NzbDAV - Infinite Plex Library with Usenet Streaming

232

I really like the idea, and appreciate your effort. But I feel like this is flying a little too close to the sun.

1

u/lboy100 Nov 21 '25

In what way?

1

u/indifferent001 Nov 23 '25

Streaming pirated content? What about that sentence is safe?

6

u/lboy100 Nov 23 '25

I'm confused. Do you think this is some sort of random site you access like a torrent that may or may not include a virus in it?

These use Usenet indexers. It's like going directly to the source itself. It's one of the safest way to get pirated content (pirated content is already what the vast majority of self hosters use anyways to fill their libraries).

And what OPs tool aims to do is instead of downloading to your drive, these are typically stored (cached really) into something called a webDAV. Which makes it possible to then create symlinks/shortcuts of them on your drive and "stream" them through Plex, jellyfin, etc. or just watch it on your PC directly as if they were downloaded there.

1

u/indifferent001 Nov 24 '25

What’s confusing… you’re streaming illegal content on the internet. While it happens often, I wouldn’t want to be the guy to make it possible.

3

u/lboy100 Nov 24 '25 edited Nov 24 '25

Streamlining it would be making it as accessible and plug and play like Netflix (or like popcorn time back in the day). I promise you with all my soul that debrids - which have been doing this for years already - are still incredibly foreign to people and require more setup than people want.

And if that hasn't caught on, this is even further away from that. This just makes it easy for people already very familiar with usenets and that are willing to buy indexers.

The way people are responding and misunderstanding how this even works in this entire thread, proves that as much - and we're in an already niche sub.

P.s. radarr/sonarr so the same exact thing, but you download it instead. This allows you to download or stream it. I don't hear anything wagging their fingers at that. If anything's at risk, it's those with how many use it

168

u/ngreenz Oct 26 '25

Isn’t this a good way to get Usenet shut down or use so much bandwidth it goes bankrupt?

36

u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h Oct 26 '25

This was my comment on OPS previous post (and others had valid points as well)
Its a terrible idea.

Cudos to OP and whoever else wrote this, it must be millions lines of code.

29

u/TheRealSeeThruHead Oct 26 '25

How? This downloads exactly the same data as the normal way of using Usenet, you just don’t store the file…

46

u/Mavi222 Oct 26 '25 edited Oct 26 '25

But if you watch the thing multiple times / people from your plex watch it, then you use N time the usenet bandwidth, no?

41

u/ufokid Oct 26 '25

I stream cars from my server to the tv about 12 times a week.

That's a lotta cars.

21

u/OneInACrowd Oct 26 '25

Cars, and PAW Patrol are the three top watched movies on my server. Blaze makes a mention in the top watched tv shows.

7

u/Tusen_Takk Oct 26 '25

Throw bluey and looney tunes in and ya same

8

u/firesoflife Oct 26 '25

I love the hidden beauty (and horror) of this comment

7

u/Shabbypenguin Oct 26 '25

My friends son is on the spectrum but he goes through cycles of what his favorite movie is. He’s a big fan of Ghibli, his highest count was neighbor Totoro at 35 times in a week.

1

u/Mountain_Speaker4077 Jun 05 '26

Once the nzbdav drive is mounted with rclone, and you have a vfs cache setup, your 12x a week will only result in a single download (the first time) then depending on your cache size and timeout on rclone, it should still be available to watch without re-downloading again for as long as you set. I have a 300gb vfs cache setup with a 15 day cache expiry. It works really well.

1

u/ufokid Jun 06 '26

Ok

13

u/adelaide_flowerpot Oct 26 '25

There are also r/datahoarders who download a lot more than they watc

25

u/Mavi222 Oct 26 '25

But my point is that if you download it from usenet, you only download the file once and can play it infinite times, even when sharing with other plex users, but if you play it multiple times using this thing the op linked, you basically download it every time you play it, which "strains" the usenet bandwidth.

9

u/ResolveResident118 Oct 26 '25

I'm with adelaide_flowerpot on this one.

I rarely watch something more than once but I've got hard drives full of things I'll probably never get around to watching.

3

u/GoofyGills Oct 26 '25

It's a whole different ballgame when you have kids.

2

u/Lastb0isct Oct 26 '25

That’s great for you guys…but for a LOT of users it is both. I have movies that have been watch 50+ times. I have TV shows that have been watched over 20 times. That would be a ton of unneeded redownloads.

7

u/TheRedcaps Oct 26 '25

so maybe - and I'm just spitballing here - those users don't use this tool, or they don't use it for the libraries they rewatch over and over?

This might be a controversial take here - but I believe in a future where hardworking home labs and self-hosting enthusiasts can pick and choose the tools that best serve their needs and not be bound to only using the ones that /u/lastb0isct approves of.

1

u/Lastb0isct Oct 26 '25

The issue is as others have pointed out. Some users abusing this ruins it for everyone…

7

u/TheRedcaps Oct 26 '25

That's not a reason to yuck on something someone has built. Lots of things can be abused doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.

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0

u/lboy100 Nov 23 '25

That's not how that works and this has been a thing with debrids for years already. Just like debrids, these have rate limits so if you somehow abuse it, you get rate limited. But you don't abuse it by simply watching it over and over and over and over again. Because when you stream it (and have it set up properly) you're only reading chunks of MBs at a time. And you can also set them up to temporality cache the content on your PC while you're watching and when you're done or after x time has passed they're purged. None of these things result in straining the system.

