Introduction
I haven't watched anime on Bilibili for many years. 💢
Since I found out that the Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan anime series were also edited, I started my journey of locally watching anime.
Until recently, the entire experience of watching anime has become much smoother, so I decided to share it.
The final result is something like this:
You can also use a demo account to log in and experience it!
This is my Jellyfin server address
It may be opened as a public service in the future.
Overview of the Process
I used two cloud servers in the entire process, one as a downloader and the other running Jellyfin.
If you want, you can also replicate the entire process on a NAS or a cloud server.
Here is an overview of the entire process:
Downloading
If you don't use websites like Bilibili to watch anime, the best way to obtain anime series is probably through bt/pt.
Thanks to the hardworking and loving subtitle groups, most anime series are translated on the same day. Thank you!
If you can read traditional Chinese characters, Bahamut Anime Crazy's subtitles are almost the fastest, Japanese speed!
I used the open-source project AutoBangumi as the main downloader because it's really easy to use.
Here is a brief introduction to the project:
This project is an automatic anime tracking and organizing download tool based on the Mikan Project and qBittorrent. Just subscribe to anime series on the Mikan Project, and it will automatically track and download the episodes. The organized names and directories can be directly recognized by media library software such as Plex and Jellyfin without the need for secondary scraping.
The final result looks something like this:
Anime
├── Lonely Rock
│ ├── Season 00
│ │ ├── Lonely Rock S00E02.mkv
│ │ └── Lonely Rock S00E02.mkv
│ ├── Season 01
│ │ ├── Lonely Rock S01E01.mkv
│ │ ├── Lonely Rock S01E02.mkv
│ │ ├── Lonely Rock S01E03.mkv
│ │ └── Lonely Rock S01E04.mkv
│ └── Season 02
│ ├── Lonely Rock S02E01.mkv
│ └── Lonely Rock S02E02.mkv
└── Daily Life
Of course, Lonely Rock definitely has more than two seasons.
Storage
Then comes the issue of hard drive capacity. After downloading so many anime series, where should they be stored?
Cloud server hard drives are too expensive, so they are not considered.
Therefore, I chose to mount OneDrive using Rclone to expand the storage space, and used autoremove-torrents to regularly delete the local torrents on the server to prevent the hard drive from exploding.
Rclone is a command-line program for syncing files and directories, and it supports interaction with various cloud storage services. You can mount your own OneDrive or other cloud drives as hard drives on your system.
In fact, there is another advantage to storing anime series on OneDrive, which is multi-device synchronization. You can have the downloader and Jellyfin on two different servers to avoid lagging.
It also makes it convenient for me to share my anime repository.
Playback
For anime management and playback, I chose Jellyfin without hesitation because it is open-source!
Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server software that allows you to manage and stream audio and video content over the network. It supports various devices and platforms, providing integration and management of personal media libraries.
And Jellyfin has a wide range of clients, covering almost all devices, so I can enjoy my anime series on the couch.
Moreover, Jellyfin's metadata retrieval is also good, with neat covers, satisfying all anime fans.
Conclusion
All of these services can be deployed using Docker, and the setup is very simple, plug and play.
Are you ready to leave behind the uncle and the advertisements?