Yeah, I hated it too. If I had a server automatically downloading torrents at all times on my network, I could kiss goodbye to online gaming and voice calls with my swarm, and even browsing and work would slow to a crawl. I guess I’d spend a lot more time reading physical books while waiting for the internet to work.
If I have 100 gigabytes free on my media drive, and I have Columbo and Friends on my to watch list, and I also want to keep up with Invincible as new episodes come out, then auto downloading would fuck me. It would fill that 100 gigabytes with 10 seasons of sitcoms and 10 seasons of detective shows, and then next week when the new Invincible episode comes out, there’s no room for it. But I definitely would rather watch the new Invincible on a timely basis than another season of Ross getting into arguments with Rachel. I can watch Chandler make bad jokes any time, and it’ll take me ages to get to season 10 if I’m on season 2
I was also on the fence. Ended up jumping into it all a few months agk, and my plex server went from a very small and informal media repository that a few friends kept nagging me about because I always procrastinated downloading, categorizing, and adding media to it, to now a vast collection of thousands of movies and hundreds of shows, spanning about 50 users, around 40TB+ of content (which reminds me I need more drives soon…) and everyone requests whatever they want. There’s still work to be done, there always is, especially if your server grows and your peers start using it (wait to see that one person start requesting Korean stuff that never gets found automatically), but it’s a night and day difference for me, and the organization of it all helps me concentrate and tackle stuff quicker.
So the stack usually goes like this:
-sonarr, radarr, readarr, lidarr, etc. : they each specialize in a media format (series, movies, books, music, respectively), they will fetch Metadata from known Metadata sources, and will perform searches on whichever indexer you like (think piratebay for torrents, or nzbgeek for NZBs from usenet). They’ll connect to your download client and send torrents and NZBs to be downloaded, will know if a download fails and search again, and will import completed items automatically. They’ll organize everything, rename everything, and keep track of quality with constant upgrades to your media by parsing RSS feeds from said indexers. They won’t go out of their way to downloading things you didn’t ask for, you have to ask for everything. You can monitor collections for movies on radarr if you want future movies, but that’s about it as far as waiting for new content not explicitly requested.
-overseerr, requestrr, etc. : these are front ends that you can share with your friends and family. You only need one. They’ll be able to search for content as well as browse trending or new contenr, see if it’s in your library, request content, and follow the progress of the requested content. No need to tell anyone “this isn’t done yet”, they can just check what’s available and whatnot, and you can designate request quotas per user and decline requests.
-jackett, prowlarr, etc. : these helper services will make it easier for you to keep track of your indexers. They’ll communicate with the content handling arr services to provide them all the indexers they need. You only need one. You set them up once on these services rather than once for each arr service. They also have the ability to perform better manual indexer searches than the main arr stack services.
-honorable mention, bazarr: this little fella will integrate with your arr services to monitor all media and download subtitles for it all, set to your standards. It even has the ability to use a WhisperAI server (speech to text LLM developed by openai) as a source for subtitles, so you could create your own subtitles if you don’t find any. Of all of them, I find this one to feel the jankiest, but it does a decent enough job, even if not perfect by a long shot.
There’s other services that I haven’t messed with. For instance, there’s Tdarr which is used for automatic remuxing and conversion of media files to whichever format you prefer, in order to standardize your entire library. I feel like this is a destructive service that could easily backfire if I’m not careful (say, HDR H265 conversion to H264, buhbye dynamic range and color accuracy forever on that file if you don’t provide an accurate tone mapping which is usually not a one size fits all thing, so a lot of intervention anyway) , so I’d rather not even risk it.
Almost everything can be thrown into docker containers, and you can find some pretty decent guides on YouTube by searching for these services one by one. After the first one, you’ll get the gist of it all I think. Bazarr runs as a service (at least on windows) and has some bug with its front-end sometimes, which requires you to restart the service to get into the page at all, though apparently setting the service to delayed start fixes the issue, which I did and haven’t run into this bug since, so something to keep in mind.
