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Hello! I never used *arr stack, and was interested into it, but one thing is stopping me. I see a lot of articles like how it is Netflix (or any other ONLINE theater) replacement, but as I see it is not online. I see two big factors that stops me from trying seerr + jellyfin (and other stuff in between): 1. You have two switch between those apps to search and then watch. 2. You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?). And then you can realize that you not into it and have to repeat all the steps above. Is my expectation correct? Please don’t consider this as negative opinion. Just want to know what to expect. I remember an app called “popcorn time” that does not have that flaws.

Your expectation is absolutely correct, and I often find myself looking at my current Jellyfin collection and have absolutely nothing I want to watch.

SuggestArr tries to fill this hole by automatically downloading content similar to what you already have, but I have yet to deploy it.

You’re right, it’s for building a private library, not a “what’s new to watch now” stream. There are other tools for that, like stremio or real-debrid.

You can connect your *arr profiles to monitor lists of new titles by pointing the list manager to something like MDBList. They might not be as instantaneous as you might like, with a 24hr refresh period, but it’s pretty much a 0.99:1 Netflix replacement for me

Firstly, the core *arr suite is not a streaming service, whatsoever. It’s a media file manager meant to help with running a private server streaming app, like Plex or Jellyfin. With that out of the way:

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?)

Download speeds depend on your own setup. IMO, a Usenet connection is the only way to use *arr. Downloads happen at the maximum speed and don’t rely on some other person’s seed rate. You, conversely, don’t need to worry about seeding.

When you manually add a show to Sonarr, you can select it to only pick up the pilot episode of the show, which would cut down on DL times. You can also select a lower definition. With Usenet and something like a 720p quality, there’s no reason why this should take more than 5 minutes to be in your library.

I’ll also paste my comment I left below about connecting to lists:

You can connect your *arr profiles to monitor external lists of new titles by pointing the list manager to something like MDBList. They might not be as instantaneous as you might like, with a 24hr refresh period, but it’s pretty much a 0.99:1 Netflix replacement for me

It would be nice to have streamio work with your arr stack.

It’s a great user experience, but the android app gives you no control over the torrents, doesn’t handle port forwarding & isn’t really opensource AFAICT.

Aside from the point that Jellyfin is meant to browse your own personal collection of files usually after the fact…

Some file formats like mkv do work even if partially downloaded, so if you’re downloading a torrent for a free libre open source movie, choose the option to download chunks in sequential order, and I think there’s a way that you can watch while downloading.

Maybe jellyseer is something for you 😇

I already use Jellyseerr (recently renamed Seerr) but it does not resolves my “what to watch?” issue.

I find the suggestions on Seerr not always very relevant, but it definitely functions as a “what to watch?” service for my needs.

i can use the searchbar on jellyfin & if it’s not already there, i can request it using jellyseer within that same search bar, so it’s possible to integrate the two somehow.

i’m afraid i’m not sure of the specifics though, i’m only using a friend’s jellyfin 🫣

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?) to download.

This is a fair take on how a locally hosted video server would go. It’s the same as someone who has a collection of disk media instead as well. Finding new media to watch is not instant, even with the best setups.

I actually consider this to be a feature, instead of a bug. The algorithms that Netflix (and YouTube and everybody else that serves content) have a lot of issues. The ability to find content, the act of discovery, is something I think is actually very valuable, and has been lost since we switched to online streaming.

Of course, I switched from Spotify to a physical mp3 player with my own personal library, so maybe my perspective is a bit skewed. For sure there is a place for a lack of barriers (including skipping out on analytical thought) for consuming content. I just don’t think it should be the default.

Its possible to have seerr search integrated into the main jellyfin search.

https://lem.ugh.im/pictrs/image/2ececdb4-81ca-46e4-a219-323b42b6406a.png

Streaming torrents popcorn or stremio style is not very practical and never has been. Popcorntime still has working forks and stremio works with jellyfin to some degree but unless you also use a paid debrid service or maybe if you dont care about tanking your ratio on a private tracker There are jusy way better solutions: like using either an on demand iptv service inside jfin that costs about the same as debrid anyway but also gets you live tv.

Not to say there isnt tons of room for improvement still, but a lot of progress is being made. I suggest to folx if jellyfin doesnt meet your standards yet, try back in a year and see how much progress gets made.

