This post contains content related to media piracy. I couldn’t find any rules for this community and I don’t know if it’s allowed. I accept the risk of getting this post taken down or being banned without knowing the rules.
With that small disclaimer out of the way, let’s tackle my question.
I’m a simple self hoster: I have single server made out of an Optiplex 3060 Micro (i5 8500T, 32GB, 14TB of storage in one drive), I use duckdns instead of a real domain and I have no supporting infrastructure. I don’t really like watching things, I set up arr stack mainly because everyone says it’s the best thing to use a homelab for.
My family have strong opinions on piracy and I know for a fact they wouldn’t use my jellyfin, even if I tried to manipulate them, which btw is a really bad practice (if it’s as common as responses under posts about getting people to use your homelab suggest).
I also have hard time getting them to even allow me to run my homelab (I’m a teenager, I live with my parents), because it takes space and uses power (for context idle is around 8W).
As I said, I don’t watch things that often and even if I watch, I’m extremely monothematic, I watch basically only AOT and sometimes some random popular movie.
I understand that my situation is quite unique, but I find it hard to argue for Jellyfin+arrs when fmhy and countless reliable streaming sites exists.
I already made my mind, I’ll stop using those services today. I’m interested how others look at this “problem” tho.
Are you hosting arr stack/plex/jellyfin?
How much is it utilized (in watch hours/week for example, mine was less than 2/week)?
Have you considered not using it?
If you stopped using it and went back, what happened, why did you change your mind?


Are you asking a technical question or a moral question?
Pragmatically - IDGAF. If I have it on the ssd, I’ll watch it there. If I need to download from torrent or usenet and then watch it, cool. If it’s easier to use CloudStream (for some transient series), no problem.
I tend to keep a corpus of movies / shows on my ssd because it’s always there, always reliable, always fast. I have stuff that’s just not easy to find online any more and multi-tenancy / bandwidth are no issue. I can throw it in my bag and watch it wherever, even without net.
It’s also agnostic. Not every pirate streaming app works on every device. OTOH, samba share / sftp pretty much does. Tonight I streamed stuff onto a OLPC X-O4…good luck getting fmhy to work with that - it can’t even load YouTube directly but stream stuff off the router just fine.
I don’t use JF much any more (prefer ssd plugged directly into router, accessed via NovaPlayer on android devices; files uploaded to via ftp transfer - yes, very 2010) but I think its pretty amazing. Cloudstream and fmhy are amazing too. Use what works.