As others mentioned, there’s guides to setting up qualities, filters, exclusions, and priorities on your content, and trash guides are usually where you go for that. I find that trash has a high standard for quality, which will eat through your storage like a bodybuilder eating 20 eggs for breakfast in a single seating, so you will always have to play around with your preferences and it will take some time to get things just right (some edge case scenarios on content are hard to spot at first, but you’ll get that one download of a very questionable release that will make you tear your hair off for a bit), but it will get better as you tinker around.
So to summarize, if you have even a little bit of trouble maintaining your media repository, these are a must. Even if you don’t, the process of searching stuff, downloading stuff, renaming and categorizing stuff, and then checking that everything is OK on plex by comparing stuff on thetvdb and whatnot, its a lot of time-consuming work even if you don’t notice it, and all of it can be automated by the arr stack easily. I have a couple of friends helping as admins of it all, and they’re just as freaky on management as I am, so we all just work together to get everything right, and it’s really helpful and easy to go down this route. Good luck and have fun!
Ah, final tidbit, if you don’t yet use the usenet, this is the moment where you will realize you have to spend money on it because it’ll help that much more than torrents once your arr stack is going at it. I’m at two usenet indexers and I think two usenet content providers. I want more. Help.
The answer is probably yes, if you download movies or shows somewhat regularly.
Together with Overseerr they can reduce the process of finding, downloading and organizing releases to just one click in a Netflix-like interface.They can also keep looking for better versions of your existing stuff and upgrade it automatically in the background. And there is Bazarr to automatically fetch missing subtitles.
I had also heard of them but waited a long time to finally check them out, and I wish I’d done the switch much sooner! It takes a bit to configure everything to your liking, but it saves soooo much time now and does things I would never have bothered to do by hand, like upgrading pretty much my entire library.
I have jellyfin set up just for myself and those solutions just didn’t seem necessary to me. I simply pull and seed manually from my desktop and transfer the files to the server over the network. Easy enough 🤷
It’s not easier than configuring each one once and then letting them do all the work from there on out. Not trying to convince you to use them but they’re pretty damn great especially when you’re trying to watch multiple TV shows or see a movie that came out a lot sooner than you thought it would.
I guess that can be easier for some. Personally I kind of like looking for file sources myself, I’m somewhat particular about the quality I’m looking for. It’s probably also easier to manually handle edge cases, for example recently I found a TV show that came with all the extras such as the soundtrack along with the show itself, and I wanted those to end up in separate places.
You could set it to only manually download the shows, then you would go into the interface and click the manual search button. It will then aggregate the results for you into a single list and give you a single click to download, rename, and import the file to your library. You can even download a temporary lower quality version and then replace it later when a better one comes out if you wish.
I particularly like it for shows that often have a week or more of downtime as I often forget when they coming back and this saves me having to check when they back.
You control everything that happens on this server. If you wanted to, you could add a little if statement that says to not render the comment if it comes from the bot.
It’s literally how it works. You could also give the bot database access, and block itself from everyone. Or you could make it post on Mastodon instead of Lemmy.
Won’t work for other instances. I could also just send it to PR to lemmy to add tags to posts while I’m at it.
Point being Just because I don’t have the time to do that one extraordinary complex solution you thought of without understanding how it all works suggest doesn’t make me lazy.
Radarr and Sonarr are *arr tools that can help with the process of acquiring media and format your media for your media server.
I’m using Jellyfin and both Radarr and Sonarr intergrate really nicely to help maintain my media, so if Plex isn’t already doing that for your, they’re great to have.
Edit: sonarr monitors your tv shows to make sure it has all episodes and grabs new ones.
Radarr monitors your movie collection. It also connects directly to your torrent provider / seedbox. Can setup quality profiles and the like to customize which files get grabbed and what not. They also do bulk renaming of files to make sure plex sees them properly. Plus more.
Seedbox is optional. It can connect to different torrent software to load the torrents in. It also can just do “black hole” which dumps all the torrents into a folder that you can setup your torrent program to watch.
If you want to use Radarr or Sonarr you better be ok with TVDB metadata because that’s all they support and will likely ever support based on the discussions I’ve seen over the past few years.