You can request in Seer and after downloading click the “Watch on Jellyfin”-Button, which then leads you to the movie. So its technically two separate services but feel like one. (With Seerr, Prowlarr, Radarr, a Downloading Client, Jellyfin and Bazarr its actually many selfhosted services but it doesnt feel like it.)

With my setup through Radarr I need to download the whole movie. For series it depends it also meeds to download one whole file, then it goes through sonarr and then gets sorted properly into the library with metadata and coverimage and so on.

So yes, I cannot sit down and then decide what to watch. But I currently dont work like that: I hear about a good movie somewhere, add it to the library. Then, after 10’ to 2 days (depending on how popular it is) its downloaded. When I sit down because I have time to watch something, I then browse through the library, which I all know, that they are good and interesting movies.

If I have friends over, I ask, what they wanna watch, request it and we eat dinner and afterwards we watch the movie.

Watch the trailers first ;)

So, yes, you’re basically correct.

There are search layers that remove the need to access radarr / sonarr directly when searching for shows (someone mentioned jellyseer, for example), so that part of the process can be streamlined, and once you’re watching a show it’s generally very good at pulling new episodes as soon as they’re available, so you’re typically, at most, a day behind actual airing dates. But if you’re trying to just bounce around and try a bunch of different shows it wouldn’t be the best for that. The biggest constraint is generally the speed of your internet and the popularity of what you’re watching. With a high speed connection and a well seeded torrent it’s often only a a couple of minutes to download a pilot episode, and you could have the whole season done by the time you finish watching that.

The other question is one of storage. If you’ve got plenty of hard disk space then you can probably afford to just throw anything that sounds interesting on your pull queue and work your way through it when you actually have time to sit down and watch. Basically you sort of pre-emptively build your “Netflix at home” library and then do your bouncing around channel hopping stuff with the five or so vaguely interesting shows that you added while you were at work.

Is it a replacement for Netflix et al? Not strictly speaking, but if you don’t mind changing up your habits a little it’s probably close enough.

probably a jellyfin plugin which then hooks into the seerr service

Yes and no. You need to understand that no home service truly replaces Netflix, for a few reasons (the media might not be available on any of the services you’re using, for example).

It’s also not as simple as searching for a media in Jellyfin/Plex (or whatever other media frontend you choose, like Emby). There’s a fixed flow.

But let’s start by explaining the layers:

1. The frontend - Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi. This is what your users see, aka the “Netflix experience” - open the app, and all the media available on your storage device will be shown. Then they can click one and play it.

2. The request manager - Seerr (previously Overseerr/Jellyseerr). This is a separate interface where your users can request media. You still need to manually accept it (unless you set it up to automate things fully, but make sure you trust your users!). If something isn’t available, your users will come here and ask for it, then the manager will show the status (requested, accepted, downloading, available). Once available, your users can watch it through the frontend.

3. The media managers - Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr/etc. This is the software responsible for keeping a list of media you want, regularly looking them up on torrent trackers, Usenet servers, etc., and matching your requirements (resolution, language, encoding, file size, and so on), then grabbing the release and passing it on to the download client.

When you accept a request in the request manager, it passes on the info to the media manager, which adds the requested media to its internal list and begins looking for it.

1. Download client - torrent/Usenet downloader (qBittorrent, sabnzbd, etc.) pretty straightforward, this thing takes an incoming download request from the media manager, and downloads the file according to protocol, then signals the manager that the download is ready.

At this point, control is passed back onto the media manager, which finds the freshly downloaded file, copies/moves it to the right place according to settings, renames it according to settings, marks it done then sends a signal to the request manager to indicate the request was fulfilled.

Finally, the media frontend, which is set up to watch the folder where the new media items are copied/moved and renamed, gets a notification that a new file is available, scans it, prepares metadata (poster, background image/music, description, actor and production lists, ratings, etc.), and makes it available in the search interface.

So the key differences with Netflix are:

• limited content compared to Netflix
• the ability to request new media
• no CDNs, so if you have lots of users and not much bandwidth/processing power (latter in case of transcoding), your users will struggle. A standard home server and internet connection can serve 3-4 users at the same time.
• limited language support. since these are pirated media, and most pirated media has at most 2-3 audio tracks, you’ll lose that Netflix perk of having 6-8-10 audio tracks available. subtitles can be supplemented though (audio tracks too but they rarely match perfectly to the video so it’s not as simple as downloading a file and call it a day).

That about covers all the functional differences between an arr stack and Netflix.

