from N0x0n@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 May 10:41
https://lemmy.ml/post/47596111
Just wanted to share my feelings about the arr* stack, will keep it short !
First, thanks to all those beautiful people giving their free time to work on all thoses services ❤️ !
At first I wasn’t that impressed and didn’t understood all the hype arround all thoses services and only used sonarr to rename my files I had manually imported. It did a great job as a file renamer service, however I was still managing everything manually from hard links to qbittorrent organization creating in the end a total messed up file system with a lot of duplicated hardlinks and files scattered in different directories, renamed differently, etc…
Also, after the most known french piracy tracker had been hacked and shut down (finally !), a lot of new trackers opened like wildfire and had over 10 trackers to keep an eye on. Searching the web, I came across Prowlarr and seeing how It connects directly to sonarr I got curious.
That’s the exact moment when I finally unsterstood what’s all the hype about the ARR stack ! My god, what an amazing piece of software stack…
First came jellyfin, sonaar, then prowlarr, radarr, seerr and now I discovered profilarr. It’s amazing to see how everything perfectly communicates with each part of the stack and everything is perfeclty automated and god does it work well… I’m impressed and still baffled how something so good is free and open source !!
Im still scratching the surface of this powerfull stack, but does it feel good to just ask seerr and after a few minutes having my media perfectly organized in qbittorrent, filesystem directories, renaming scheme, hardlinks, quality profiles, config synchronization… 💥🤯
It does have it’s own quirks right and there, and can become kinda weird if you do not know what you are doing (thanks Trash guides ❤️❤️) and seeing from all the issues the arr stack seems to hit a wall with the current code implementation. But IDK, i’m not a programmer so I may be wrong here.
And there seems always something new to complement the arr stack !
So that’s it :) Just wanted to share my feeling and appreciation with all of you ! Happy self-hosting !!
threaded - newest
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Already mentioned seerr.
Glad to see appreciation as always but I got to be honest.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t get the arr stack. I’ve looked into it and don’t see the advantage.
Is keeping your media organized that much of a challenge? I find it fun, easy and a better way to kill time than being on social media.
Downloading a movie, TV show or music just means putting it in the right folder then Jellyfin is smart enough to figure out.
I also don’t want to use any extra resources when I can use that for other self hosted software.
I’ll probably eventually get it, I’m glad they will keep making it better till then
Edit: I expected some replies but God damn what have I done lol
Edit2: looks like the main gap is letting others download what they want. If I were to do that then all my space would be filled with low quality paw patrol shows.
One of the biggest advantages to me is that my friends and family can go into Seerr and click “I want this show” and it will magically appear in a few minutes without my intervention. Also, for TV shows specifically sonarr will automatically get new episodes for series that you’re subscribed to
Yeah that’s one thing that could benefit me but my tv show preferences change. If a new season drops but it has bad ratings, I don’t get it.
I also would want to pick the quality/size of the file depending on the show (good shows deserve better quality).
Entirely possible with Seer (and also directly in Sonarr I think)! Don’t want to convert you though. If what you are doing is working for you, that’s great.
Tv show seasons/episodes can be subscribed individually, and you can change behavior e.g. ‘stop after this season’.
You can set up quality preferences per show and even more complicated choosing with a lot of regex, and it actually works very well. If you do it this way and enable upgrading, the media will also automatically get its quality upgraded when something “better” comes out.
“TRaSH guides” has a lot of regex that can be copied from, and I also have a ton of my own preferences codified.
The core arr stack (radar, sonarr, optionally seerr) is generally just a really smooth way to handle everything at the cost of an initial learning curve. Maybe overkill for some people, but I think it’s a straight upgrade if you set it up right
I do all that with sonarr. Custom quality profiles with size ranges to look for depending on the resolution wanted and quality profile selected.
You can also tell it to only keep specific episodes, or seasons. I only keep the first 10 seasons of The Simpsons as example. Or The Daily Show, I only keep the last 10 new episodes.
Sonarr accommodates season un/monitoring and show-level quality profiles covering source, resolution and/or bitrate.
I do this too and that was a major hesitation in switching to use arrstack. What I do is each library (movies, TV) has an organized folder (Archive) and a folder for arrstack (Active). I have both added to arrstack and Plex/jellyfin but I only let it download automatically to the arr folder. Every week or two I check what people have requested and downloaded into the arr folder and either move it to the archive since I’m happy with the quality / release group, or I use arr’s ui to pick a different release with a single click.
It’s nice because I get the best of both worlds, hands free downloading for 10-15 people, new episodes daily, but I also get to screen and control what goes into my archive and upgrade important shows before I lose track of it.
Same! Honest question, is the Arr stack only for pirates? I mean the name suggests this but I am not entirely sure
You could probably use it to download legal torrents (movies, series) but they depend on metadata providers for all the data.
I thinks It wouldn’t be that useful for something else than piracy (torrent&Usenet) but I may be wrong here.
I find curating the collection quite relaxing, so I agree there. I have all the automation set up for new media that’s not released yet, but the other main benefit I get is using it as a search interface for multiple public and private trackers without having to visit any external websites.
Yeah, I had the same feeling before I discovered how powerfull it is.
It’s not that hard to keep it well organized manually I guess, but you have to be very thorough and always keep the same structure when you do something ! I’m not at all an expert in scripting or programming on Linux and i’m relatively new in the Linux familly so I guess Im lacking a lot of basic skills in that matter.