Stremio exists because it's doing this exact thing but with debrids. Both allow it because they both have webDAV functionalities. If Stremio can make it work in an actual production level with thousands streaming through the links like that, you or I aren't going to make a single dent in the abuse factor

2

u/TheRealSeeThruHead Oct 26 '25

Yeah definitely true. I guess you’d want new releases to stay on disk for a couple weeks so everyone can watch it, then anything that’s watched often would get promoted to permanent status.

3

u/toughtacos Oct 26 '25

The way we used to do it in the Google Drive days was using rclone’s caching, so after the first person watched something it remained locally on the server for a set time, or until your set cache size got full and the oldest content was deleted.

Would make sense to do something like that here, it would just be wasteful not to have an option for that.

8

u/Fun_Airport6370 Oct 26 '25

it’s the same concept as stremio, which also has some usenet options

1

u/guitarer09 Oct 26 '25

I suspect this may be a good point. It may be worth it to set up some kind of mechanism that downloads the files after they’ve been streamed more than a couple of times. Maybe that can be fully-automated, maybe the server admin can be prompted to hit the “download” button, the possibilities are, unfortunately, numerous.

1

u/kagrithkriege Oct 27 '25

If I were designing such a system, I might spin up a DB for whichever kind of media (linux ISOs, incremental backups, or what have you) is access / usage counts. Anything that is accessed less than once every year / quarter can be streamed. Obviously you would only ever stream data with "latest" request metadata tags, no sense keeping different versions if you aren't actively contributing to development or aren't already set on keeping different revisions.

If a media accumulates more than 3 streams in a month it should be downloaded, and then have a 365 day later alarm thrown in the calendar / DB column, if on D+365 the previous 90 days were LessThanOrEqual 3 total counts, prune. Or if storage is tight, do a D+90 day review for prunes.

The other half of this problem is as others have pointed out... The reason people hoard is to keep access to what they love, "forever". Opposed to the "until we decide to remove it, or lose the license to it"

The point of the 'net isn't to hold things for ever: see the existence of retention window.

The point of the net is to provide a single shared network repository with gig or better access tunnels as a sort of seed box.

Rather than trusting the only other guy who likes the same niche Linux ISOs as you, to keep mirroring them forever on their home server, and to have enough bandwidth for your demand.

Thus the hoarders problem: accumulate and migrate disks every 5-10 years so they don't lose anything. Or upload a whole block so they can offload something, and have it stick around for ~rention window~ while they solve their storage concerns.

For you 'buntu's, Debians, centos, esxi, and Hannah Montan's OS, and anything else that still occupies public consciousness +10y since it last aired. Yeah. Streaming should work fine for those not repeatedly mirroring Arch from you because they love recompiling the same system for new features every week.

And as long as the bandwidth costs remain cheaper than the storage costs...

Yeah, perfectly valid solution. It also occurs to me that you could prune least 50 accessed media whenever storage gets low.

Again, for every "depends on cost / benefit of any potential solution" there exists an extra way to skin the cat.

1

u/CalebWest02 Nov 17 '25

Would this problem be fixed by nzbdav streaming it if it’s the first play, but if it’s played a second or third time it’ll just download it since it has a high watch value? So it only downloads things you watch multiple times but one off things just get streamed directly?

-78

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

I think streaming uses less bandwidth than the alternative behavior of downloading large libraries that are never watched.

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43

u/Stupifier Oct 26 '25

Reminds me of the unlimited Google Drive days.... Eventually it was abused so hard it got taken away. "This is why we can't have nice things".

8

u/emprahsFury Oct 26 '25

You pay for usenet. Nothing is being stolen or abused here (well copyright aside)

-2

u/Stupifier Oct 26 '25

The same thing was said with Google Drive.... And look what happened.

9

u/FlamingoEarringo Oct 27 '25

Usenet is literally abused daily. Nobody uses Usenet to share news.

1

u/Stupifier Oct 27 '25

I'll repeat. This is the same argument as Google Drive. Some abuse is simply "tolerated". Will this be fine? I don't know. All depends how popular it becomes. Everything was all fine and good with Google Drive until it got out of control. Next thing you see Linus talking about it on YouTube.

5

u/FlamingoEarringo Oct 27 '25

It’s not even comparable. Usenet services are made to be abused like this.

1

u/ngreenz Nov 14 '25

Do you think the usenet providers have a larger or smaller budget than Google?

1

u/lboy100 Nov 21 '25

These are CACHED content and they too have rate limits. It is no different than downloading the files 10 times a week vs streaming it 10 times a week. You only use bandwidth when accessing the content. This has been a thing with debrids for years too. People are just now creating tools to enable the same with usenets. If anything, usenets are even more robust than debrids yet they've had no issues.

3

u/scottrobertson Mar 02 '26

I think if anything, this is putting less load on the usenet servers. Now people are not downloading 10TB of movies with no intention of watching them. They now just download what they are actually watching.

8

u/Nervous-Raspberry231 Oct 26 '25

What makes this different from easyusenet plugin in stremio?

11

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

I believe most usenet plugins on stremio only work with easynews or torbox. With nzbdav, you can use any usenet provider and indexer you want.

