Curiously it seems to be a problem of rent seeking. “I’ll start my own streaming service, with blackjack and hookers” said every rights holder. And why is it so expensive to “rent” a movie from for example Apple? Rent two movies and you’ve paid for a month of Netflix. How did that compute?

Maybe someone with experience in the field and more up to date info will correct me, but I did some research on the subject 10 years ago while entertaining the idea to launch a VOD service in France, and the right holders expected that such a service would:

- pay them a percentage of the price of the rental, which could not go below a certain amount,

- pay a yearly license (~3500€/year just for my country for a popular movie) per language audio track,

- handle on their own sending technicians to rip the masters to then host them on the platform.

I don’t exactly remember the minimum price per rental, but the economics didn’t make sense in terms of what we wanted to attempt, so we gave up. One would have to pay an enormous amount in upfront license costs without being able to generate a big volume of views by undercutting the competition in the case where technical excellence could allow us to cut prices.

> per language audio track

I guess this explains why Netflix will have different audio options for the same movie dependent on region.

Partially. The other reason is simply to remove clutter in UI.

You can get more tracks to appear if you change Netflix UI language in settings, as described here in 2015 by Netflix CPO: https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-all-subtitles-available-in-a...

This is also mentioned in various Netflix help pages, like here, which says 5-7 subtitle languages are shown by default, and you need to change UI language to see the rest: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13245

Did you do the entire setup from scratch, one by one, or you used some script that handles everything? I mean Sonarr etc.

Also, your seedbox is that NAS or it's remote and the NAS just syncs it?

It's extremely easy to set up the entire stack (Sonarr for TV, Radarr for movies, Lidarr for music, Transmission (or Deluge, or Rtorrent) and Jackett for torrent handling, Plex (or Emby, or Jellyfin) in a docker-compose using the LinuxServer containers, shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to set it all up for complete automation. I have a NUC from... 2016? running all of these and handling a couple of Plex streams at the same time as well, everything works perfectly (but if you're looking for an actual NAS be careful since Plex is a bit on the heavy side, especially if you want transcoding). You can find more info on Reddit, especially /selfhosted /datahoarder /plex and /homelab

as I trust HN more than reddit (perhaps optimistically), what VPN should I use with a seedbox? I've been looking at seedhost, but wondering if I also need a VPN as well, as an american

I am currently using Mullvad VPN.

I followed a guide to set a seedbox up as a media server a year or two ago, and as a professional salesperson not developer it took me like an hour.

I've found that seedbox providers tend to have very helpful irc nerds if you run in to trouble.

Yep. The piracy age is definitely resurfacing.