Cutting the cord on TV and movie subscriptions
In 2025, there's no longer a single subscription that you can pay for to watch any new movie or TV show that comes out. Netflix, Disney, HBO, and even Apple now push you to pay a separate subscription just to watch that one new show that everyone's talking about -- and I'm sick of it.
Thanks to a friend of mine, I recently got intrigued by the idea of seedboxing again. In a nutshell, instead of spending to pay for 5 different streaming services, you pay a single fee to have someone in an area with lax torrenting laws host a VPS for you -- where you can run a torrent client and a Plex server, download content, and stream it to your devices.
I tried a few seedbox services, but the pricing didn't really work for me. And since I'm in the Philippines, many of them suffer from high latency, and even raw download speeds can be spotty.
So I put my work hat on and decided to try spinning up my own media server, and I chose this stack: https://github.com/Rick45/quick-arr-Stack
For people just getting into home media servers like myself, this stack can essentially be run with just docker compose up, with a few modifications to the env values as necessary. (For Windows users running this on WSL like me, you'll need to change all containers using host networking to bridge instead, and expose all ports one by one. Most of them only need one port, except for the Plex container, which lists them here.)
Once it's up, you get:
- Deluge -- the torrent client
- Plex Media Server -- this should be obvious unless you don't know what Plex is; it hosts all your downloaded content and allows you to access it via the Plex apps or through a web browser
- Radarr -- a tool for searching for movies, presented in a much nicer interface than manually searching for individual torrents
- Sonarr -- a tool for searching for TV shows, and as I understand it, a fork of Radarr
- Prowlarr -- converts search requests from Radarr and Sonarr into torrent downloads in Deluge
- Bazarr -- automatically downloads subtitles for your downloaded media
The quick arr Stack repo has a much longer and thorough explanation of each component, as well as how to configure them.
Once it's all up and running -- you now have access to any TV show or movie that you want, without paying ridiculous subscription fees to all those streaming apps!
Some caveats
- Torrenting is illegal. That should be obvious. Check your local laws to make sure you're not breaking any. The stack includes an optional VPN client, which you could use if you want to be less detectable.
- You'll need to configure the right torrent trackers in Prowlarr. Some are great for movies, some for TV shows, and there are different ones for anime. There doesn't seem to be a single tracker that does it all.
- Even then, some trackers might not work. For example, l337's Cloudflare firewall is blocking Prowlarr.
- Not all movies and TV shows will be easy to find, so if you're looking for some obscure media, you might need to go with a Usenet tracker.
- This setup requires a pretty stable internet connection (with headroom for both your torrenting and your regular use), and tons of storage. Depending on how much media you're downloading, you'll probably need to delete watched series consistently or use extremely large drives.
- Diagnosing issues (Prowlarr can't see Sonarr! Plex isn't updating! Downloads aren't appearing in Deluge!) requires some understanding of Docker containers, Linux, and a bit of command-line work. It's certainly not impossible, but might be off-putting for beginners.