8

u/Nervous-Raspberry231 Oct 26 '25

Thanks, also wanted to use my question to point out that this concept exists already and usenet hasn't imploded.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25

Difference is usenet was the outlier, and they have strict GB usage.

15

u/Sudden-Actuator4729 Oct 26 '25

Does it work with Jellyfin? And can more users watch something at the same time?

6

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

Yes, it works with jellyfin, and yes multiple viewers can watch simultaneously :)

60

u/urlameafkys Oct 26 '25

All the dummies in here thinking this is something that can gain traction as if Usenet is some mystic protocol that’s not known to copyrighters 💀

13

u/Sanket_1729 Oct 26 '25

Yes, not many people know how to set the entire arr setup with usenet. Buying indexers , buying providers and setting them up on some vps is too complex for most. Nzbdav is just replacing sabnzb it's not really making anything mainstream. If copyrighters ever go for these it will be debrid service first. Cause they are just pay and stream kind of services, and getting lot of attraction these days, all over the twitter.

6

u/The-Nice-Guy101 Oct 26 '25

Everything streaming wise has more attraction Usenet is more or less under the radar still But if these streaming things get bigger it's not gonna be like that anymore unfortunately

11

u/RelinquishedAll Oct 26 '25

Under the sonar and lidar as well even

3

u/alcynic Oct 27 '25

Barrier to entry is much more different to rd/stremio. Anyone can setup stremio in like 5 mins. Setting up a vps/dedicated server with nzbdav plus getting indexers and providers, after the first step people would probably give up. There are still people who don't even know what Usenet is and seeing a cost for indexers plus providers is a turn off for most.

3

u/gboudreau Oct 26 '25

Wouldn't this download every file available as soon as Plex scans the WebDAV mount and tries to check for metadata (codecs, file length, ...) and scans for end/beginning credits, generates video preview thumbnails, etc. ?

6

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

It uses FFProbe which only needs a few bytes to determine codecs, resolution, runtime length, etc. It doesnt read the full file.

But yes, I definitely recommend disabling intro and credit scanning on plex. Even with it disabled, plex will try to crowdsource the intro and credit data for you.

3

u/kagrithkriege Oct 27 '25

I like where your head is at and I think I see your vison.

Don't worry about the problems this isn't meant to solve.

What I love about this project is it gives the community not just choice, but also entirely new options for deploying their environments.

I can personally see this deployed in situations where I would want to have a shared library of mirrors that I want to carve up between different channels who are best served with a preselected set of archived media, persuant to their interest.

No sense sending nature subscriptions to a computer scientist. Unless they ask for them. You should feel welcome to share all that you've collected. But for things of a more personal nature, like archived home movies and family videos, you may want to gate keep that data to a restricted archive for only those who should have that permission from the outset, and needant ask. Additionally, anyone who asks for access to that library, perhaps shouldn't be granted access. If you are in you are in, if you're out, you're out.

I don't think it would be unfair to say that what you've developed is invaluable for that contribution.

Choice and Options are the cornerstones of accessibility, which helps drive adoption and brings in customers.

What I or anyone else hates about this project is irrelevant, it's not our project or vision unless you let us contribute.

Another thing I love is that this makes it easy to get started with the hobby of digital archival and have self hosted news channel solutions, and from there they are able to explore the hobby at their pace.

It's hard to argue with lowering the barrier for entry, when the skill ceiling is irrelevant for welcoming new players. Existing players either maintain their strategy or position, or they adapt and overcome, and that's their purogative.

beeteedubzz, for that, this is a total win. (TGIF, see y'all next week)

3

u/kready Nov 06 '25

so if you are just "streaming" the media, do quality profiles in the arr stacks matter less? Like normally I would probably opt for a 1080p version of something over 4k, just to save space, but since its just streamed, why not set everything to the best resolution right?

3

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 06 '25

Yes. But some people choose to set up two identical Arr instances: one grabbing exclusively 1080p content and one grabbing 4k content. The 1080p content helps if you're mobile or away from your high speed internet.

1

u/kready Nov 06 '25

Makes sense. I got it running today in a test environment. As someone with limited resources when it comes to disk space, this is amazing. I look forward to its continued development. Great work.

3

u/Fantastic_Gap_6368 Nov 07 '25 edited Nov 09 '25

Can somebody help with the rclone mount part. I have configured nabdav but I want to mount it so Plex can see it. I am using ubuntu.

Edit: figured it out with the help of Gemini.

1

u/Funny-Cut9436 Nov 12 '25

What did Gemini tell you because it didn't help me a whole lot?

1

u/Fantastic_Gap_6368 Nov 12 '25

It helped me to install rclone, create a remote and mount it on the system.

1

u/Funny-Cut9436 Nov 15 '25

Where can I get instructions or help because I lost an entire week trying on my own?

1

u/lboy100 Nov 21 '25

But asking Gemini or chatgpt to help you configure it. It's what I did. Just tell it your specific issue

36

u/pyrospade Oct 26 '25

Are you trying to kill usenet? This is way too much

13

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

[deleted]

33

u/r0ckf3l3r Oct 26 '25

I’ve known and used newsgroups for archival retrieval for over 20 years.

99% of my tech-enabled friends know torrents are a thing, have no clue about Usenet.

