Plex

Plex is a home media platform which lets you catalog and manage your media. That is, your TV and movies, music, and some other stuff. It’s pretty smart. It knows about show seasons, airdates, organizes everything for you into your own personal Netflix-style environment. You can then watch that stuff on your computer, or with their apps available on smart TVs and game systems, on your TV.

There’s also a mobile app for Apple and Android devices. You can stream to your phone. And if you’re not home, you can stream it on your laptop while you’re at a comfy hotel.

Oh, and if you have friends on the platform, you can open up your media library to them, so they can also stream your shows and films, or listen to your music. And since they use their own account it will track their progress for them, and not bother you and yours.

You get where this is going? It’s pretty awesome. There’s some other software that does this too, notably Jellyfin, an open-source project that’s very similar. But Plex is the current king, and it has some really killer features I won’t get into in this post.

What I wanted to document a little bit here, on my non-technical blog, is the rather ridiculous setup I have for acquiring media. Lets just say right away that everything else I describe below is to acquire digital copies of things I own in physical format already. Got it? Cool. Just pretend with me and we’ll move along.

Lets pretend that I wanted to find a digital backup copy of Batman (1989) to go along with my VHS tape. It’ll be easier to watch it streaming to my phone that way. There’s a lot of ways to acquire that online, the most popular being torrent sites. I could search around for a torrent site, search for the movie, and hope the version I get looks like it’s good quality and it’s a decent file size. But that’s a lot of work! What if it’s not on the first torrent site? What if it is, but only in a low quality? Or the filesize is too big. Or it’s in French? This stuff happens all the time, and it’s annoying. Finding stuff is hard. I’ve just been talking about films, but imagine TV shows. How do you know when a new episode comes out? Finally, there’s other ways besides torrents to find things and they have their own challenges.

So what do I do? I use Prowlarr, an index manager. It’s entire purpose is to search stuff for me according to rules I set up. I tell it the quality I want (DVD is good enough for me. I don’t need Bluray). I tell it the language I want (original, no dubs). I tell it a list of a bunch of torrent sites it can look at, and other places too. It gets to be very smart for me so when I tell it to find something it can do it automatically. Cool, right?

It’s a start. That’s fine for searching, but how do I know what to search for? For TV shows I have another program called Sonarr and for films one called Radarr. They’re trackers. I tell them I want to watch the Golden Girls, and they tell Prowlarr all about the episodes to go search for. Or I tell Radarr that I want to see the newest Godzilla film (which I will totally own already!) and it watches for when it is released on video or streaming so it can tell Prowlarr to begin the search.

So that’s it, right? Well, no. Now we’re tracking and we’re searching, but we’re not ahem acquiring just yet. I need some downloaders for that. I won’t bore you with the names, but yes, a torrent program is involved, as is another technology that I’m not even going to try to explain here except to say it’s more than a decade older than the world wide web. There’s a lot of tech stuff that goes into this part of the puzzle, and it’s pretty boring. Just trust me, they take the info Prowlarr finds and actually uses that to download things.

And then we’re done! Nah… See, Sonarr and Radarr then can tell the downloader information to rename the file and sort it right into my Plex library. Pretty names, folder structures, etc. Everything is nice and organized, and Plex is automatically updated. Huzzah!

So we’re—hold your horses! I said earlier I like original language things. That means I’m going to need subtitles. And that means I need something to go search and fetch those for me. This is yet another program called Bazarr. It’s configured with the language I want and it integrates with Radarr and Sonarr to automatically queue up things that they download. Subtitles also get shoved into Plex, and we’re finally good to go.

Except, how do I tell these tools what I want to add later on? There’s a few tricks here. Sonarr and Radarr can be set up so that anything I add to my “Watchlist” in Plex will get added to their queue. I also use a website called Trakt to track my watching habits and rate things. It’s like letterboxed does for movies, but it works for both movies and TV shows. I tell Sonarr and Radarr that anything in my Trakt “To watch list” should get queued up too.

So there we have it. I can just tell my media library what I want and it’ll show up automatically for me. Nice, right?

But!!! What if you’re my friend and you want something to be in my collection that you can see? Well, I have one last tool called Overseer that integrates with … well everything above. It’s a discovery tool, and you can log into my copy of it via your Plex login, if you have access to my Plex. Then it does some cool magic. It looks at your Plex watch history on my server and offers a discovery service. It’ll recommend things based on your history. If you want something you can click it to request it. That can be set up to send me the request to approve, or just auto-approve. From there it’s just like I had added it myself. Into the queue and onto Plex.

It’s a pretty silly level of setup, and everything beyond “install plex” is not for the non-technical person. It’s a fun set of toys to me, and I get a kick out of the notifications I get–HOLD YOUR HORSES!! Notifications!

Right, so all those tools are working quietly in the background of my computer, but how do I know what’s going on? They all integrate with a number of notification systems, from email to whatsapp to my choice, Pushbullet. I have Pushbullet set up on my computer and phone, and whenever one of these systems does a thing, it lets me know with a push notification everywhere.

Right, so I get a kick out of those notifications. They make me feel all fancy.