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If you (or anyone else that's reading this) are going to do illegal and questionable shit on the Internet, you might as well go whole hog and set up your own piracy and content distribution system on your home network.

1). First and foremost, you need to do this shit behind a VPN. You're specifically looking for a VPN with port forwarding so you'll get better download speeds on your torrents. I'm using ProtonVPN because when I was setting my rig up for the first time about a year ago, that was the top recommendation. Just do a little research and type in "best VPN for torrenting" into your favorite search engine. Set up your VPN as instructed. You'll want to make special note of the "openvpn" username/password. You'll need it later.

2). Next, you'll need hardware. While any old laptop that's been sitting around collecting dust is probably fine, you'll run out of storage on it pretty fast if you want anything more than a few shows and movies. If you're running out of storage space, I would recommend a Network Attached Storage device (NAS). There's lots of brands to choose from, but I'm partial to Synology.

3). Next (regardless of hardware) you'll want to be familiar with Docker and the container model. Essentially, containers allow you to run a little piece of software in a self contained virtual environment. All you have to do is tell docker the containers' dependencies and configuration and it'll spin up the container you ask for it.

4). Next you'll want to get smart on the arr stack. This is a set of services that run in docker containers that can completely automate your piracy activities. At a high level, you specify the TV shows and movies you're interested in, then the arr stack will search for the torrent, download it, and move it to where your content distribution service is scanning for new media.

5). Not sure where else to put this, but I'd recommend gluetun for the VPN client (this is where you'll need your openvpn credentials), qBittorent for your torrent client and Jellyfin for your media distribution. These are all services that can run in Docker containers. I'd recommend using the docker containers from https://fleet.linuxserver.io/ since they tend to standardize the configuration of their docker containers.

Resources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/rikthc/list_of_recommended_vpns_2022/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread

https://wiki.servarr.com/

https://trash-guides.info/

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki

It's a lot to distill from into a single Lemmy comment, but hopefully this sets you on the right path!

Why not? First of I have all the episodes as mkv files, they are high quality but indeed compressed.

Second, if I will AI upscale the episodes, I want to use uncompressed video files, and then compress them after the upscale. Maybe 720p would be more than enough? Maybe 1080p? I don't expect 1440p or 4k to improve the viewing experience much over 1080p

Lastly, in Norway, ripping DVDs for own use is specifically legal. The act of format shifting or making straight up copies at least of music got legal precidence about 20 years ago. I don't remember exactly, just remember watching the news. Reasoning was, for the sake for format shifting, or making backups to preserve your original. Giving away, lending, or selling your backups was strictly made illegal, except if the original is included when you sell your backup. As well you can't make a backup and sell the original without destroying the backup or including it with the sale.

One of the guys credited with breaking the dvd encryption was Norwegian. He didn't do it alone, and last time I called him the guy who broke thebencruption, someone on reddit yelled at me. He had the code printed on a t-shirt, and used it in every interview on TV. There FBI had an arrest warrant out for him, he even won an award he didn't attend in the US. The warrant was later recended or something I don't know, because he did move to the US in the end.

Final thoughts. I think my ps3 can be used to rip dvd's using home brew? I might not need to buy a usb drive if I don't want to.