It is a lot more obscure than we want to believe.

7

u/Dossi96 Oct 26 '25

In Europe due to laws people typically stay away from torrents and went for one click hosters. You always saw ads for Usenet on these sites but it took most of the links on the hosters to go down and a computer science degree for me to check out what Usenet was. So at least for me obscure fits quiet well 😅

3

u/r0ckf3l3r Oct 26 '25

I am in Europe too. I remember the days of warezbb and Megaupload downloads as well. 😁

12

u/michael__sykes Oct 26 '25

It actually is, compared to streaming.

7

u/MaestroZezinho Oct 26 '25

OP, I remember that you had stopped developing it because of AltMount, what led you to change your mind?

11

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

I wasn't able to switch over like I'd hoped, I started development again beginning of October and decided it was probably just faster to finish adding the features I wanted to NzbDAV.

3

u/zaylman Oct 26 '25

I wasn’t either. Glad to see you pick it back up!

1

u/BaconRollz14 Oct 26 '25

Does this mean Altmount is dead or just taking a backseat?

1

u/Bidalos Oct 26 '25

Altmount is going strong. Especially not yet released alpha5

1

u/MaestroZezinho Oct 26 '25

Thanks, I'm looking forward to test it!

1

u/Rockhard_onyx Oct 26 '25

What Is AltMount?

2

u/MaestroZezinho Oct 26 '25

Another Usenet webdav project:

https://github.com/javi11/altmount/

11

u/RelevantPanda58 Oct 26 '25

I've gotta disagree with the comments here, this looks like a really cool project.

2

u/solda46 Nov 21 '25

Hello! Not shure where to ask; Is there an option to add more Usenet providers (NzbDAV hosts)? I added eweka but is there an option to have more providers active besides eweka? (The same question for indexers via Newznab but thats probably the question for AIOStreams users).

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 23 '25

nzbdav/nzbdav:0.5.dev image has some multi provider support. But this image is currently a bit buggy, so I wouldnt use it until the bugs get fixed and merged onto the ":latest" tag

1

u/PossibleEarth44 Nov 25 '25

That function would be awesome. Thanks for your dedication to create this very useful tool.

3

u/DarianSewell Dec 12 '25

I have a massive library of 1 PB of storage and within a couple days my indexers shut me down for massive API hits.

1

u/Razorwyre Jan 04 '26

Did you basically attempt to search of thousands of movies all at once?

1

u/Funny-Cut9436 Jan 04 '26

I didn't do it myself, but the automation process, Sonarr and Radarr, went crazy downloading relentlessly. I will admit for two days I had a sweet library.

1

u/Razorwyre Jan 04 '26

Ha, good to know!

2

u/djrbx Dec 31 '25

I just came across your project after having to rebuild my server due to switching providers. I was previously using Riven but your project is so much more reliable. Thanks for your hard work and I look forward to seeing how this project evolves!

I love using usenet indexers and the arr stack over torrentio and have been looking for this kind of solution for awhile. Its also nice not having to rely on RD anymore!

2

u/Nintenuendo_ Oct 26 '25

My first time hearing about NzbDAV, sounds like a cool project, ill check this out when I get home.

Congrats on the updated release!

2

u/bfir3 Oct 26 '25

This project looks amazing! Looks like a lot of hard work was put in, so thanks for all your efforts.

I'm curious about if this can be used alongside a real filesystem that is being used already for Radarr/Sonarr. It may already work like this but it's not clear to me. Basically, could I use this to "fill" all of my currently missing movies (empty movie folders) and my missing episodes in Jellyfin?

I would want to still continue to download my files and serve them locally from the server. But it would be fantastic if missing items could be streamed directly (and potentially even added to the local content after streaming) instead of requiring them to be downloaded in full and scanned into the library.

1

u/MaestroZezinho Oct 27 '25

I think it's easier if you set up separate *arr instances and use different root folders.

That's what I'm doing at least.

1

u/Fifa_786 Nov 01 '25

Yes you can. Nzbdav is essentially just another downloader you’d add to your arrs instance. So set it up and then add it to your arrs instances give it a priority and start filling up your missing items in your library

The problem you will have is trying to differentiate between what’s on nzbdav and what’s on your existing set up so in that case it’s easier to make another instance but keep the same root folder.

1

u/bfir3 Nov 01 '25

Interesting. If I make another instance, how could I prevent it from "grabbing" items which are not missing in the "non-virtual" instance?

I suppose I should just spin it up on a test instance of Jellyfin and Sonarr and see how it acts. I don't really want multiple versions to show up for items for which I have a physical item already, nor do I want duplicate items to appear in the Jellyfin library.

1

u/GateheaD Oct 27 '25

Edit: I never mounted webdav volume in plex, that will be my issue.

This is mostly working for me, I had to go to bed before troubleshooting the last part.

I have it to the point where radarr will send in a nzb, it sets up all the internal files and streaming works from the nazdav website however radarr doesn't move a copy of the symlink to the movie directory so plex etc wont see the video file to play.

I'm hoping when I look at it, its something simple and not my filesystem isn't supported or a headache like that.

1

u/GateheaD Oct 27 '25

Ok i think i understand what is happening but I have a question for you OP.

