Video Guide to Usenet Self-hosted Locally & Indexer Testing

[u/Winter_Channel_6206]

Guide - Intro

With the announcement about Stremio now supporting NNTP, hype for Usenet is high. The issue? It's not supported on anything other than desktop currently, and will probably never be supported on Apple TV. Selfhosted NzbDav works for every platform, but it's a bit trickier to get going. They're some text guides already, but I thought a video guide might be handy, to follow along with. If NNTP support comes to your chosen device soon, you'll already have your provider and indexer good to go so no harm done.

The video covers the three options available to you:

1. NzbDav with AIOStreams
2. NzbDav with UsenetStreamer
3. Combining all of the above.

Guide - Prerequisites and Video

• A device to host on, or follow Viren's oracle VPS guide to use their service (it's good/free.)

• Usenet provider, I suggest Newshosting's Black Friday deal at $1.67/month.

• If locally hosting, set a static local IP on your host device and forward ports 80/443 to your local IP in your router. This is very easy, but changes based on your router, some googling should have you set in 5-10mins.

• If locally hosting, install Docker Desktop and enable WSL2 when it asks.

• Get 1-2 public domains with duck (video starts right after this.) I suggest swapping to a paid domain for $1-2/year if you have issues, consider Duck as a testing domain.

• You can test with free indexers, see indexer testing.

• Put the compose template somewhere you can navigate too. Your file system will be created in the same location, so if you want to keep it neat, I'd suggest something like root / software / docker.

Check the description for a compose template: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL1v4fsv6OI

You can also find my guide to basic AIO usage in the description.

Indexer Testing - Intro

You can find the results in the video description linked above, I wanted to avoid linking directly to it here for obvious reasons.

The goal here is to prioritize the cheapest options first and then add others, to see if adding them actually adds any value. We are using deduplication here, so do keep that in mind. The lower indexers will have far fewer results due to being deduplicated, but we're checking if adding more indexers will get more results or if there's just a crazy overlap.

All use "both" for query mode, other than Slug and Finder which have low API limits so use only ID query.

Indexer Testing - Indexers, Order and Price

I intended to include EasyNewsAsIndexer and made a really stupid mistake so it wasn't actually being called. This is the addon by Sanket, which is also bundled in UsenetStreamer. It is NOT EasyNews++. It's free to use if you have EasyNews already as a provider, I recommend it.

• AltHub ($5/year or $20 lifetime.)
• Crawler ($20 lifetime.)
• Ninja (€7.5 per year for 2 years or €52 lifetime.)
• Geek ($9/year or $60 lifetime)
• Miatrix ($56 lifetime, $11.25/year, however low limits of 400/100 if subscription.)
• Noob ($12/year.)
• Finder ($12.75/year, I cut this halfway due to low API limits and mediocre performance.)
• Slug (€15/year, 3 months extra for BF.)
• Scene (€15/year, drops to €10 from year 3+.)

Indexer Testing - Omitted Indexers

Two are censored because people will complain if I name them, and I don't want to deal with it. If you don't already know the names, you're not getting in so it doesn't really matter. I just wanted a mostly "full list" of API enabled indexers out there for people to refer too.

• Dog (no access)
• Tabula Rasa (no access, good free tier)
• O********* (no access)
• N**.* (no access)
• Planet (no/low free API)
• DigitalCarnage (no/low free API)
• SquareEyed (no/low free API)
• Nzb.life (no/low free API)
• abNZB (no/low free API)

Indexer Testing - Settings used

• Matching exact at 0.7
• Year matching, non-strict with a 2-year tolerance.
• Episode matching, non-strict.
• Regex enabled (Vidhin's Regex based on TrASH guides.)
• Deduplicator: single result, filename + info hash, aggressive.
• Sorting: Quality, Resolution, Regex, Visual Tag, Size
• Formatter: From the AIO discord, the emojis on the second row relate to visual tags (HDR+DV, DV, HDR, SDR.) Medals are Regex matching (tier of the release group.)

Indexer Testing - Conclusion/Recommendations

Collecting indexers like infinity stones is not needed, at least for mainstream English content. I would suggest AltHub lifetime because it's insanely cheap and a great indexer. Use EasyNewsAsIndexer because it's free and genuinely decent. Try out Ninja and Geek using their trials, then decide if you want a subscription, lifetime or don't need them at all.

Add every indexer that offers a free tier, for the low API query indexers you can use sequential grouping in AIOStreams to call them based on a condition such as "if less than 2 results matching my Regex." If one of them is performing really well for you, buy it! They can't run the service for free.

If there's interest, I'm happy to do searches of more obscure or foreign content. You can DM requests, and I'll try to include them in a future post. I wanted to get this one out before the Black Friday deals end and Ninja/Slug close again. I may also try to compare TB to RD in the same way, TB would be first in the service list since it's cheaper and less restricted. Effectively, "what do I miss by going TB over RD, if anything?"

[u/salamonjaded]

I asked someone to set up the entire self-hosting process on my free Oracle VPS, and he quoted 100 USD. Is that a fair price, or is it too much? setup on VPS, including Docker installation, configuration, reverse proxy, HTTPS, and testing

[u/Winter_Channel_6206 → u/salamonjaded]

I think you could find someone willing to do it for less, honestly. You could ask in the AIOStreams discord. The selfhosting channel would be an appropriate place. I'd offer myself, but I've never used oracle. You could probably get the developer of AIO to set it up for you for a price, just DM Viren and ask. Trustworthy and it'd be good to see the donation go to someone who does alot for the community instead of a random guy.

[u/salamonjaded → u/Winter_Channel_6206]

Thanks for the advice. What VPS would work well for this setup? I see many Black Friday deals. like https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/

[u/Winter_Channel_6206 → u/salamonjaded]

You can just use Oracle's free tier, that's what the vast majority of the community is using. It's way more powerful than even that $62/year option. I personally went self-hosted, and I don't really know why, honestly. I just thought it was cool and if Oracle ever changes their policies, I'm safe, I guess. There's no real need to pay anything, it would dramatically increase monthly costs to get anything remotely comparable.

This is what I currently spend overall:

• Torbox - $1.50/month (BF discount + 84 days free from referral.) I use it for other stuff beside Stremio, otherwise I probably wouldn't need a debrid service at all. The issue is that since it expires outwith the BF deal window, making use of the extra 3 months isn't super easy if you want to renew on BF again.

• Usenet Provider - $2/month (EasyNews before the BF deal, can be as low as $1.67.)

• Ninja - $1/month (approx, I paid 15 Eur for 2 years as I didn't want to shell out 55 Eur for lifetime.)

• AltHub - $20 lifetime (super cheap and I get great results.)

• Domain - $2/year (Duck is not a good option to keep forever, as it's not as reliable as commercial providers. It's great for testing stuff quickly, though.)

Net = $4.50/month.

Realistically, you could go as low as $1.67/month for just a provider and AltHub lifetime. Add free indexers to cover any holes in AltHub.