In my own house, or just myself. Jellyfin is fine. I haven’t spent as much time on it though compared to Plex.

Plex has its own user auth, I don’t need to manage that. My friends and family don’t have to hit me up for password resets.

It has apps on pretty much every device.

Users can just log in. They don’t need to know what server to type in.

Totally reasonable. I don’t shuck anymore, so I don’t have the concern of getting the wrong disk.

I’ve personally never had a problem with their returns before. But I haven’t had a doa disk out of their “renewed” internal disks yet.

Specifically the renewed drives sold by Amazon. They are the returned/refurbished drives. I’ve probably bought 10 or so in the last few years and that’s how they’ve all come. I haven’t had a failed drive out of them yet. (Seagate 22tb and WD reds 18tb)

Amazons renewed drives usually come well packaged. Antistatic bag, suspended inside very thick air pocket thing that completely encases the drive, inside a good cardboard box.

A big one for me was user management. I don’t have to concern myself with that. So it helps. They also have apps for most things, I can just say go get Plex instead of what device are you using? Get x app. Here is the server information you’ll need to put in.

I didn’t have to put a lot of effort into managing the people using it.

California. And I’m not entirely sure. The emails went to my mother, so I didn’t hear too much about it until they terminated our contract.

My father got us kicked off our ISP for downloading music from random public trackers.

I’ve been on private ones for years and never gotten a warning.

I second the super micro picks. They are relatively cheap and super reliable.

Currently I run a 36 bay 4u supermicro server. It runs unraid because I’m lazy and it seems to handle the mismatched disks really well. Most of my stuff is now docker containers out of laziness. But I prefer VMs for production services. I built this box to also be able to handle external SAS cards in case I need to add another shelf. But I really wish unraid would support multiple pools of their main storage type. But I hope to replace all my disks with 22tb before I get to the next shelf.

I used to run a 7 node ceph server for my storage. Which has a ton of benefits going into data warehouse stages. But it ended up being more frustrating than I needed. At least 5 years ago when I was running it.

Even perma seeding, redacted is hard. There really aren’t enough seeders to make it worthwhile. You basically need to do what you can to get free leech tokens and then use them wisely.

Lidarr can tank your ratio quick and the time it takes to upload the same amount can be months. Soulseek is another option to help build out your library. But I don’t know if it can be combined with lidarr.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great site and I love it. I just don’t think it’s a good fit for lidarr.

I’ve had to put up a lot of obscure music from local bands to keep my ratio on redacted. As someone who has been torrenting for decades, it’s not an easy site.

It’s a great site. So if you can get in, do so. But I wouldn’t use it to fill lidarr, it will kill your ratio and get you banned. It supplements my Usenet for bands that I REALLY want to have now.