My 2.5 year old loves watching classic Pokemon. I’ll be honest, so do I. But have you tried doing that? It’s fucking insane.

  • The first half of S1 is on Netflix
  • The second half is on Amazon but you need an extra subscription to watch it.
  • The theird season (johto) is also Amazon.
  • The 4th is no where but Archive.org of all places… Which is called Johto Champions, so it really feels like the end of the season but it’s another 52 episodes!

You would think pokemon.com would have all this (they have a lot, and it’s all free) but they don’t!

Seeing S4 (is that even right?) On Archive.org is really pushing me to want to build a Plex server. Having all this content in one place would be very nice.

I do IT work by day, and I have some older 2TB platter drives from a retired camera server laying around. What’s the easiest way to get my foot in the door? Do I save up some $$ for a Synology box?

Love to get your input!

3 points
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This is where the beauty of sonarr comes in

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2 points

Hot dog, I just looked it up. So you set up Sonarr and tell it I want “Pokemon” and it just pulls torrents for the show from feeds it knows?

Now the obvious question I have is, how do I avoid my ISP from freaking out? Is it just as simple as putting it behind say, NordVPN?

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1 point

I gave up on torrents a while ago and just focus on Usenet. It cost money (~$3/mo for a provider and another ~$2-3/mo for indexers) but it’s encrypted and doesn’t rely on P2P.

Also don’t forget that DVDs exist if you want to go a more legal route.

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2 points

Huh I’ve never looked into Usenets. Any good learning resources on that? But also, your right about DVDs. I think early seasons of Pokemon are hard to find in physical media these days.

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2 points

idk how much you know about docker, but that’s how i have everything set up. i use sonarr with prowlarr (indexer) and a torrent downloader. the only thing the isp will care about is downloads so put torrent-dl behind vpn like nord. i use gluetun to do that, but there are other ways too. at the end i use plex because i like the apps ecosystem with music player, but a pass costs like $100 for life. otherwise check out FOSS jellyfin, many users like that.

these apps all have git repos and websites to explain their uses, you’ll be fine with your background. if you haven’t used docker, i recommend it, but its not required for anything, especially on windows

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1 point

I’ve been using this docker container to manage the VPN connection and transmission and it’s been fantastic https://github.com/haugene/docker-transmission-openvpn

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3 points

If you are using Docker to set it all up, then there is a Docker image for Transmission & OpenVPN called haugene/transmission-openvpn. It’s what I’ve been using, if you’re using something NordVPN then you tell it your login credentials and it works. I’ve been using it with PIA and had no issues.

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1 point

Same, been using it for years with no issues at all

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6 points

The easiest would be a Synology Nas, but make sure it has transcoding capabilities otherwise its such a headache if the device you’re playing the video on doesnt support the codec.

otherwise i’d just try and see for a 2nd hand thin client which will be way more powerful than a synology and sweet sweet intel quicksync.

Also look into Jellyfin instead of Plex :)

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1 point

I have a Synology DS220+, and it works great as a Plex server for my purposes!

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1 point

Can Synology nas with transcoding handle 4k content? I’ve been using my old desktop for ages to handle Plex, but the CPU is too old to handle live transcoding of 4k

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3 points

depends on which synology model. any intel cpu thats like 8000> generation has very good transcoding support.

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1 point

Would have to be on the beefier end of synology boxes, in my experience my 220+ has not been great for 4k. Perfectly fine for less than that though. So maybe you wouldn’t have to step up much.

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1 point

My 918+ handles it fine. I think Plex requires the pass to utilize hardware transcoding, though?

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1 point

Can Synology nas with transcoding handle 4k content?

Only a few models, and most of them have issues with HDR.

This is what you’re looking for: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MfYoJkiwSqCXg8cm5-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc

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1 point

Thanks! Trying to grok the list. For the hardware transcoding that reports “H264 Output”… What does that mean? Like what limitations will be on the transcoding that they didn’t say “yes”. Does that mean it’s effectively downconverted out of HDR?

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1 point

I also used plex for my kids for a while and for the longest time I simply put a couple HDDs into my personal PC and ran plex off my PC. It was more than adequate for just letting them watch whatever shows they wanted, no need to go crazy if you don’t have the need for more!

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This is true… I have a feeling my PC is pretty power hungry. I’ll see how hard it would be to get my PC to WoL. I could have it boot up on a schedule and then power off on a schedule.

I can always migrate off it later.

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2 points

Just slap the drives into an old optiplex or something similar honestly. If you’re just streaming it to 1-2 people at a time you won’t need anything too powerful

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1 point

Most TVs can read from a usb drive directly; I used to load up all the the seasons of Pokémon onto a external hdd, usb plug it into the tv and just watch it directly

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1 point

We have an old desktop that’s usually turned on for one reason or another. The easiest thing for us was to make the D:\ drive visible on wifi, put all the media on the D:\ drive, and stick VLC on everyone’s Roku/FireTV sticks. That way we didn’t have to manually add new things to specific drives or worry about which TV’s could watch which shows or accidentally run out of space on a thumb drive.

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