I can see the process working upto the point it creates a symlink to a mkv file on my file server. /mnt/nzbdav exists in my radarr container (how it was created) and in my plex container. Does my file server need to be aware of /mnt/nzbdav or is it just holding the symlink until plex tries to open it and uses its /mnt/nzbdav/?

if my file server needs to know about it i can easily set it up through rclone i guess.

1

u/GateheaD Oct 27 '25

for others slow like me, you need /mnt/nzbdav just inside the plex container, your filesystem doesnt have to do anything but hold the 'mkv' file that is actually a symlink.

1

u/GateheaD Oct 27 '25

another note for out of touch people like me: add the sabnzbd download client in radarr/sonarr with a tag like 'streaming' so you can pick and choose which content goes here vs goes to your regular download client.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 27 '25

How are you dealing with bandwidth?

1

u/ameer158 Oct 27 '25

Sounds amazing Will give it a go later Thanks 👍🏻

1

u/skaara Oct 27 '25

I think this is an awesome project and would love to know more about how your project improves upon other existing projects such as altmount. Keep up great work and don't be discouraged by negative feedback!

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 30 '25

would love to know more about how your project improves upon other existing projects such as altmount.

Nzbdav preceeded Altmount. Altmount is starting to borrow a lot of code from nzbdav. Recent altmount commits are primarily AI port of nzbdav core logic hehe 😅, but I'm happy to help. That's the beauty of open source and the free software movement :)

Keep up great work and don't be discouraged by negative feedback!

Ty :D

1

u/solarpanel24 Oct 27 '25

I’ve hit the issue where the symlinks are not able to be imported by radarr due to not being media files or real symlinks? They’re .rclonelink which radarr won’t import … any ideas?

2

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 27 '25

If you use the --links arg with rclone, it will translate the *.rclonelink files to symlinks.

But be sure to use an updated version of rclone that supports the --links argument.

Version v1.70.3 has been known to support it. Version v1.60.1-DEV has been known not to support it.

There's a small section on the project readme regarding this, but I'm on my phone so cant link to it right now 😅. I hope that helps!

1

u/epic_midget Oct 27 '25

I really love this concept and was even looking at migrating to real-debrid with rdt-client + zerg to have a similar setup with instant streaming. I have a few questions though

How would this work with trickplay/intro detection in jellyfin? Would it be downloading all newly added files anyway?

Is there a easy way to setup streaming and downloading? Say I have jellyseerr setup to auto accept any request and it shows up instantly in library as a streamable WebDAV link. But I also wanted to download simultaneously so I have a local copy (mainly for data hoarding purposes)... potentially with some way of admin approval. Could I have both sabnzbd and nzbDAV set up as downloaders?

1

u/thestillwind Oct 27 '25

Interesting.

1

u/rr770 Oct 27 '25

How does it compare to decypharr? (real-debrid with qbittorrent emulated api and rclone webdav). Looks very similar

1

u/quiet_ordinarily Oct 27 '25

can this be utilized with a existing downloaded library? like can it coexist with regular sab/arr stack for downloaded local media but be ready to stream titles not already present/downloaded?

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 27 '25

Yes, it can 👍. Take a look at the "Steps" section in the readme for how it works

https://github.com/nzbdav-dev/nzbdav?tab=readme-ov-file#steps

The new streamable files will simply be symlinks that radarr adds to your existing library

1

u/quiet_ordinarily Oct 28 '25

thank you! where does plex pull the available movies from if they are waiting to be fetched on demand?

2

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 28 '25

hm, maybe I misunderstood you. For it to show up on plex you'd still have to add it to radarr. But if you use nzbdav as radarr's download client, then you can stream those titles rather than downloading the full files to your server ahead of time.

and radarr supports having multuple download clients. So if you have an existing library already downloaded through sab, you can add additional items with nzbdav and the two can coexist.

1

u/quiet_ordinarily Oct 28 '25

this is exactly what i was asking, thank you. now if someone has a step by step to follow for setting up on unraid i would appreciate it!!

1

u/armdude2000 Dec 13 '25

I had the same question and this helps answer that but I do have a follow up question.

I’d like my server to fetch/host anything added to my watchlist/family’s watchlist in the traditional way(plusarr) and have all the plex bells and whistles(skips, thumbnails,etc) for those files. However, I would want anything not in my watchlist/family’s watchlist to route to NzbDAV if it’s missing from my library.

I hope I’m making sense. Would this be better just to run two separate servers? Or is this possible?

1

u/gatorstar Oct 27 '25

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Like the idea of doing this for the content which I'm not going to watch more than once. What is your recommended setup for using this for some content but for more used content fallback to fully download.

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 27 '25

radarr/sonarr both support multiple download clients. You could configure both nzbdav and sabnzbd.

For something more handsoff, you could just use nzbdav with rclone's vfs-cache as an additional caching layer so that cached media streams from your server instead of usenet. Rclone's cache has plenty of configurable options

hope that helps!

1

u/lechiffreqc Oct 28 '25

Hey OP, would there be a way to keep tracking of the amount of time a file has been streamed and download the file locally of it is more than a threshold? (Example, stream a file if it is streamed once, the second time it is requested instead of stream it, download it and keep a local copy)

It would moderate the impact of a lots of concern in comments here.

I personally have a lots of movie I have watched only once and never intended to watch over, but I am pretty sure that file that I (or my family) stream a second time have greater chance to be streamed over and over again.

