Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

darkmiasma said:

Void

Thanks for responding. I'll reread the last few pages and see what i can figure out.

The biggest issue is just learning Linux at this point. I'm sure the method exists and its fairly easy.

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If you're looking for my setup, it will be way back. Not sure what the best way to find it would be, but probably over a year ago I'd guess.

Crone said:

Unforseen problem with my new setup. I set my SD profile in Sonarr to include HDTV-720p, because often times those are available when SD isn't. The issue is, since those come first, they are snagged first, and it doesn't wait to get the SD quality of a episode. Why should it? But the issue then is, the 1 friend on my server has terrible buffer times now because my 6 upload, and the her 20 download, even with transcoding down the quality, have terrible buffer times.

My 6 upload isn't any good, but the setup worked when it was transcoding down SD episodes. lol.

Edit: The other issue is I have 80+ torrents now going. How do you guys decide when to clear them out? I'm obviously not getting enough upload to not be counted as a HnR, so I'm just burning through bonus points, at 50 per to clear the oldest ones out. I let them seed as long as I can. While I'm not uploading all that much at all, just the sheer number of open connections could be slowing things down maybe. I don't know.

Tempted to remove Torrents as an option, but figure out how to keep it in Sonarr, for when episodes are not found through Usenets.

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There is an option to prefer Newsgroups over Torrents (or vice versa) in Sonarr. I'm not sure how long it waits before resorting to the secondary, but the option is there at least.

In regard to the quality issue, sounds like you're just screwed and should stick to grabbing SD only. I don't know how people watch in SD anymore though But aside from your upload, if it is transcoding down it sounds like more of a processor issue? I don't know enough about the inner working of Plex to say for certain, but if you can stream SD just fine when it starts as SD, but can't when it starts as 720p, that points me towards the transcoding process being the issue, not the upload. How good is your processor, memory, etc?

The number of torrents *could* be affecting your processor as well, but it shouldn't be too much of an issue once everything is just sitting there seeding. During the download and moving/linking that Sonarr does I could see it momentarily increasing processor load, but after that it should be fine with only 80. I used to have hundreds going on my home computer, only really ran into an issue when I got near 1000. I'm assuming you have a limiter on the upload speed of your torrents? Otherwise that could be eating up your bandwidth and it just looks like a 720p issue.

My first guess would be processor load from having to transcode, but if you have a beefy computer there goes that idea. Next would be no upload bandwidth limit on torrents. If you have that set though, no fucking clue what it might be.

Crone

Your router would be the best way, but I don't know much of anything about how specific you could be. If you could set it where if Plex is using it, it gets 100% of whatever it needs and tells your torrent program to fuck off, that would be the perfect solution. Not sure if that is possible, or if it is, if your router supports it. Much less how to do any of it.

Barring that, all you really need is bonus points and seeding time for IPT. I forget what it is but they actually introduced a seed-time goal as well as just 1:1. I want to say it is 5 or 6 weeks. So technically if you just limit your uploads to the slowest you can get during "Plex viewing hours" you'll still get tracker updates showing you are seeding and eventually they will hit the time needed, regardless of upload amount. You'll also be gaining bonus points as you go in case you just want to nuke particular ones to save space or whatever. Overnight you could remove the throttle and let it try to seed as much as possible too.

I don't remember what torrent client you are using, but I know rTorrent let's you assign a default "channel" to all new torrents too. The lowest pre-configured one is "16KiB up" whatever that equates to. So if you chose you could just set everything to that automatically and it should act as a sort of "keep alive" function. Or, you can do things like assign ratio groups, like "1:1" where as soon as it hits even ratio it automatically sets the upload to that 16KiB. That way every new torrent will try to seed as much as it can right away, but once you hit 1:1 it drops to minimum and can't eat up your bandwidth any more. In other words, that one really hot torrent isn't consuming all the bandwidth to get to 20:1 ratio while all your other ones struggle to even get 1:1. Of course, then you might be losing out on upload gigs too, since you just limited your best torrent.

Lots of different ways to configure things and decisions to make, although if you use any of these you aren't going to be able to just do a global limit/unlimit like I described in the second paragraph above. Still, if you aren't willing or able to remember to change it every night/morning (or configure it to automatically do it somehow), setting some of the automatic ones could go a long way to saving your bandwidth. I'm fairly certain other torrent clients would allow the same thing if you aren't using rTorrent.

Not sure what else to suggest, aside from buying faster internet of course, but that might not even be possible in your area for all I know. Whatever you do, don't fucking donate to IPT. You can earn enough bonus points to stay afloat if nothing else, and that guy is a huge fucking faggot and already makes a shitload of money from his sites.

Quickest legit solution to much of that (added to Netflix and Hulu of course) is SlingTV. App for all kinds of devices that lets you purchase a subscription for various packages. I use it strictly for NFL RedZone, but I had to pay for a basic tier and then an extra package, so it isn't some a la carte nirvana like we all wish for, but it is relatively inexpensive and can fill a lot of those needs. You also get a free week to try it, so no reason not to. The streaming quality is good, no complaints here. I don't use it for anything else so I can't say just how comprehensive it is, but if he's got specific needs to fill, this might work if you aren't wanting to try to explain torrents or newsgroups to him.

The Fire Stick mod he's talking about is Exodus, you just install it on anything that plays KODI (easy to google, not going to bother explaining it), and it aggregates a bunch of different streaming sites for stuff like movies. So two days after a movie is released in theaters you might be able to see the same cam version you can download from torrent sites on there, but it doesn't magically give you a perfect copy until other people have perfect copies.