It’s linked to on the official wiki, and walks through the process of Hardlinks and Atomic Moves. They’re basically shortcuts, they allow the file to exist in two places at once. This means you can still have a torrent seeding, while the media also exists in your plex collection. It also “moves” the file instantly once it’s finished downloading, without having to wait for it to copy anywhere.
Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.
If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.
It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.
I’m searching for a service where I can have a list of releasing movies and series and just add them to a kind of todo list, so that I can see which movies are out now and don’t remember everything in my head or so. Does Overseerr also kind of do this? Or is it rather only applicable for people with shared libraries? I still am going to download the content manually probably.
I’m currently doing this manually with a notion database, just entering movie names and release dates and download state manually…
That’s how I use it right now for my personal library, just browsing Overseer from time to time and marking movies and shows I want to watch at some point. There are predefined lists for popular or upcoming releases, and it also has a very powerful filter system. I think you do have to have the appropriate *arr app installed to be able to mark and request things, but not 100% sure on that.
I’ve now installed it, it even directly connects to Plex haha, and pretty seamless. I’ll use it just like that for now, maybe will take a look at radarr etc.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Yes.
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Yeah, I hated it too. If I had a server automatically downloading torrents at all times on my network, I could kiss goodbye to online gaming and voice calls with my swarm, and even browsing and work would slow to a crawl. I guess I’d spend a lot more time reading physical books while waiting for the internet to work.
Limit your torrent program to half of your internet speed.
You should look into hard linking: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/Hardlinks-and-Instant-Moves/. Remaining and no double storage
As for trakt isn’t that what you want? If you haven’t watched it and it’s on your watch list why filter things out?
If I have 100 gigabytes free on my media drive, and I have Columbo and Friends on my to watch list, and I also want to keep up with Invincible as new episodes come out, then auto downloading would fuck me. It would fill that 100 gigabytes with 10 seasons of sitcoms and 10 seasons of detective shows, and then next week when the new Invincible episode comes out, there’s no room for it. But I definitely would rather watch the new Invincible on a timely basis than another season of Ross getting into arguments with Rachel. I can watch Chandler make bad jokes any time, and it’ll take me ages to get to season 10 if I’m on season 2
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I was also on the fence. Ended up jumping into it all a few months agk, and my plex server went from a very small and informal media repository that a few friends kept nagging me about because I always procrastinated downloading, categorizing, and adding media to it, to now a vast collection of thousands of movies and hundreds of shows, spanning about 50 users, around 40TB+ of content (which reminds me I need more drives soon…) and everyone requests whatever they want. There’s still work to be done, there always is, especially if your server grows and your peers start using it (wait to see that one person start requesting Korean stuff that never gets found automatically), but it’s a night and day difference for me, and the organization of it all helps me concentrate and tackle stuff quicker.
So the stack usually goes like this:
-sonarr, radarr, readarr, lidarr, etc. : they each specialize in a media format (series, movies, books, music, respectively), they will fetch Metadata from known Metadata sources, and will perform searches on whichever indexer you like (think piratebay for torrents, or nzbgeek for NZBs from usenet). They’ll connect to your download client and send torrents and NZBs to be downloaded, will know if a download fails and search again, and will import completed items automatically. They’ll organize everything, rename everything, and keep track of quality with constant upgrades to your media by parsing RSS feeds from said indexers. They won’t go out of their way to downloading things you didn’t ask for, you have to ask for everything. You can monitor collections for movies on radarr if you want future movies, but that’s about it as far as waiting for new content not explicitly requested.
-overseerr, requestrr, etc. : these are front ends that you can share with your friends and family. You only need one. They’ll be able to search for content as well as browse trending or new contenr, see if it’s in your library, request content, and follow the progress of the requested content. No need to tell anyone “this isn’t done yet”, they can just check what’s available and whatnot, and you can designate request quotas per user and decline requests.
-jackett, prowlarr, etc. : these helper services will make it easier for you to keep track of your indexers. They’ll communicate with the content handling arr services to provide them all the indexers they need. You only need one. You set them up once on these services rather than once for each arr service. They also have the ability to perform better manual indexer searches than the main arr stack services.