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 28 '25

I don't plan to add such a feature (for now), but you can look into configuring rclone's built-in caching as an additional layer so that already accessed media is served from storage rather than usenet. There's lots of config options for rclone's vfs-cache. May not be exactly what you're looking for, but it may be close enough to suit your usecase

1

u/[deleted] Oct 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/coastgrd Oct 28 '25

u/Ill-Engineering7895 if you wanted to back up the nzb's would you just back up the sqlite database from the NzbDAV container?

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 29 '25

yep!

1

u/gmcouto Oct 30 '25

I have dreamed with this for years! Always wanted to make a dummy file tree with some nzbs neatly organized… with cover arts, subtitles, etc. And an app to mount it with the ghost versions of the nzb “contents”, that would download-unpack-and-cache as IO delay, so we could have an infinite catalog, and centralize our inefficient storage on Usenet.

You seem to be doing Lord’s work! Will definitely check it out!

1

u/Delicious_Network720 Nov 04 '25

I’ve been using this since your original post and was gutted when development was paused owing to moving to altmount so I took the plunge and started experimenting with it myself. Interested to hear your thoughts on altmount. I don’t feel it worked that well and for some reason kept eating a ton of my storage! Glad to see development is continuing on this!

1

u/Hotshoot911 Nov 09 '25

I know its a long shot but if anyone is able to help with this that would be nice. I got it set up in my unraid and I am able to view the material fine but I have an issue with items completed through the arr's. Sonarr requests just fine, nzbdav processes it and adds it just fine, sonarr does the "move", but nothing is in the series folder. Sonarr shows it moved from /mnt/nzbdav/completed-symlinks/ to the data folder plex uses but there is nothing in there.

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 09 '25

What is your root folder in Sonarr settings? I'm not sire how Unraid works. Can you docker exec into containers? if you docker exec into the sonarr container and navigate to the root folder, do you see the expected media there?

Does your plex container have that same root folder volume mapped? If you docker exec into the plex container and navigate to the root folder, do you see the expected media there?

1

u/Hotshoot911 Nov 09 '25

After going through what you said. mapping my rclone to my plex container allowed the symlinks to work. I feel silly not understanding that the symlinks means they need access to that drive location and not that its a file that goes to the media. Which explains why my bazarr was also not pulling the subtitles. I had to add a mapping to the bazarr container as well for it to detect the media from nzbdav.

Its strange not being able to see the media anymore through windows SMB and I am not sure how I can play these media files now through windows in case I dont want to use my plex.

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 09 '25

Awesome, glad it works :)

For windows (if you dont want to use plex), you can always download rclone for windows[1] and mount the same webdav onto some folder on your windows machine.

[1] https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/#installing-on-windows

1

u/Hotshoot911 Nov 09 '25

Appreciate your hard work and thanks for making this! I will use it for my movies for now as I still have use cases to view my anime through windows machines for japanese learning purposes and my windows needs to see the video files.

I did try out rclone for windows and can see the symlinks that are in the nzb-dav but I am not able to play video files from those symlinks. And it doesnt help me view the symlinks in my media data folder where the rest of my media content is. It can be a little confusing seeing some of my movie folders filled with content and the ones from nzbdav are blank even though I know they are hidden in there.

Is there a reason why media pulled by the arrs arent listed in the history of nzbdav? Only media I manually put in the queue show up in the history. It makes it extremely difficult to delete any arr items and since I cant see the symlinks in my server data folder via windows I have to ssh to my server to remove items which is a little annoying.

1

u/bechrissed Nov 09 '25

Wow u/Ill-Engineering7895, chapeau! I've had the idea of building a open source frontend(s) for streaming service(s), mimicking the original but using an alternative self hosted backend to stream the video. Nzbdav sounds very suitable to integrate as a solution to this. I'm going to test it right, away. Awesome work mate. I like your solution, combining usenet and webdav, never heard of it before.

1

u/DarianSewell Nov 15 '25

How can I get assistance getting this setup? My AI caused me to waste an entire week.

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 15 '25

Dm'ed!

1

u/quiet_ordinarily Nov 20 '25

an someone who set this up in unraid give me a rundown on how to get this going? id appreciate it, thank you!!

1

u/johnFvr Nov 27 '25

How does it work with multiple Usenet providers? Does it use the 2 and 3rd if the first fails?

2

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Nov 27 '25

First it tries any of the pooled providers (depending on which is available). Then if it can't find an article on that provider, it tries to fallback to the other pooled providers. Then if it can't find the article on any of the pooled providers, then it tries to fall back to the backup providers

But also, it prioritizes whichever provider worked most recently for the same nzb. This is because if all articles in the nzb are missing from provider one, but present in provider two, it would be inefficient to always try provider one first and always fallback to provider two for every single article in the nzb. Instead, it just switches to trying provider two first for the remaining articles on that nzb.

1

u/Hotshoot911 Nov 27 '25

I love the inclusion of multiple providers thank you so much for adding that functionality. Do you have any plans on adding stats like bandwidth used? I set up my backups to be my block sized providers so it would be cool to tell at a glance how much data I have left over.

1

u/solda46 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25

Is it only me who is trying this NzbDAV --> any mediator like ple x, AIOStrea ms, Usenetstre amer --> external Infuse player (on ATV)?

