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2024

Mooar debrid toys

It's too soon to tell whether it's "just a passing phase", but the "infinite" streaming app bundles seem to be a popular alternative to traditional torrenting / usenet. It's a good fit for us, since (a) the apps can be complicated to interconnect, (and automating complexity is our jam), and (b) they rely primarily on compute and network resources, which are cheap and easily expandable, rather than storage, which is a stone-age PITA 🪨.

So for your instant-streaming enjoyment, I present the following "instant streaming" guides:

We've also got an alldebrid bundle ready for a trial, if that's your flavor.

Read more for capacity expansion, and changes to TDarr and WebDAV access to meet resourcing constraints...

Beware, here be bugz

After yesterday's plex-debrid business, Discord (and the ticket channels) were surprisingly quiet today. Either the hiccups are gone and users are happily streaming, or they've given up and gone outside with the rest of r/realdebrid!

One minor improvement to note - you can now do a once-off top-up of ElfBuckz, without it turning into a monthly subscription.

We did find a few bugs today, which I'll list below, in order of criticality:

  • in new-app
  • 4 min read

Turn-key solution to Plex-Debrid streaming

Today we welcome plex-debrid, another piece of the puzzle for simple Plex debrid-based streaming. Plex-debrid lets you use your Plex watchlist as a "watchlist" (haha), scraping public trackers for the debrid-cached releases, and adding them to your Real-Debrid. It then triggers a rescan of the Plex library, so that in theory, the media is available to stream within 10-20s!

Plex-Debrid "Infinite" streaming

This is a beginner-friendly solution which avoids dealing with torrents, trackers, ratios, VPNs, and storage limits. The trade-off, of course, is that you don't own the media - it's streamed to you from your debrid service, for as long as you have a valid subscription.

Here's a little diagram showing how simple it can be:

flowchart TD
    K[Plex] --> |Stream|Z[User]
    Z[User] --> |Add to watchlist|K[Plex]
    K[Plex] --> |Watchlist|G[plex_debrid]
    G[plex_debrid] --> |Scan on download|K[Plex]
    G[plex_debrid] <--> |Find and add torrent|H[real-debrid]
    H --> I[Zurg]
    I --> |/storage/real-debrid/...|J[rclone mount]
    K[Plex] <--> |Library|J

And here's a demo from the plex_debrid repo..

Go behind the scenes with Kubernetes Dashboard

As you'll no doubt have read, ElfHosted is not a traditional seedbox, VPS, or shared hosting provider, but rather something new - we run the apps you choose, on a selection of appropriate hosts, in a highly-available and fault-tolerant way, using Kubernetes. And we open-source it all.

Kubernetes

What's the downside?

This distinction has many advantages (automation, scalability, resilience...), and some complex implications - for one, your apps don't necessarily run on the same hardware, so it may be that Radarr, Sonarr, and qBittorrent are all running on different hosts with different storage and processor capabilities. Our streamers (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby), for example, run on hosts with Intel Quicksync support, for hardware transcoding support.

We can't (easily) provide TCP-based access for services like SSH or FTP, which is why we rely on rlcone and WebDAV for data migrations, and we can't provide "root access" because each app runs on an as-locked-down-as-possible container, dispersed across our cluster.

One previously negative implication has been (until now...) that it's not simple to see app's real-time CPU / memory usage, or to watch logs in realtime. Certainly, these are available at a cluster-admin level, but without complicated authentication integrations, it's not possible to provide a user with visibility into their own resources, without exposing the privacy of other users.

A sexy solution!

We now have a solution I'm particularly proud of, because it exposes our Kubernetes environment on a per-user basis, in a way that's safe, while still providing all the cool visibility.. which I'm happy to now be able to share with you...

Geek out with custom domain names / branding for Jellyseer / Overseerr

Do you 1⃣ love showing off your Overseerr / Jellyseerr to the family and friends you share your media with?

Do you 2⃣ also love owning your own domain name, like iamacouchpotato.com?

Now, you can combine these two passions with custom domain names for Overseerr and Jellyseerr! 🏆

Setup custom domain for Jellyseer / Overseerr

Create a custom CNAME on your domain name (noobflix.iamacouchpotato.com, for example), pointed to the FQDN of your elfhosted service (i.e. noobflix-overseerr.elfhosted.com), and the pick up a custom domain addon for Overseerr or Jellyseerr.

Plug your CNAME in, push the button, and within a few minutes we'll have generated the appropriate SSL certificate for your fancy new https://noobflix.iamacouchpotato.com instance!

Read on for details re changing the default logos too!

Welcome to 2024! 🎉

In today's blog post, the first of 2024, we discuss:

  • How SABnzbd's queue in the 1TB /tmp folder now persists
  • How RDTClient gets some VIP network connectivity
  • How the volume provisioning bug was actually solved