Some time ago I gave up using sonarr & radarr to watch (popular) tv shows and movies because the search just stopped giving decent results. Now I heard that rarbg has also quit.
Automation apps have gotten more popular over the years so yes, they are still a thing.
Sonarr/Radarr are the most popular ones but there are others too. Most work with torrents and usenet but you'd need to check the individual projects to be sure.
fucking lemmy man, wrote out awhole ass answer to this and got deleted. god fucking dammit.
welp. here goes again.
headphones is a monthly subscription and not that great, not worth it at all.
lidarr is garbage and the folks around it are assholes. you iether love it and froth at the mouth when someone says they're having trouble with it, or you hate it. It also is a fucking resource hog like I've never seen. MAJOR memory leaks
I use Roon and Qobuz, and Nicotine+ for stuff that isn't on Qobuz. qobuz-dl is really robust and awesome and can do anything you want lidarr to do: just maintain a list of artists in a document, and qobuz-dl will automatically download anything new as it keeps track of what's already been downloaded before.
The Roon folks are just as bad as the Lidarr folks. This shit costs $7-800 for a lifetime license and it does't even include ANY music streaming. It's just a music server and manager. And they don't actually have tech support. Literally if you go to their support page, they direct you to a fucking forum full of morons high on the koolaid (bc honestly you have to be if you invested $700 on a shitty music player), tell you to get lost if you don't like a program with bugs up the ass.
I would love to make an open source offering that does what roon does but also allows you to automatically download stuff using qobuz-dl, tidal-dl, bandcamp-dl, etc.
Depending on your preferences, there's even been a pretty big update to Sonarr which allows custom formats, thus bringing out some pretty powerful abilities!
For example, I have it set up EXACTLY how I want for anime. X265 PREFERRED, Dual Audio PREFERRED, a whole smack of uploaders were essentially blocked from ever being downloaded, and there's a few users who trump all else and will always be downloaded first if they are available. So good.
There's a few guides if you want to give it a try! :)
Do you have any guides for the custom anime formats? I haven't updated yet and would love to get more dual audio releases. My current setup is pretty hit or miss as to whether I ever get a dub of a show.
These are fantastic have really upped my quality. I was just randomly grabbing releases without knowing whether they had atmos or hdr 10 or dv etc. This is SUPER helpful as you can give a score and then when you manually search, it chooses the highest score.
For me the highest custom format score possible is Dolby Vision with hdr10 or hdr10+ fallback, truehd atmos, criterion collection. This was a custom one I made. YOu can also follow precisely their own prescriptions for how to use the custom formats if you like, which I may go back and do.
That said, some releases that say atmos in the title are not atmos and it pisses me off. The good thing is you can find which scene releasesd , check out a few more "atmos" titles from them and see if it's worth just blocking their releases entirely, which you can do with custom formats.
I think the next step for radarr/sonarr is to make those custom formats a LOT easier to manage on your own. LIke let you give a a priority list or video codecs, a priority list of audio codecs, a priority list for other things such as criterion collection, etcc.
This is what I used, and I added some custom rules too! There is an uploader who goes by "Judas", so I added a rule that gives a positive weight of 100 whenever it's his upload, so if it's between 2 exact copies of a torrent, but 1 is by Judas, then he gets priority. I also made 265 a positive score instead of negative. And I also made dual audio positive.
I have plex setup, and I have two tv's, one from 2022 and and one from 2015, Samsung for some reason the old tv sometimes on some shows has this screen tearing thing... I don't know why, any ideas?
My issue with Nova is that PBS and The TVDB don't agree on season/episode numbers so I often have to rename files. When uploaders title based on TVDB numbering, everything works great.
Have a look at Jackett, it re-produces the search results for hundreds of torrent sites as Torznab feeds, what that means is that these can then be added to indexes for Sonarr and Radarr.
I had issues getting Prowlarr to connect to many sites at all. Jackett just works and has a huge list of working sites, however syncing them all up in the other arr services is a pain which is where https://github.com/AllergicDuck/jackett-sync-ts comes in.
Very much so. I just switched to prowlarr from jacket to handle searches. I use pirate bay for all media 1337x, and eztv for television and find most everything that's not obscure. Have it all behind a VPN though obviously.
But the truth is the problem isn't Sonarr or Radarr it's just that Torrents can be kind of garbage with automation, I would suggest you look into Usenet. It costs a bit of money to spend but a much more consistent experience.