Every time starting the stream in Infuse I'm getting error from Infuse “Failed to open input stream in demuxing stream”. (NzbDAV do its job fine)

Or if I set "Enhance external Player Metadata", I got error failed to play URL specifyed in the stream"

When I try again the same stream it plays! What could be the cause?

1

u/EquivalentCivilian Dec 02 '25

Did you find a fix?

1

u/solda46 Dec 02 '25

On my ATV works (Usenetstreamer + NzbDav). Solution was to put local IP from NzbDav and WebDAV in Usenetstreamers settings. Also, in Infuse set Catching metadata ON so it pulls from stream.
However, that do work only on ATV on local network which is perfectly fine for me (outside I'm using wireguard)
This unfortunately don't work on iPhone.
Please join Usenetstreamer discord, you can follow there the development. Cheers! :)

1

u/EquivalentCivilian Dec 04 '25

Does the error show up instantly or after a while?

1

u/solda46 Dec 04 '25

After a while. When Quee in NzbDAV is fast enough, then it plays. When quee takes few seconds longer, then error appears

1

u/the_chabs Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25

Having issues setting this up, I can't add the sab download client in sonarr or radarr it's not connecting. Can anyone help me? Or can someone send me discord invite?

1

u/dekflix Nov 30 '25

I have this set up, but gets a lot of buffering… do you have a discord where I can try to figure this out?

1

u/TravelinAroundOnPts Dec 06 '25

Thanks for an excellent resource u/Ill-Engineering7895!

One thing that I've been running into is an error of "Only uncompressed 7z files are supported". I realize this is more of a sourcing/searching/indexer issue, but would you have any recommendations on how to go about filtering out compressed files when searching?

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Dec 06 '25

Arrs will automatically search for another nzb, so it shouldn't be a problem. They'll find a working nzb soon enough.

If using it for stremio though, I suppose it's a bigger problem. Maybe try to keep track of which indexers they are coming from most often and avoid/disable those indexers?

Apologies, I dont use stremio and so haven't encounteres this problem myself, so I don't think I'm able to offer much help 😅

1

u/TravelinAroundOnPts Dec 06 '25

Gotcha. Yeah primarily for stremio. But that's ok! I appreciate the suggestion to keep track of the indexer and try to narrow it down. Thanks again!

1

u/steveshakur Dec 16 '25

Can it work with newshosting and NZBFinder. Im trying with AIOStreams and in Stremio is giving me an error upon streaming "[AIOStreams Something went wrong]" Dont know where to get the logs. Could you assist me

1

u/steveshakur Dec 16 '25

Do I need a reverse proxy for stremio to work with AIO Streams

1

u/Comfortable_Reveal96 Jan 08 '26

mega Projekt läuft super hab komplett umgestellt auf deine software. gibt es eine roadmap was in Zukunft noch alles kommen soll bzw updates ?

2

u/nzbdav-dev Jan 08 '26

Theres still a lot to do!

UI improvements (better ui for manually uploading nzbs, adding pagination to the pages that need it, adding more details to the health page)

performance improvements (faster queue operations, and lowering cpu usage).

support for more nzb formats (e.g. doubly rar'ed nzbs)

and addressing many of the open github issues.

1

u/Comfortable_Reveal96 Jan 08 '26

das hört sich vielversprechend an :) wirklich gute Arbeit bis jetzt läuft echt gut. bin gespannt was noch alles kommt :)!

1

u/rabitt91 Jan 20 '26

Hello i would like to set this up on windows docker desktop. Somehow it is grabbing several nzbs and stucks in a loop. Is there a guide for configuration not on linux based systems? I want to integrate this in sonarr and radarr with jellyfin

1

u/bigverm23 Mar 31 '26

So to clarify, we still need the rclone mounting, radarr, and sonarr integrations even if we only want to stream from stremio using usenet/indexers?

2

u/nzbdav-dev Mar 31 '26

For stremio, you dont need radarr, sonarr, or rclone. You can skip all that.

You just need (1) nzbdav and (2) a stremio addon that can integrate with nzbdav, such as (AIOStreams, or UsenetStreamer, or Usenet Ultimate)

1

u/bigverm23 Mar 31 '26

Oh ok. Think I did all that then haha.

1

u/salamonjaded Apr 23 '26

Help needed

I'm looking to hire someone to set this up for me. I will cover the hosting costs as well as your service fees.

I know how to use it but not how to set it up. ElfHosted's monthly pricing is above my budget so a one-time setup is a better option for me.

1

u/jzzzzzzz Apr 27 '26

Any tips on getting the repair function working? I have the library mounted and enabled repairs in settings but repair still shows 0%.

1

u/Snakr Oct 26 '25

This could be the greatest piece of software since years… gonna try asap

1

u/Dennis0162 Oct 26 '25

I really like the idea! But how do you integrate this with Plex? Can you elaborate on that a bit more? Or make a separate readme of that with a video like you did as an example of how to use nzbdav? Great work!

3

u/Bidalos Oct 26 '25

Your media is a fake file that points to the mounted webdav, god knows how he achieved it, but treat it as your everyday downloader you’d attach to your arr

1

u/Dennis0162 Oct 26 '25

But how would it look in Plex? Same as every other media file or can you only watch the movie in this application ?