I did appreciated my manual setup for a while. Also I did learned a lot of new things (what are inodes, files, hardlinks, softlinks, mount points, ffmpeg, mkvtools…) But now that I have that new basic knowledge I can take away this mental charge and just let it run whithout the need to overthink things !
I think it’s the best course of action for my learning Linux journey :)
Hold on, what do you mean by that?
The advantage of Jellyfin is that it understands different structures. Whatever format I download my media, as long as it is in the right parent folder, it gets picked up flawlessly.
I’ve had some issues with it here and there actually. Most recently, teen titans loaded into jellyfin as a different entry for the series for each season and it didn’t get any of the names or order right. After the first two entries it just became easier to copy paste SE01EP and type the two numbers than it was to try and save the episode name. Jellyfin finds those itself anyways.
I mean, you have to be very thorough when manually curating your medias.
All I do is have a tab constantly open for a torrent site, search a movie, click the magnet link, then pick my movies folder.
It gets a little trickier for other use cases but that’s pretty much it for most of the time
Download a show that’s still being released, and then every night have to go find the latest episode…
OR, just set up sonarr to automatically grab the next episode the minute it releases.
Download, say the Marvel movie collection, and a month later, another superhero movie is released, go search for it manually, ORRR just watch as radarr grabs it automatically.
Your favorite music artist released a new album? Lidarr grabs it automatically.
See the point yet?
Huh I guess the difference is that I have an internal quality gate.
Ongoing series? Better wait for the season to be done, otherwise I could be disappointed.
Marvel movie collection? The whole point is to pick only the good ones.
An artist released an album, let’s see the reception and then maybe I’ll get it.
I also don’t want to waste space so making things automatically download could lead to quantity over quality
I’ve been downloading shows for 30 years and all the manual curating and renaming is for the birds.
I think it’s fine for yourself, but as soon as other ppl are relying on you for this, it becomes a full time job.
Hmmm, that also might the other missing link, I am not sharing with others (have suggested but their adoption is slow).
I also find others deciding to add content to my library a no go, what if they download a terrible movie?
Shutters
You can set quality preferences so it only downloads greater than x quality.
They meant artistic quality, not resolution and bitrate.
I’m kind of standing on the opposite side of the crowd in an identical soggy ditch as you. I set up the arr stack because I thought it was the next line of progression, instead I find out that the problems I was hoping to solve are endemic to the system and not the method. Using youtube-DLL to get all my music back left me with about two thousand files that MusicBrainz can’t identify which means I’ll have to play memory match annually for each one because I’ve never been good with remembering band names. Lidarr also doesn’t recognize them and the ui is yet another list of steps I have to learn.
I was hoping prowlarr would be an upgrade to torrenting, I haven’t had my finger on the pulse since 2013 and everything I knew is gone. Instead I only have access to trackers from the two torrent sites I already knew. If I couldn’t find it myself then a bot looking for me isn’t going to do better. Trusting a bot to not expose me is an even harder sell. I know the science, I know the method, but I’m old enough to remember all this being unreliable and that’s a hard view to shake.
Sonarr and Radarr worked fine out if the box, but they didn’t have anything to do as I already curated all my movies and shows. All they managed to do is rename a few obscure things to the wrong name. Try as I might, Sam and Max: Freelance Police doesn’t exist as far as these things and jellyfin ate aware. I don’t blame them, I’m still not entirely sure they’re not some cognitohazard pretending to be a show myself.
I’m sure the vast amount of my problems are user error, I’m practically a luddite and I’m only getting into this to escape the corporate spying and endlessly fun tax our society has agreed is ok. If I could pay someone to set this up for me in homemade pickles, home repair, and DIY reptile habitats I’d do it in a heart beat.
It’s all about time management. I have lots of requests from family/friends that I don’t want to have to do lots of work on. My stuff I want I tinker with. I’ll transcode and optimize and make sure the naming is what I want. Other stuff… don’t care. If it’s watchable it’s fine.
For me, yes. Very much so. Having my *arr stack handle it makes my life that much easier. Sure, there’s a bit of a time cost to get it set up (which I find fun - I enjoy figuring out how to automate things), but once it’s set up, it works really well. Especially if it’s set up with Usenet.
10 paragraphs later… /s
That’s short compared to how much there is to say about the arr stack :))
Just yanking your chain. I don’t run the arr stack but I’m constantly amazed how it all works together.
I love piracy as much as anyone, but I got to be honest, I am a bit irked by how much of a hardon you have for the amazing people who develop these beautiful tools in their free time driven by nothing else just an outbursting of love from their hearths. In reality, while I am sure there are innocent enthusiasts, many of the people who run private trackers, usenet servers, and I’m assuming are developing client architecture, are basically criminals who make a living off stealing protected IP and selling it to people who prefer a subscription for a tracker or server over a streaming service or over purchasing audiobooks, games, or porn directly from publishers. The arr stack is the infrastructure for hosting industrial scale streaming services using pirated content. So that’s part of the reason why the free piracy software is good. There is a very real paying market for it.
Didn’t down vote but damn…
You’re in the wrong tracker if that is the case. No trustworthy tracker has a subscription.
I don’t dabble but I just thought the cognitive dissonance was thick.