@freeman @mittyta I have not figured out the arrs entirely yet, I believe they make em weird and ugly on purpose, but I have noticed that when I add a series on seerr, it will try to download a full season in a single torrent, but does not seem to search for individual eps if it doesn't find it.

I then go into the arr and click search on the individual episodes, and it usually finds them then. It's brilliant at grabbing new stuff, but I'm finding it's just easier for me to manually download and move older stuff, more and more.

Yeah, that’s a very good point! I use it sometimes manually on qbittorent. Can it be done automatically for all downloads on qbittorent?

Yeah, that’s enough for me in 90% times. But does seerr provide such feature? Because I don’t see trailers in last two videos about *arr stack I watched on YouTube.

ah, yes, I can only download an whole season in seerr. With the benefit of it getting new eps as they air. Yes, for getting the taste of a new series its the wrong tool I guess. Its more to build your library, or get reliably all new episodes of a running show

My media server has more shit I want to watch on it than Netflix does, it’s not even close. Yeah it took some time to build my library but it’s paid off. Even starting out just queue up a bunch of shit ahead of time and it will be ready to go when you go to watch it. I personally watch shows through the week as they take longer to get through and are more adaptable to the amount of free time I have. Then I queue up any new movies for the weekend and new shows as I hear about them. It’s not difficult to stay ahead of the curve with some minimal planning. My backlog will take me months to get through. Also your media library will never remove shit before you’re done and you’re not limited to just what the streaming services you have are currently offering.

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/164

TIL it has purposely not been implemented by the main developers in over a decade for ideological reasons. There are scripts and forks to enable it by default.

Once you adjust it works well. The whole “find something at random to watch” paradigm is not really how *arr works, but if a coworker mentions a show I can have it ready when I get home.

Friend, how do I do Seerr in Jellyfin? Could you post a link?

My wife hates Jellyfin. When the whole world’s media is at her fingertips, she gets choice paralysis. She finds it easier for Netflix to serve up a small number of suggestions and just pick from there, even they’re all crap suggestions.

Ive found it so much better to disconnect from suggestion algorithms. I’m much more intentional with what I watch. I never run out of things to watch. I bookmark movies and TV shows from organic suggestions from friends, family and Lemmy, or from podcasts, critic reviews, my followed YouTube channels, etc. Everything on my Jellyfin is curated content that I want to watch.

I think Jellyseer gives you the ability to watch trailers or see external links (imdb, tvdb, etc) for the show/movie.

Like others have said, this stuff is really about building a collection not streaming something the moment the idea to watch it pops in your mind. It can replace Netflix but you’d want to build it up first (with plenty of HDD space to do so). Mine is also shared with family and friends so it supplements their watching too.

To help combat this I’ve created numerous collections in Plex based on commonly shared traits like genre, actors, directors, release decade, holidays and placed these collections at the top of my library. You can even find artwork for all this stuff on The Poster DB. I also make sure to put sequels into their own collections and separate animated TV/movies from all the live action stuff (four separate libraries) to further reduce the wall of choices.

Closest thing to streaming is Kodi + Umbrella + Premiumize (or other debrid).

Quality is so much better than streamed, even over fiber. Also, having the everything-library is killer.

I am struggling with this aspect. I have a list there (they call them “filters” and I struggled with that too, lol), but it (radarr) does not seem to detect the new titles I put in it my list. I am sooo close. The mdblist site is difficult for me to parse (UI and nomenclature) and I get frustrated whenever I try and fix it. So, I still just jot the title down on a scrap of paper and feel like a caveman. [shrug]

The whole point of the arrs is to download things in advance. Many users set up Import Lists.. There are also apps like Boxarr.

Netflix’s model is to provide the cheapest, low-quality media you can bear to watch. The kind of browsing you are describing is your distressed search to find something watchable. If you populate a server with good TV or at least TV that interests you, you won’t want to hop between media like that.

Same here, every now and then I browse IMDB/TMDB for future releases and request them in Seerr. Then sometime later they just appear in Jellyfin and Plex.

Hmmm, sorry to hear that. What kinds of lists are you trying to make? Are you making sure to “enable” the filter when creating it in Radarr?

At least for me your argument is invalid.

