Goodbye Netflix! Building my own home streaming and media server with Unraid and the *arr apps

Half year ago I decided to move away from streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV and HBO Max. Shows I loved being removed or censored, content fragmentation, price hikes, and general enshittification were the main reasons behind this stampede.

Now I run my own home streaming and media server. A couple of friends have witnessed this solution in real life and have asked me to share the details; which is not an easy task, because this journey took many evenings of reading, tinkering, breaking things and starting over from scratch.

In this series of articles I will share all my learnings in setting up such a streaming and media server.

Photo by Oscar Nord on Unsplash

Ingredients

The hardware

• A television. Obviously! The specifications of your television will have an impact on some choices down the line, for example: whether it can display 1080p or 4K content; whether it supports Dolby Vision (DV), or HDR10+, or HDR.
• A computer. That computer will be your home media server. Content will be stored here and get streamed to the television. Furthermore, a number of applications will be running in this server so that we can find, fetch and organize all our media.
• Optionally, a streaming media player like NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro. I chose to get it because both its hardware and its media player client were more powerful than my TV’s. The Shield’s Plex app is faster, more stable, and supports a wider range of formats. It can direct-play high-bitrate 4K, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos without server-side transcoding, and its powerful Tegra X1+ chip handles decoding locally, preserving both quality and CPU power on the server.
• Wired ethernet connection between all the physical components (television, computer, streaming media player, and wireless router), to enjoy the highest possible bandwidth while streaming media.

The goal of this ecosystem is to be able to have Plex do Direct Play of content from the home server into the television. Direct Play means that the video and audio are already in a format my device (the NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro) can handle, so Plex simply sends the file as-is. This preserves the original quality and uses almost no CPU on the server, because the server won’t have to transcode (i.e. converting a video or audio file from one format to another in real time) the content into a format supported by the receiving device.

The subscriptions

Yeah, here’s the thing. You will still need some subscriptions; but at this point it’s costing me less money than having several streaming services.

• A Usenet provider, which gives you access to the Usenet network. In my case, I’m using Eweka.
• One or more Usenet indexers, which are the “search engines” for Usenet content. Some of them provide lifetime access with one single reasonably priced payment, but monthly/yearly subscriptions are quite cheap. In my case, I’m using DrunkenSlug, abNZB, altHUB, Nzb.su, NZBFinder, NZBGeek and NzbPlanet.

The software

• The “direct replacement” of Netflix et al will be **Plex**. It has a separate client (for the TV or the streaming media player) and server (for the computer) applications.
• A bunch of applications running as Docker services in the computer. More about them later. This ecosystem of services will be working together, talking to each other, delegating responsibilities, etc., to guarantee that whatever (new) content I request is available to stream in Plex in a matter of minutes. A lot of these applications belong to the *Arr stack: a family of open-source, self-hosted applications that automate the downloading, management, and organization of media like movies, TV shows, music, and more.

Documentation and guides

All you need to fine-tune the configuration of all the services in your home server can be found in the famous Trash Guides. You DO NOT need to follow these guides blindly; more about that later.

Deep dive in the software stack

The main applications we will be using are as follows:

• **Unraid:** The operating system of our home server. Delivers parity-protected storage, Docker container management, and easy virtualization. All through an intuitive web interface.
• Plex Media Server: The heart of your personal streaming platform. It organizes your movies, shows, and music with rich metadata and streams them to all your devices, locally or remotely.
• Plex Media Client: The app you use to watch content; whether on your TV, phone, or browser. It connects to your Plex Media Server, offering a Netflix-like interface with your own content.
• **Radarr:** Automates movie management. It monitors your wanted list, grabs new releases from Usenet or torrents, and adds them to your library, fully renamed and organized, and in the quality you’ve configured them to be.
• **Sonarr:** Like Radarr, but for TV shows. It tracks upcoming episodes, handles season packs, and keeps your series collection complete and consistent.
• **Prowlarr:** A unified Usenet indexer manager. It connects Radarr, Sonarr, and other apps to multiple Usenet and torrent indexers, syncing searches and API keys in one place.
• **SABnzbd:** A lightweight Usenet downloader. It receives NZB files from Prowlarr and downloads, repairs, and extracts them automatically.
• **Deluge**: A flexible torrent client often used alongside SABnzbd for content that’s easier to find on public or private trackers.

Optional services:

• **Overseerr:** A beautiful web app for managing requests from other household members. My girlfriend can browse my catalog, request new movies or shows, and get automatic updates when they’re available.
• **Bazarr:** Handles subtitles for your entire library. It automatically downloads and syncs multilingual subtitles for new and existing media.
• **Recyclarr:** Keeps Radarr and Sonarr configurations clean and consistent. It syncs your quality profiles and custom formats with the community-maintained Trash Guides.
• **Flaresolverr:** A helper service that bypasses Cloudflare and other anti-bot protections, allowing Prowlarr (and apps depending on it) to access protected indexer sites smoothly.

Deep dive in the hardware

I chose the following components to build my home server.

• Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX In my case, the first and foremost limiting factor in my build was the space where the computer would sit. This case fits perfectly in the shelves next to the TV, and has a very decent airflow.
• CPU: Intel Core i5–13500 + Noctua NH-L12S Low consumption and powerful enough to transcode 4K content if necessary.
• Board: B760I AORUS PRO DDR4 Decent ITX board with 4 SATA ports for 4 hard disks. Won’t be enough to fill the entire case, but for that we will use a separate expansion card.
• Memory: 64 GB Corsair LPX DDR4–3200 Because we will be running quite some Docker applications. And because we will be keeping the transcoded media chunks in memory rather than in the disks. In 99% of the cases the media will be streamed as Direct Play, but I want to leave enough room for when transcoding is necessary.
• Drives: 2x Kingston KC3000 2TB M.2 NVME and 6x WD Red Pro 16 TB 3.5" The m.2 disks will implement what in Unraid is called the “cache pool” (configuration and Docker images), and the 3.5" ones will contain the actual media, in what Unraid calls the “array pool”. One of the 3.5" hard disks will be the parity disk that will save my ass in case something goes wrong with the others, which leaves me with a total of 80 TB of available disk space for content.
• Fans: NF-A14 PWM 140mm (exhaust) and Noctua NF-A9 PWM 92 mm (intake) It’s important to keep the inside of the computer cool.
• PSU: Corsair SF750
• Controller: LSI SAS2308 HBA Our motherboard only has 4 SATA ports, but we have 6 hard disks. This professional card will expand the amount of SATA ports available. I found one in eBay, and then attached a small fan (Noctua NF-A4x20-FLX) to its heatsink to keep lower temperatures inside the case.

What happens once you get all the ingredients?

Boy oh boy, where to begin? There are many small things here and there. Like I said in the introduction, it’s taken me weeks of learning, tinkering and finetuning to get to this point.

For this first article, let’s start with a simple walkthrough of what happens behind the scene from the moment I decide I want to watch something unavailable in my home server, until the moment it’s ready to be watched.

What happens behind the scenes: a spoiler

Let’s imagine that there is some content that I want to watch. This content does not reside yet inside my home streaming server, so it needs to be somehow found, fetched, organized and made available for Plex to stream.

What does this journey look like?

1. Option a) I will search for a movie in Radarr, or a TV show in Sonarr. They have access to a vast catalogue of content; but that’s just that: a catalogue, a database, something like IMDb. They don’t “have it” per se — they just know it exists. In any case, they will find it in their catalogue, and I will tell Radarr (or Sonnar) to go get it. But not just “go get whatever”: I will specify the quality that I want for that specific content: it could be Blu-ray 1080p quality, or maybe 4K Dolby Vision, or maybe just plain DVD quality because it’s a very, very old TV show. What I have specified in my search is called a “Quality Profile” in the world of Sonarr and Radarr. Option b) My girlfriend will find a TV show or movie she liks in Overseerr and file a request to download it. The request will be approved automatically by Overseerr because I love her so very much.
2. Radarr / Sonarr will perform a search for this content through Prowlarr. They will search for it in all the configured Usenet indexers. Eventually, they will find the best version of that content according to my wishes. This it a very important detail; to reiterate: in the previous step I have specified which one of my configured “quality profiles” I want the content to be in. So Radarr / Sonarr will give scores to each search result and pick up the instance with the highest score.
3. Prowlarr will instruct SABnzbd to fetch the content from Usenet. The content will be downloaded in the M.2 SSD disks (Unraid’s “cache pool”.)
4. Once the content is downloaded, SABnzbd will “unpack” it and sanitize, a bit of post-processing. The content is now downloaded and ready to be picked up by Sonarr / Radarr.
5. Sonarr / Radarr has been monitoring the download and now realizes it’s time to deal with the downloaded content. The first thing it will do is moving the content from the M.2 SSD disk (“cache pool”) into the 3.5" hard disks (“array pool”). As part of this moving, the content will be placed in the right directory, and will be renamed in configured and standardized way that Plex Media Server can easily identify what kind of TV show or movie it is, so it can properly fetch all its metadata (poster, description, cast, etc.)
6. Once the content has been moved to the right place, Sonarr / Radarr will ping Plex Media Server to make sure that it is immediately incorporated into the right library (Movies, TV shows, anime, etc.), and then it can start fetching the content’s metadata (poster, etc.)
7. At this point, the content is available in the Plex Media Client and I can watch it on my TV.
8. Plex Media Server will also ping Overseerr in case it was my girlfriend the one who requested it, so that Overseerr can send a message to our home Telegram group to let her know she can start watching the new content.
9. In parallel, Bazarr is already searching for English and Spanish subtitles (in case the content didn’t ship with those already). If they are found, they will be downloaded and stored next to the content files.

In the next articles of this series I will go into details like:

• Configuring Unraid.
• How the Docker services actually communicate with each other.
• Directory structure in the hard disk pools.
• Quality profiles and scores.
• Automating everything as much as possible.

Do you have any questions at this point? Do you know something that I don’t? Please let me know in the comments!