either sonaar or couchpotato?

Thirded. I looked at couchpotato but I’m not very savvy with the command line.

Alright, this post will be kind of long, and it will STILL be missing a lot of details, but I will do my best to point you guys in the right direction and answer any followup questions.

I highly recommend using a dedicated machine for this. It doesn't have to be super high powered, but if you use Plex on a Roku or other device that requires transcoding to stream to, it does need a reasonable amount of horsepower, especially if multiple people will be watching simultaneously. There are charts around that list recommended CPU benchmark scores. Several models of NUCs have the power and are quiet and light on power consumption.


High-level overview of setup and software

Sonarr and CouchPotato are the two programs I use as the "frontend" to managing my media. They may be tricky to get set up, but are both dead simple to operate. They both have prominent search fields... search, click, done. Behind the scenes, they handle everything from searching your indexer, grabbing the NZB file, directing your downloader (SABnzbd in my case) to grab the articles, and renaming/moving the downloaded content to the proper folders so Plex can pick them up. Both Sonarr and CP can be configured to use torrents instead (or in addition), but I just avoid torrents entirely.

SABnzbd, the downloader program, has a TON of settings, but you don't need to touch many of them. It really just needs to know your login info for your usenet server. It provides you with an API key which you plug into both Sonarr and CP, and that allows those programs access to SAB to direct it what to do.

I recall that Plex can be picky about how it likes files to be named, so you may need to read up on that a bit if you find Plex doesn't always find your media. That said, both Sonarr and CouchPotato have sensible defaults for renaming files, so it's mostly just a matter of setting your final media directory locations.

The services and accounts you need for Usenet

First you need an account with a usenet host. I use SuperNews, but there are many to choose from. Some of them resell access to larger hosts. Most are in the $10/month range. Many ISPs used to run their own usenet servers and provide free access, but those days are long gone. Usenet has been around for nearly 40 years, and it is still very widely used and active in academic and research fields, among others. Its intended purpose is as a discussion forum, but it can be used in many ways. It can be used to distribute free software (Linux was initially released on usenet), or you can even use it as a personal cloud backup service. You can package and encrypt your files, upload them to your usenet host, then they get distributed to dozens of servers around the world for redundancy. Not bad for $10/month.

Now, in order to actually find what you want on usenet, you're going to need an indexer. These are the search engines of usenet. There are free ones, but the quality of results usually isn't great. They miss a lot of content, and some of the content they do find is either poor quality or trash you didn't even want. So I use a paid indexer. Most of them are $10-20/YEAR, I pay with bitcoin. Paid indexers are generally pretty good about finding more content and filtering out the bad. The reason the free indexer results aren't good is because usenet hosts do comply with DMCA requests, and copyright holders monitor usenet posts. If content is not encrypted and filenames aren't obfuscated, they generally get taken down quickly. Paid indexers are able to generate NZB files (the usenet equivalent of torrent files) of encrypted content by various means. Maybe the groups that upload the files generate their own NZBs to provide to the indexer, or provide them with encryption keys, or whatever. I'm not sure about the details on how people do that stuff behind the scenes, but I am here to tell you that the results you get from a paid indexer are vastly superior to the free results.

Sonarr and CP need your indexer credentials in order to search. All of these settings are input via web UIs, pretty easy to do.

Alternative to Usenet

Both Sonarr and CP can be configured to use torrents, but I have not done that so I can't comment much on it. I just know the obvious that you will want to use a VPN if you decide to torrent. I'm not too concerned about a VPN with usenet, because my connection to my usenet host is encrypted. And I download a LOT of datasets for research purposes from usenet, you know?

What to expect

You will most likely get frustrated during the setup process, especially if you don't have much experience installing things from the command line. I DO have a lot of experience with the command line, and I still got frustrated a few times. That said, there are tons of instructions available for installing this stuff. And, really, it's not all that hard. You will need to download the files and install some stuff from the command line (again, following step by step instructions), but once they are installed all these programs are configured via friendly web UIs.


Once you're all set up, you will have the Plex server you've dreamed of.

Terrarium TV bah