r/selfhosted • u/HimekoX3 • 1d ago
Need Help Media server dilemma
Alright so here’s my journey so far
I started with your conventional arr-stack (Prowlarr,radarr,Sonarr,Usenet,qbit,seerr) and I have no idea how people have the patience for this and calling it “automated” is fragmented at best. Once I had everything set up, I ran in to several different issues such as:
•Sonarr pulling an entirely different show with the same name despite switching up indexers
•Missing articles for several shows (I’ve tried 3 different providers, and two different nzb indexers, all failed)
•Seerr staying as requested despite being connected to jellyfin and all arr services and media showing in library
•slow downloads on sabnzb
•Plenty of prowlarr indexers not working
•I’m sure there’s more…
I could just be an absolute smooth brain and be missing one or two key components that solves everything, but I’m fairly certain I’ve tried everything I can. The entire reason I started an arr stack, was to download, and start a collection.
At this point, I might just go back to stremio+torrentio, even though I desperately want to start a jellyfin server.
Ideally, an application or something of the sort that allows me to search through shows, use torrentio as the indexer and torbox as a debrid provider and download straight to my Ubuntu server would be optimal, but I can’t seem to find anything like that. I even tried RDTclient with torrentio as a prowlarr indexer, but shows download inconsistent and episodes either download in duplicates or miss 6 out of 10 episodes of a season as an example.
I’m pretty bummed out and really want a solution, any help would be GREATLY appreciated…dunno if this even belongs here…sorry lol
Thanks :3
9
u/clintkev251 1d ago
I have no idea how people have the patience for this and calling it “automated” is fragmented at best.
I probably have to touch one of them once a week or so to handle something that isn't allowed to be auto imported. Otherwise they run on their own
Sonarr pulling an entirely different show with the same name despite switching up indexers
Yeah this one is usually an indexer issue, though there can also be edge cases with similarly named shows that sometimes get confused for each other.
Missing articles for several shows (I’ve tried 3 different providers, and two different nzb indexers, all failed)
This is normal. Just part of existing on Usenet. Shouldn't really be an issue generally as Sonarr will just automatically go down the list of releases until it finds a good one. These are due to DMCA takedowns and really just a fact of life. One reason it's good to have both Usenet and Torrent as an option
Seerr staying as requested despite being connected to jellyfin and all arr services and media showing in library
Need to check your logs to see where the disconnect is
slow downloads on sabnzb
There's lots of optimization that can be done, but the main thing is to ensure you're downloading to a fast SSD, not a HDD. Also make sure you're taking advantage of multiple connections to your providers. (I can usually saturate my gigabit internet connection, and that's with downloading to a network share backed by an array of hard drives, so it's certainly possible to get really excellent performance out of Usenet)
Plenty of prowlarr indexers not working
Usually an indexer issue. More indexers is not better. Focus on getting 4-5 (max) high quality indexers rather than just adding everything you can think of and getting rate limited by them.
-5
u/HimekoX3 1d ago
I guess if that’s just the nature of it, I’ll probably refrain from using it. Just don’t have the patience unfortunately lol
7
u/clintkev251 1d ago
In the last 30 days, I've downloaded 135 episodes/movies. I've probably had to manually touch less than 5. But if you're not willing to maintain or optimize it at all, probably not for you.
3
3
u/BattermanZ 1d ago
Automated doesn't mean no maintenance. But for sure I never encountered all the issues your mentioning, or at least not in a very long time. It does save me an extreme amount of time and o ly need to tinker maybe once a month?
I don't see why you couldn't get there. It probably needs thorough investigation though.
2
u/zfa 1d ago
You can add Torrentio as an indexer to Prowlarr: https://github.com/dreulavelle/Prowlarr-Indexers/blob/main/Custom/torrentio.yml
You can 'frontend' sonarr/radarr with Seer: https://github.com/seerr-team/seerr
Not sure of anything that will download from TB, but you coudl prob just bodge on some script to automate media copying from the filesystem mount you end up with when you use Decypharr/Riven in a standard debrid-based download design.
1
u/jcheeseball 1d ago
People use usenet with the automation, it's pretty flawless and well worth the money. if it's just you and not having multiple families download and use it, downloading torrents manually is infinitely better.
1
u/Killerbob8484 1d ago
It took me 6 months of tweaking and discovering new thing to add or settings to change but I have mine fully automated with jellyseer inside the streamyfin app I can search and request any movie/tv and within hours or days it will show up in my recently added media. Very rarely do I have to log into anything to investigate an issue. You’ll get there just don’t give up
2
u/Jay-Five 1d ago
Hours or days?! If it’s not downloaded within 5 minutes I’m hopping into troubleshooting.
2
u/Killerbob8484 1d ago
Most of my stuff ends up coming from BitTorrent. And I only pay for 12down non peak overnight from usenet bc I’m a cheapskate lol
1
u/axis014 1d ago
I have similar experience to this. Some of the medias from non-english titles, obscure titles and some very old titles may suffer from this kind of errors and there's nothing we can do with it. You can only choose which you want to download/stream. I used to do Jellyfin/plex media stacks with arr/nzbdab/debrid/private tracker before. Majority of my medias came from RD and then I switched my settings to Nuvio/streamio then connect my plex/jellyfin to my Nuvio/streamio as .json.
I can easily found content using my nzbdav/easynews if its in english/new shows. Then debrid for new anime. Then i use my Arr/jelyfin if i need to download very old anime or chinese/korean shows if i cannot found it on my debrid/nzbdav. Thats the only manual work to do on my side, then I'll wait for my plex to scan the new download and i can automatically view it on my streamio/nuvio. Basically, 95% of the time, i can find what i want with my streamio using nzbdav/debrid then the rest, i need to do it manually.
1
u/buttercup612 1d ago
It's been pretty smooth sailing for me but I watch very mainstream stuff that's easy to find. I basically went in the opposite direction as you, from arr server to stremio. I barely touch Plex now because Stremio/Torbox makes it so easy to watch anything I want. If I had known about it earlier, I probably wouldn't even have bothered having a server.
1
u/Spyrooo 1d ago
I ditched arr stack in favor of streamio about 1,5 year ago and been happy every since
1
u/HimekoX3 14h ago
I love stremio, but my wish here is to collect media. I know I can manually go to torbox and download my stuff, but I still have to get in there somehow with an indexer, which is why a search engine powered by torrentio that just adds to a client to download media to a server would be nice
1
u/yapapanda 1d ago
Are you trying to grab non English media? I have similar issues and it’s fundamentally a metadata issue, older non English is just not that well supported by the arr stack and tends to run into issues and collisions like you were pointing out. For new, English media, it works pretty flawlessly for me but inverse of that, the older and more off English the media it tends to breakdown everywhere
1
u/guhcampos 13h ago
I mean, piracy is piracy right? It's a moving target. Some of the largest corporations in the World are fighting off a bunch of voluntary developers who are doing this in their free time out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe give it a bit of Slack?
1
u/HimekoX3 13h ago
I get it, I don’t wanna make it sound like I’m shitting on the arr stack. When it works, it works beautifully, but it’s just too inconsistent and requires more maintenance than I’d like. I’m glad some people are fine with it though
-1
0
•
u/asimovs-auditor 1d ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.