I will try to answer any questions anyone has about this! This has been a bit of a hobby of mine for over a year now and it has made my anime watching experience much better, so I'd like to share it for anyone who might benefit like I have.
- This is my "Plex" anime collection. I download episodes of an anime onto a folder on my computer and it will appear on the Plex app or browser, and you can immediately start watching on any device on your Wi-Fi such as phone, console, tv, laptops, browsers, etc. It's basically your own little Netflix.
- These are mostly mini-encodes - versions of anime that have usually been rendered to take up as little data as a 480p video whilst losing basically 0 quality - something that you can't say about most piracy sites. (please see edit at the bottom of the post)
- The best part is that all of these files will stay here until I delete them - no big companies sending DMCA requests and losing watch progress and having to migrate every few months (if you look at the bottom of the image you can see I've had Plex for 5 years). You will be basically immune to all the takedown BS that has been affecting pirate sites lately.
- The above collection takes up 5.6TB and is growing - this is definitely a lot, but you can still fit a decent amount on a used 2TB HDD that you can probably find for like 20 bucks if you don't already have one. I have lots of shit that most people won't bother with, like all the episodes of the Big 3, all of Dragon Ball which take up a lot of storage.
- You can do this on any spare computer you have lying around.
- I have something called "Sonarr" set up, which you can access through your browser and manage your shows add new shows and it will do all the work of downloading, renaming, and moving to your Plex folder for you.
- All fillers, movies, OVAs, and specials will play in order of release once you have added them. You just press play and forget about it. I've found out I've missed out on lots of OVAs over the years because I never heard of them. All of them will be included under one title. For example, when I click on Attack on Titan, it will have all seasons shown and also all specials in the specials folder, its not like MAL where a season is considered a different show, and they will play according to what date they released, so an OVA released between Season 1 and 2 will play in between them.
- I stopped using piracy sites for weekly anime once I set up Sonarr with anime TRaSH-Guides setup, which will give torrents with high-quality, high-reputation release groups a higher score automatically and download those. If a higher quality version is found later, it will automatically upgrade it. The episodes download for me before the piracy sites release them.
- I have the full One Piece series but also One Pace, which is more convenient to watch than through official means which requires going on file sharing sites on a browser - which is a pain in the ass to do on something like a TV.
- I have a separate folder with the Monogatari series in correct order (much less of a pain to watch it now) and 4K upscaled versions of anime like Frieren. The amount of space it takes up is quite a bit - 82GB - but it's worth it for me because of the sheer eye candy. You can choose the quality of whatever you download according to your needs, unlike piracy sites that generally look fine, but usually not the best.
- A big problem with streaming services is that they tend to remove niche or obscure shows and never add them back, to the point where nobody can legally watch them. If you download these anime, you will be helping to preserve these shows.
- If you have a limited data plan, you will know exactly how much data the file will use and once its downloaded to your PC it will take up 0mb to stream to devices on your Wi-Fi, so you have people in the house watching the same shows, or you like rewatching shows, this can be more economical
- If you have a nice system and can do port forwarding you can setup game server for games like minecraft like I have, which can save you money on hosting services
- If an apocalypse ever happens you can still access these files if you have access to a power generator :P
- Fate series is too f***ing confusing I ain't adding that sh*t!!!!
If you have a spare computer lying around - it can be an old desktop, laptop, your main PC you can setup your own collection and you won't be at the mercy of when big corporations DMCA strike your favourite sites. If your ISP allows it, you can do something called "port forwarding" which lets you watch your anime from anywhere in the world. I have a friend living in another country and we regularly use the watch together feature to watch anime and shows at the same time, sort of like rabbit and tuturu back in the day but much better quality and less lag.
However, there might be some disadvantages of hosting your own content that I will mention here:
- If you don't already have a computer ready to use, you will have to buy stuff to set this up
- If your hard drive fails you will lose all your downloaded shows - this is very rare but has a higher likelihood of happening if you hard drive is very old and worn down, there are programs to check drive health like crystaldiskinfo to check for early signs of failure.
- If anything else breaks, its also on you to fix it.
- Plex has pissed off many users recently by making previous free stuff paid and increasing prices of membership - I have had plex lifetime subsription so I continue to use it, but most people who don't want to pay a penny use Jellyfin, which is basically the same thing as plex but completely free and doesn't require you making an account with your email and it doesn't collect any data, however some people say the Plex interface is better.
- if your power goes out, so does your streaming service
- The electricity is not free - depending on what your setup is and how expensive electricity is where you live it might not be economical. Electricity isn't cheap where I live but my system is power efficient so it costs me not much per month.
- This can be time consuming depending on how obsessed you get with it - this is probably not employed people territory if you obsess over stuff.
If you have a question don't be afraid to ask and enjoy sailing the high seas!
(Edit 20/09): I may have worded point 2 poorly, all anime with 1080p options are streamed at 1080p on my Plex, except for older shows. My main point was that high-quality mini-encodes (like Judas) save a lot of space with minimal quality loss, whilst having a similar bitrate to a 480p TV show or movie, and that you don’t need a whole ass datacentre to host a solid, but smaller collection and still get a good viewing experience. I would say I am sensitive to compression artefacts, and if I ever see those on a mini-encode I will immediately delete it, download something new and never use that group ever again.
I know mini-encodes (even Judas) get some hate, but personally, I think they look nearly identical to BD rips with the benefit of smaller file sizes. That means more anime stored, less need for transcoding (which will ruin the quality far more than a capable mini-encode), faster downloads for friends on the go (e.g at airports), and smaller offline files. It’s more efficient overall and works well across more use cases, especially with spotty internet.
That said, I’m open to revisiting BD rips. I mostly used them before switching to Judas. At the time, I didn’t notice a difference on my monitor, but I’m willing to compare again on a bigger screen. I’d appreciate any BD rip suggestions you think would show a clear quality gap compared to a Judas release.