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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

How do you get content for Plex?

Ripping DVD's/BluRays is a very popular way to do it. Plex also has "channels" for streaming content but they are a crap-shoot on if they work any given day and I've all but given up on them.

>Ripping DVD's/BluRays is a very popular way to do it.

Is it really? Because I know nobody doing that of several Plex users. Maybe with a few of beloved DVDs from their library, but not for 99% of what they watch.

Ok, maybe "very popular" isn't the way to describe it. It's the most popular LEGAL way to do it. The most popular way consists of:

* Sonarr/Sickbeard/Sickrage (TV)

* Couchpotato (Movie)

* Headphones (Music)

* Sabnzbd/Nzbget (Usenet download clients)

* Deluge/Transmission/etc (Torrent download clients)

Is usenet still going for that sort of thing? I found it started drying up massively about a year ago, have switched to torrents ever since...

It's extremely reliable if you have something like Sonarr/Sickbeard constantly running (checking rss feeds every 15min or so). A lot of stuff gets DMCA'd be there is a still a ton of content there, it's by no means dried up or dead. Sonarr/Sickrage can use torrents and usenet though so it can fallback to torrents (or use them primarily if you desire).

The unspoken answer? Usenet and torrents.

I have a fairly large Plex library that's 100% legal.

- Legal music from iTunes and AmazonMP3.

- Ripped discs using MakeMKV.

- A rigged-up pipeline of tuning TV using an HDHomeRun, recording with MythTV, and a custom script to invoke Myth's commercial skipper, remove the commercials (using avconv), and rename according to Plex's desires. I used to have it compress the files down, but I let Plex do that on sync/play, since it'll usually have to transcode anyway.

The first is super easy and definitely legal, no matter where you live. There may be some legal issues around breaking the DRM when you rip a disc, and it's not 100% dead-simple (some DVDs have weird structures). The third requires some pretty substantial babysitting.

I wrote a channel that might help[0]

[0]: http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/

You pirate

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