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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 6th, 2023
  • JGrffn@lemmy.worldtoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•What are radar and sonar? Do I want them?English
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.