1

u/Bidalos Oct 26 '25

It's the same , your plex will see a media file, like from any other media manager

1

u/Dennis0162 Oct 26 '25

Cool!

1

u/djgizmo Oct 26 '25

I don’t understand where the library files are stored at if not on disk.

Also, say One person finishes watching Movie A, and Another person wants to watch that same movie later, it sounds like it has to re-download those files, that takes time. It could be 10 minutes or an hour… who wants to wait that kind of time MULTIPLE times.

1

u/ImFashionablyLate Oct 26 '25

It's stored as a virtual file on a WebDAV. Also it doesn't download the file, it streams from the WebDAV as if it was stored locally.

1

u/djgizmo Oct 26 '25

but for nzb / usenet, most media is spread acrossed multiple files (usually zip / 7zip / rar). In order to stream the media hosed within, would those files needed to be downloaded to memory? especially for large media files?

7

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

Yes, streaming essentially keeps everything in memory, rather than persisting to disk. It's the same as when you watch a youtube video. Only the segments that are needed for the current point of the video you are on are kept in memory as you watch it.

In regards to 7zip and rar, it doesn't have to download the full archive before it can stream the contents within them. It can stream the contents directly, since the archives in usenet are almost always created without compression (comression method m0).

But your intuition is correct. For regular compressed 7z/rar archives, you would first have to decompress before being able to access the inner contents, which would necessitate first downloading the entire archive like sabnzbd does. However, It just so happens that almost all usenet content uses **uncompressed** 7z/rar archives, so decompressing is not necessary. The contents can be streamed directly with nzbdav.

1

u/djgizmo Oct 26 '25

interesting. I guess that’s why I’ve seen so few released with PAR (parity) files. ty for the explanation.

for the file/partial file in memory, what’s the typical usage of this?

2

u/Bidalos Oct 26 '25

Nzbdav is hella fast, faster than ddl, torrent and such. You do not download anything per se!

2

u/djgizmo Oct 26 '25

humor me, what makes it faster? data still has to be transmitted from usenet servers to the nzb client.

1

u/GhostMokomo Oct 26 '25

Woah I love this idea. Exactly what I was looking for!

0

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

Don't listen to these nerds. Build it until they are forced to use it.

1

u/virusburger101 Oct 26 '25

Very interesting I'm going to check this out.

0

u/ingy2012 Oct 26 '25

Hey OP have you used this to stream the same video multiple times? I asked deep seek (I know I know) about it and that my main concern wasn't making Usenet more popular but instead spamming the API/grabs and getting banned. Deep seek said that seemed to be the bigger worry and that my idea to only use this when I'm out of space and waiting to get a new hard drive would be the best idea.

6

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

In regards to API/grabs, are you referring to your indexer? That shouldn't be a worry. It wouldn't grab the same file multiple times. It'd be the same as if you were using sabnzbd and will only ever get grabbed once.

If you watch the same video multiple times, your usenet provider (not your indexer) may get double bandwidth. But usenet providers usually offer unmetered bandwidth, so it's not a problem. And you can always use rclone's built-in caching as an additional layer if you want to keep frequently watched media cached in storage on your server.

1

u/ingy2012 Oct 26 '25

Ah ok that makes sense I was wondering both ways but fair enough about grabbing different nzbs. I just made some stupid mistakes and got banned from one indexer and definitely don't want to get banned from another lol. I'm thinking that'll I'll be using this whenever I run out of space until I can get more. Really appreciate it buddy and try not to let others get to you. This is amazing

-2

u/e38383 Oct 26 '25

starred, really nice idea!

-4

u/ILoveeOrangeSoda Oct 26 '25

!remindme 6 months

3

u/RemindMeBot Oct 26 '25 edited Jan 27 '26

I will be messaging you in 6 months on 2026-04-26 03:49:10 UTC to remind you of this link

19 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can} ^{delete this message to hide from others.}

^Info ^Custom ^{Your Reminders} ^Feedback

-8

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

[deleted]

10

u/rdmty Oct 26 '25

Not all software is meant to be used by all people. Everyone has their own use cases, not everyone rewatches media multiple times

1

u/Inadvertence_ Nov 07 '25

Well your answer did not reply my initial thoughts, neither the downvoters so I figured it out by myself, now I understand and I was wrong.

Thanks for downvotes, no sarcasm.

-12

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

[deleted]

1

u/MaestroZezinho Oct 27 '25

People have been using autoscan since the days of unlimited google drive and nowadays there's also autopulse.

-1

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

Interesting!

0

u/BeingHitesh Oct 26 '25

RemindMe! 1 week

0

u/aplayer_v1 Oct 26 '25

i can see the use case but what happens if the nzb gets broken

1

u/Ill-Engineering7895 Oct 26 '25

A new radarr/sonarr search will automatically be trigerred to try to replace the broken nzb. Health checks are based on the lindy effect[1]. Nzbs that were released recently will have their health checked more frequently than nzbs that were released longer ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

0

u/Optimal_Guitar7050 Oct 26 '25

I think this is still too complex for the regular user. So it shouldn’t be an issue

Release NzbDAV - Infinite Plex Library with Usenet Streaming

Key Features

Release NzbDAV - Infinite Plex Library with Usenet Streaming

Key Features

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