[qersist3nce]

Can someone tell me what is the appeal of *arr apps? I'm not a hoarder or professional movie/show watcher, why should I set up what is basically a glorified "periodic metadata downloader with a tiles UI"?

I tested radarr and readarr recently. Didn't find out why people use them. Like libgen was better than readarr and I couldn't even select the encoding/file size of a movie title in radarr (there are some predefined profiles and you can define yours too but I expected something waay too simpler to do this. Like if you select fhd, it may download a very large file. You have to manually set the bitrate slider for all profiles, but then you may risk losing some available item if the release is very new and not encoded. I mean the UX was confusing)

And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin) on top of that just to show a folder structure with pretty thumbnails? Each one of these apps is usually written in C#, taking ~300MB of RAM mind you...

What would help me is simply a search box that crawls all available torrents and presents rows with filtering based on size and encoding. I tested prowlarr for this but the UX was poor.

I must be missing something very obvious here.

[wernercd]

*Arr is automation. Add a TV show, connect some pieces together and your favorite TV show gets downloaded, catagorized and added to your own private Netflix server (Plex).

Sonarr? TV shows. Radarr? Movies. Books. Music. Etc.

"missing something obvious" the UX might be horrible... but once you set it up? you don't have to look at it.

"And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin)" if all you think Plex is a "tiles UI" then there's no wonder you don't understand it... I have hundreds of movies, dozens of shows, audio books, music, etc in Plex and all the metadata gets automatically added and I can automatically play anything on my phone, tv, etc.

Oh... my friends/family has access to my Plex library as well so they can request and watch when they want.

Plex does transcoding and all that fun stuff.

You're missing all the details that go miles beyond a "tiles UI".

[bryanrasmussen]

>Can someone tell me what is the appeal of *arr apps? I'm not a hoarder or professional movie/show watcher, why should I set up what is basically a glorified "periodic metadata downloader with a tiles UI"?

As streaming gets split up into little fiefdoms it can become difficult to have access to the content you want, furthermore as some content for various reasons is never made available or fully available - for example if you want WKRP in Cincinatti with the original music you will need to pirate it (I would of course like to hear I was wrong about this - other than find some CD somewhere with all that content at a yard sale)

[somehnguy]

I don’t want to download tv shows or movies when they come out. I don’t even know their schedules. Just add them in *arr and they appear in Plex automagically as they come out. For TV shows specifically this is a huge time saver. Plus they let less technical family users add and manage media on their own.

Regarding not being able to select encoding, etc - you setup profiles and it automatically chooses the best release for based on the criteria you set. Again, it’s one less thing to think about.

[qersist3nce]

how do you control the quality and encoding of the show?

And why is there a separate *arr app for every content? (music album, tv, movie, book, subtile(!),...)

[seaal]

In the settings [1].

There's probably different *arr app's because it's easier that way. Each one already has enough bloat and settings to it to be overwhelming.

Overseerr [2] was the key to making me love the radarr/sonarr experience.

[1] https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/radarr-setup-quality-profil...

[2] https://overseerr.dev/

[wincy]

It’s weird to me too. I consume a decent amount of media but if I can’t think “oh yeah I want to watch this particular thing” I just don’t download it and it falls out of my brain. Which I’m fine with. Foundation was like that, and His Dark Materials. I guess I would have finished them if they downloaded automatically but they were kinda lame.

I guess I just consume media more haphazardly than most people. The whole point of my PLEX is only exactly what I’ve requested shows up.

[somehnguy]

To be clear, the *arr suite of apps don’t just download things randomly. You still only get what you request. You just don’t have to go download a new TV show episode every week or keep an eye on exactly when the new movie hits the shelves.

You just tell the apps ‘follow this tv show/movie/whatever’ and it grabs it when it becomes available.

[dchuk]

I personally solve for this by configuring my profiles to download decent sized files for my preferred formats, and then I run FileFlows as well on my media server to automatically transcode everything into the same h265 codec and transcode settings and stuff...it's all just hands free, everything gets spit out perfectly how I want it.

Now that being said, the plex app blows on Apple TV with h265 codecs for some reason, so I'm now using the Infuse app which is ok, but yet another thing. But overall, yeah, I've been able to cancel multiple streaming services (hulu, sling, soon netflix) and have MORE content available than before. saving a grand a year in streaming services ain't bad for a few hours of learning how to set it all up.

[FridgeSeal]

> how do you control the quality and encoding of the show?

There are settings for setting the desired quality parameters, and even for transparently replacing the on disk version with a higher quality version becomes available.

[lelandbatey]

The key is Overseerr. It allows non-technical folks to say "I want XYZ show/movie" and it'll just show up as part of the private Netflix (Plex). It's incredibly simple to use, but it depends on the various *Arr apps to do the finding and downloading.

[neonsunset]

Try with env var for these apps DOTNET_gcServer=0, should make them less optimistic about taking up free RAM (but then again, free RAM == wasted RAM)

[hauxir]

sounds like you're looking for rapidbay

https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay

[noman-land]

Have you checked out Jackett?