I currently have a very comfortable lil home server with the arrs and plex (would like jellyfin but it’s not there yet for me, currently fielding emby given how Plex is going), basically all sources are usenet.
I’m nearing a point where I either have to delete some stuff or expand space, which is not cheap, and some of my older drives are likely due for some failures too. So after seeing the popularity of debrid I’ve been wondering if it’d be worth to instead spend the money on it, but would like to ask some questions. I spend maybe around $70/year on the various bits for Usenet and I expect I’d have to spend around an average of $80/year on drives for just expanding storage (obviously assuming I don’t just delete stuff). And that’s with avoiding 4k just for storage reasons (my internet could take the streaming tho)
Even just the price of Usenet seems to be more than the price of a debrid subscription though and from what I understand I’d not need new disks with it either.
From what I understand debrid is a shared download space for Torrents/direct downloads where if someone adds something it’s available for everyone (presumably it gets deleted if noone accessed it for some time and would have to be re-downloaded?). It’s possible to mount the content via WebDAV to make it accessible to clients/media servers to stream directly from debrid.
My questions are…
- Is there still a point to sonarr/radarr with debrid?
- How is the quality? (both in terms of media quality and in terms of file organisation so things are discoverable and accurate, e.g. chances of things explicitly named wrong so you think you’re about to watch Brooklyn 99 and instead get porn)
- I would likely go the path of using zurg and keeping with Plex/emby - any experience with how well does this work (any recommendations for or against)? What’s the mechanism for picking what is available in the mounts to the media server… or is it just… everything on debrid?
- I don’t really use any torrents at the moment, from what I understand that’s primarily how you get things on debrid. Would I have to start looking for good trackers to get content or is there no need because chances are someone will have downloaded/shared most things?
- I guess, am I assuming this works very differently to how it actually does? Any experience from people who did the swap from Usenet/arrs to some debrid + media server?
Many questions in a wall of text, I’d be grateful for any answers to any of them! Thanks!
I can’t comment on questions 1, 3, and 5 but I have been using Real-Debrid for around four years now (through Kodi mostly because I don’t want to have to manage a huge server again, occasionally I download directly to watch later/on a different device/non-video stuff) and I’ve been pretty happy with them so I’ll answer from that perspective.
Quality is great. As you mentioned in Q4, it works via torrents so if a torrent exists you’re free to grab whatever you want. You can stream or download from RD once it’s been cached by them. Even 50+GB Bluray remux streams fine directly from them. As for file naming, in the thousands of downloads I’ve gone through, I think I’ve come across two incidents where something wasn’t named properly and I ended up with something I didn’t expect but I believe both of those were Kodi issues, not RD. One was a movie where I got a foreign movie of a similar name and one was a TV series where it kept trying to play the wrong season/episode. In both cases I was able to just manually add the torrent/magnet and RD had it fully downloaded basically instantly or I was able to manually select another file in Kodi. The file names are what you expect with a torrent though with the title/year and all the quality and codec info in the filename so it’s hard to get the wrong thing. I don’t think I’ve ever come across deliberately misnamed files. It would get nuked pretty fast, trackers usually take stuff like that pretty seriously.
Assuming something is relatively available RD seems to be able to grab it very quickly. Like as fast as the page refreshes after adding the torrent/magnet. You also download very quickly from them; I typically see over 100MBs down over my wireless connection in a house with several other people using our connection which is pretty much fully saturating our bandwidth lol. Occasionally I have had issues getting something, but like with most things, the older and more obscure you get the harder it is to find sources for. In that case you may want to be on certain trackers. This is kind of why I like Kodi because there are plugins that focus on different types of media and some may have better luck finding, say, old 90s cartoons while others are better for anime. Once it gets added to my debrid I can go back and grab it/rewatch later. But for more popular stuff, I typically just use one of the big name public trackers. RD grabs it and I get it securely and privately from them. I’ve never bothered with a VPN and have never had issues.
One thing that I didn’t see mentioned was downtime. Occasionally RD has had some downtime. If you’ve ever been on the addons4kodi subreddit you’ve probably seen the posts with people freaking out about it within minutes of it going down. Downtime is typically minimal and usually back up within minutes to a few hours. In a few instances (like maybe twice?) it went down for like 12 hours or longer? Not really sure, if it goes down I just find something else to do and check later in the day or the next day and it’s back up. RD has also been known to compensate days worth of service for hours of downtime which is pretty nice. I haven’t heard the same about Alldebrid or Premiumize.
RD also gives you tokens based on the service package you buy (called fidelity points). 1000 points will convert to 30 days of service. I buy 180 days at a time which is currently around $17.33 USD and I get 800 points, so buying a year (~$35) gets me an extra month with points left over. Then the next several 180 day purchases also get extra months with them.
Thank you! This is great information.