-honorable mention, bazarr: this little fella will integrate with your arr services to monitor all media and download subtitles for it all, set to your standards. It even has the ability to use a WhisperAI server (speech to text LLM developed by openai) as a source for subtitles, so you could create your own subtitles if you don’t find any. Of all of them, I find this one to feel the jankiest, but it does a decent enough job, even if not perfect by a long shot.
There’s other services that I haven’t messed with. For instance, there’s Tdarr which is used for automatic remuxing and conversion of media files to whichever format you prefer, in order to standardize your entire library. I feel like this is a destructive service that could easily backfire if I’m not careful (say, HDR H265 conversion to H264, buhbye dynamic range and color accuracy forever on that file if you don’t provide an accurate tone mapping which is usually not a one size fits all thing, so a lot of intervention anyway) , so I’d rather not even risk it.
Almost everything can be thrown into docker containers, and you can find some pretty decent guides on YouTube by searching for these services one by one. After the first one, you’ll get the gist of it all I think. Bazarr runs as a service (at least on windows) and has some bug with its front-end sometimes, which requires you to restart the service to get into the page at all, though apparently setting the service to delayed start fixes the issue, which I did and haven’t run into this bug since, so something to keep in mind.
As others mentioned, there’s guides to setting up qualities, filters, exclusions, and priorities on your content, and trash guides are usually where you go for that. I find that trash has a high standard for quality, which will eat through your storage like a bodybuilder eating 20 eggs for breakfast in a single seating, so you will always have to play around with your preferences and it will take some time to get things just right (some edge case scenarios on content are hard to spot at first, but you’ll get that one download of a very questionable release that will make you tear your hair off for a bit), but it will get better as you tinker around.
So to summarize, if you have even a little bit of trouble maintaining your media repository, these are a must. Even if you don’t, the process of searching stuff, downloading stuff, renaming and categorizing stuff, and then checking that everything is OK on plex by comparing stuff on thetvdb and whatnot, its a lot of time-consuming work even if you don’t notice it, and all of it can be automated by the arr stack easily. I have a couple of friends helping as admins of it all, and they’re just as freaky on management as I am, so we all just work together to get everything right, and it’s really helpful and easy to go down this route. Good luck and have fun!
Ah, final tidbit, if you don’t yet use the usenet, this is the moment where you will realize you have to spend money on it because it’ll help that much more than torrents once your arr stack is going at it. I’m at two usenet indexers and I think two usenet content providers. I want more. Help.
This is an amazing write up, thanks!
You might do, but you might also want to just use Stremio with a Real Debrid account and save yourself ballache in the process.
Depends on whether you’re concerned about your enemies approaching from the sea or the sky
You’re not wrong.
Why
Well different technologies have different uses, you can’t spot sound with sight or objects moving underwater with sound
I thought you were making a Dr stone reference… I’ll see myself out
deleted by creator
The answer is probably yes, if you download movies or shows somewhat regularly.
Together with Overseerr they can reduce the process of finding, downloading and organizing releases to just one click in a Netflix-like interface.They can also keep looking for better versions of your existing stuff and upgrade it automatically in the background. And there is Bazarr to automatically fetch missing subtitles.
I had also heard of them but waited a long time to finally check them out, and I wish I’d done the switch much sooner! It takes a bit to configure everything to your liking, but it saves soooo much time now and does things I would never have bothered to do by hand, like upgrading pretty much my entire library.
I have jellyfin set up just for myself and those solutions just didn’t seem necessary to me. I simply pull and seed manually from my desktop and transfer the files to the server over the network. Easy enough 🤷
It’s not easier than configuring each one once and then letting them do all the work from there on out. Not trying to convince you to use them but they’re pretty damn great especially when you’re trying to watch multiple TV shows or see a movie that came out a lot sooner than you thought it would.
I guess that can be easier for some. Personally I kind of like looking for file sources myself, I’m somewhat particular about the quality I’m looking for. It’s probably also easier to manually handle edge cases, for example recently I found a TV show that came with all the extras such as the soundtrack along with the show itself, and I wanted those to end up in separate places.
