(Disclaimer: yes, I bought a $180 4TB Crucial SSD too, but my family split the cost with me since they're going to use my Jellyfin server. Whether that counts towards the final cost is up to you. And the electricity cost is pretty negligible to run a Le Potato as a server, but I guess you can count that too.)
So this all started rather innocently. I was fed up with all the ads being shoved in my face with everything I do, so I finally decided that it was time to set up a Pi-hole on a single board computer. For me, it ended up being a Le Potato. I had never even touched Linux prior to this, so it took me a day or so to get everything set up. I love learning new things so I kind of got hooked on learning my way around Linux basics and decided that I was going to upgrade my setup to a Pi-hole + VPN using wireguard. That was kind of a beast to configure as a novice but I got that to work after about a week. Now I was getting ad free content anywhere I wanted on my phone. I rode that high for a few weeks until I realized that I was just scratching the surface of what I could do with my little $30 Linux server setup and this is where I really got to upgrade.
I had learned of Jellyfin from LTT and decided that I was going to test it out. I set up the Jellyfin server on the Le Potato and I was off to the races. Now I just needed content. I read through some of the wiki and settled on Mullvad+qbittorrent to find the content I wanted. With everything configured it still didn't really feel complete, so I set up profiles for my family members and gave them their own passwords to access the content. I quickly realized that 64 GB was not nearly enough (without a rolling library) and I was getting annoyed with having to constantly swith the flash drive I was using between the Le Potato and the laptop where I was downloading my content. So I went out and bought a 4TB USB SSD from Crucial and set up access as a NAS on Ubuntu with Samba.
It's just now finally set up. My family texts me to let me know what it is they're wanting to watch, I torrent it, upload it to my NAS, and Jellyfin streams that content to my family 100% free. I've turned my 6 family members into pirates and they barely even realize it.
Take a look at Overseerr.
You’re welcome.
Jellyseer also works
The *arrs work well with all of the big three, I have a Jellyfin install here but it's apps for TV and what not are really lacking and attempting to get that to work with some of my elderly relatives I don't look forward to. Just setting up Plex with them was a nightmare.
Yes, Jellyseer works fine but it's really only a version specifially for jellyfin when OS already has support for it.
Radarr and Sonarr both have good list parsing now, all people have to do with mine is add it to their plex/imbd/trakt watchlists.
Hypothetically, a person could simply set up overseerr on a secure domain, provide that URL to those with whom the content would be shared, and they log in, do a search, and request the media.
I could see this being a very easy method of allowing others such access, quite a low barrier to entry for them while allowing the content provider the ability to vet requests.
But everyones’s use case may be different. So whatever works best for them is also valid.
100% the method I use doesn't really have auditing or limits in the intuative way programs like overseerr or ombi does. I'd have to setup each list per user with a load of rules set. Rather than a global ruleset for all users
This comment piqued my interest. I've been dreaming of a trakt -> torrent integration for some time now, since I actively use trakt to manage my "watched" and "want to watch" movies. In an ideal world, whenever I add a movie to my trakt wishlist, it would automatically be grabbed from a torrent on a remote seedbox. But I could'nt find any trakt integrations on the tools you named when I researched this a couple months back. Do you have any instructing links or similar where I could read more about this?
This section of Spaceinvader1 covers adding lists in radarr there's a lot more defaults now within that list option that have made it easier to add things like trackt. Gone are the stevenlu days
The rabbit hole never ends.