Searching for files is not what Sonarr and Radarr are really strong in. They do an excellent job of managing files and keep track of shows. And occasionally ask an indexer to find them.
Indexers are what actually search files. Jackett was the popular manager, Prowlarr is the new hotness and really simplifies the process a lot.
But bigger point being Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr work together to find and manage files. They are only as good as what you set them up to do. Prowlarr can search 50+ torrent websites for a file at the same time if you set up all the integrations for those. It is better than any one website because it can search them all, even RarBG when it was up. It also works with NZBs and search them all at once. Then you set Sonarr and Radarr to the quality and type you want and they'll pick from the search results automatically.
This actually isn’t true. You can configure sonarr and radarr to directly search indexers without using a wrapper. Most people use a wrapper so you only need to configure changes to your indexers from one place instead of updating sonarr,radarr,lidarr,readarr all individually
Still, at the end of the day a large part of what you get is what you have access too. Better indexers gets you more content
Is the manual search interface and experience better on Prowlarr? I don't really need the automation part from Sonarr/Radarr but the mega search on Jackett is really useful for me.
Yeah, it's pretty nice. Prowlarr is a straight up upgrade over Jackett from my experience. It even auto manages the indexers on all your arr instances for you.
The devs for these projects are kind of uppity tbh. Like I'm appreciative of their efforts, but I'd never contribute to the code base itself as they're very rude.
They've seemed pretty decent to me except for the king A-hole /u/Bakerboy448 or whatever his username is/was. I see they removed him as "junior developer" so problem solved. He was always a prick when offering 'help' to anyone in the radarr/sonarr subreddits. Like why even bother responding to help requests if you're just going to be as least helpful as possible?
I use sonarr for a few weekly shows i watch and never had any big problems. I use torrents with jackett for my indexers. Downloading whole seasons works prefectly too assuming the show is popular enough to have seeders. Ive been recommended prowlarr over jackett but ive not had any reason to swap yet!
I've exclusively used Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr for TV/Movies/Books and audiobooks for the past several years. Combined with a few usenet indexers and a decent usenet provider these programs are fantastic (fully automated other than selecting the content and speeds often max my gig connection). It does take a bit of reading and tweaking to get it all setup but I can't recall the last time I couldn't find content.
Rarbg is a PITA with its random rate limiting. I wish they'd let me sign up and get an API key (Even if that meant paying for it) because I'd rather have rarbg than rely on whatever arse trackers I have the time and energy to sign up for.
I know people say "oh just get private trackers" but it's so much effort, especially when my piracy philosophy is that it should be as painless as possible to access content. I just want to get a tracker's info, add it to Prowlarr, and start downloading. The requirement of posting and becoming a community member when I deal with my seedbox/prowlarr setup once every couple of months (if that) is far too labour-intensive imo.
Freeleach filters, and re-seeding for the minimum amount of time is a great way to handle private trackers though. Yes, still more work than public trackers, but you generally get access to stuff that’s harder to find if you’re into them, and download speeds are generally faster.
Nothing wrong with how the leeching system works on privates. I quite like it, in fact. It's just that private trackers are very often a "who you know" kind of affair and that requires sitting in IRC, forums etc. which is something I can't justify doing on the random chance I spot a tracker doing signups.
Any private trackers that do have open signups seem to have too few users to keep new content coming through at a decent pace. I use DigitalCore, for example, and a lot of their content is just nonexistent compared to RarBG (RIP) with less seeders on anything that isn't brand new, and the only new stuff is usually concentrated on stuff already seeded ad nauseam on public trackers.
It's a shame RarBG went kaput because their system was fine... when it worked.
Just be selective and if you notice a bunch of crappy releases coming from a specific tracker or release group, you block them. It's worth getting into private trackers if you cam meet the seed requirements but I dunno where to gain access to new private trackers other than reddit /r/OpenSignups
Real Debrid combined with Sonarr/Radarr is an excellent combination with rdt-client as the torrent software. Most of the time the files are already hosted on RD, so you don’t have to wait for the torrent to download, and it sometimes has files for torrents that no longer have seeders
I use raddarr/sonarr/jackett and I haven't had any issues, I added addarr also so I can add things if I'm not near my computer. I just made a doc er compose with all of them through linuxserver.io on dockerhub, but makes it super easy if I need to switch to a new server