You could set it to only manually download the shows, then you would go into the interface and click the manual search button. It will then aggregate the results for you into a single list and give you a single click to download, rename, and import the file to your library. You can even download a temporary lower quality version and then replace it later when a better one comes out if you wish.
I particularly like it for shows that often have a week or more of downtime as I often forget when they coming back and this saves me having to check when they back.
removed by mod
Why down vote? This bot lets mastodon users join in the discussion IIRC.
Because @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com is too lazy to make these spam messages hidden by default.
It’s not a matter of laziness.
You control everything that happens on this server. If you wanted to, you could add a little if statement that says to not render the comment if it comes from the bot.
That’s not how anything works
deleted by creator
This makes no sense
It’s literally how it works. You could also give the bot database access, and block itself from everyone. Or you could make it post on Mastodon instead of Lemmy.
Won’t work for other instances. I could also just send it to PR to lemmy to add tags to posts while I’m at it.
Point being Just because I don’t have the time to do that one extraordinary complex solution you thought of without understanding how it all works suggest doesn’t make me lazy.
Radarr and Sonarr are *arr tools that can help with the process of acquiring media and format your media for your media server. I’m using Jellyfin and both Radarr and Sonarr intergrate really nicely to help maintain my media, so if Plex isn’t already doing that for your, they’re great to have.
I couldn’t get it to work on my M2 Mac mini. It won’t read my library or something.
They have a wiki which explains a lot: https://wiki.servarr.com/ as well as other arr software.
Edit: sonarr monitors your tv shows to make sure it has all episodes and grabs new ones. Radarr monitors your movie collection. It also connects directly to your torrent provider / seedbox. Can setup quality profiles and the like to customize which files get grabbed and what not. They also do bulk renaming of files to make sure plex sees them properly. Plus more.
deleted by creator
Seedbox is optional. It can connect to different torrent software to load the torrents in. It also can just do “black hole” which dumps all the torrents into a folder that you can setup your torrent program to watch.
What about my porn collection? I mean my friend’s porn collection? I mean, I don’t like porn, and I don’t know anyone who does, how dare you!
Yeah. I mean how else are you supposed to know if you’re about to watch Backdoor Whores 9, or the Slutty Professor? Labels, people. Labels!
I just watch whatever Plex says my friends are watching.
Whisparr is your friend’s friend 👉👉
Stash can manage his friend’s friend large collection of linux ISOs.
If you want to use Radarr or Sonarr you better be ok with TVDB metadata because that’s all they support and will likely ever support based on the discussions I’ve seen over the past few years.
sorry you got confused
Adding this because I didn’t see anyone else post it, but I found this guide really useful for setting them up: https://trash-guides.info/Hardlinks/Hardlinks-and-Instant-Moves/
It’s linked to on the official wiki, and walks through the process of Hardlinks and Atomic Moves. They’re basically shortcuts, they allow the file to exist in two places at once. This means you can still have a torrent seeding, while the media also exists in your plex collection. It also “moves” the file instantly once it’s finished downloading, without having to wait for it to copy anywhere.
Trash guides keep scurvy from taking hold. An absolute must for any ship worth its salt
Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.
If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.
It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.
I’m searching for a service where I can have a list of releasing movies and series and just add them to a kind of todo list, so that I can see which movies are out now and don’t remember everything in my head or so. Does Overseerr also kind of do this? Or is it rather only applicable for people with shared libraries? I still am going to download the content manually probably.
I’m currently doing this manually with a notion database, just entering movie names and release dates and download state manually…
That’s how I use it right now for my personal library, just browsing Overseer from time to time and marking movies and shows I want to watch at some point. There are predefined lists for popular or upcoming releases, and it also has a very powerful filter system. I think you do have to have the appropriate *arr app installed to be able to mark and request things, but not 100% sure on that.
I’ve now installed it, it even directly connects to Plex haha, and pretty seamless. I’ll use it just like that for now, maybe will take a look at radarr etc.
Thank you!
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deleted by creator