1. I installed Wholphin on my TV and it’s both a jellyfin and an (experimental) jellyseer client
2. Here in Europe I have fast internet, so downloading the whole file is not really a problem. Also I configured my arr stack to prefer a certain size (on the smaller side) for each resolution.
3. I remapped my Netflix button to Wholphin

You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

This is not true for just about any use case.

If you use *arr, you’ll likely use Plex or Jellyfin for a media server. That server will do progressive streaming. Netflix by contrast does dynamic adaptive progressive streaming.

Progressive streaming means that playback will start once your client has downloaded and buffered enough of the selected content from the server. The amount is typically a fairly small portion of the stream, like 10 seconds or so, though the specifics are left to the server and client configs.

Dynamic adaptive progressive streaming has a multiplicty of streams optimized for different devices, formats, and quality levels. This might be a few hundred copies of the same video asset, but in a few different codecs, a few different color encodings (ie HDR, SDR), and a quality ladder of maybe 10 steps ranging from low quality SD to moderate quality UHD (like maybe 300kbps at the low end, and 40Mbps at the high end. And these will be cached around the world for delivery efficiency. On playback, the client (player) will constantly test your network throughput in the background, and “seamlessly” adjust stream quality during playback to give you the best stream your network and client can support without stopping to rebuffer.

For example, if you’re on a 4K/HDR TV with Atmos sound, and great network throughput, you’ll get the highest quality HDR streams and Atmos audio. Conversely, if you’re on mobile that doesn’t support HDR and only stereo audio, you’ll get much more efficiently coded HD video (or maybe SD) and stereo audio streams that are more suited to playback on that device. It would be impractical (huge cost and minor benefit) to try to replicate dynamic adaptive streaming just for yourself.

In any case, even if you’re just pulling off a NAS, you shouldn’t need to wait for the entire file to download before you can start playback. If your files are properly coded, you should be able to do progressive streaming in just about any use case.

I tried making a “new film” filter to list higher rated films with sufficient votes. Then I created a normal “new” filter just to add titles to as a seperate test. One I linked with Trakt and the other I didn’t b/c I wasn’t sure at the time where I would scrape with radarr. And I also created a list from one in the community. Partly to see if I could point radarr to it (don’t think you can), and also I could just manually peruse and add titles myself. I am sure I’ve pointed to one of my lists, but am not in front of my server atm to check again.

I’m a tech guy, but every so often I run into some tech that is very foreign to my mind and it tough to latch onto. The mdblist site does that to me. Getting older too, so I am sure I am losing mental elasticity. Anyways, I thank you for replying and any help you might offer. Cheers!

I interpreted their question differently. It sounds like they’re taking about Radarr having to download a movie before they can watch it, whereas streaming services have a “complete” (compared to a new *arr setup) library available to stream instantly.

Some bittorrent clients can start playing a video before it’s done downloading, and prioritize the torrent chunks in the right order so there aren’t any interruptions as long as there are seeders and you have enough bandwidth. But I don’t think plex or jellyfin can do it, and I don’t know of any alternatives.

Any reason not using Streamio?

With radarr etc you typically download content and then move and rename it in post processing. You can’t stream it in Plex, as it doesn’t even show up in Plex until after all of this has happened and Plex has scanned the folder.

Yeah it is, because you can just set it up to automatically download whatever you want if that’s what you prefer. You can just set up lists to watch for content that matches certain criteria. I’m sure there is even one that would mirror Netflix.

*arr works just fine with “find something random to watch” if you set it up that way with lists.

Anyone has a good tutorial on how to setup a complete are stack with docker on Linux?

Already one that quickly explains what arr does what would be helpful. I know there is radarr, sonarr, bazarr and loads more and I have no idea which system does what or how to connect them.

I’ve found tutorials about individual pieces, but those are of little help

And then the biggest one: I have jellyfin, I’d like to use it over the internet, bit I need to have that obviously VERY safe. How to do that? I know of a popular reverse proxy for those things (name escapes me for a sec) but again, the tutorials I’ve found were lacking at best.

I’m looking for something where I can write a bunch of docker files and start it all up from scratch on Linux, is that possible?

• limited content compared to Netflix Not sure if this is actually a key difference. You can have as many content as you want on your service, if you have the needed space ! But the point is, when self-hosting your ARR stack, it’s more about QUALITY vs QUANTITY…

How many times have I seen people looking for something to watch and bing scrolling Netflixe’s front end.

For the rest you’re on point !!

You can go with this tutorial - https://trash-guides.info/ docker images are available for the arr stack at https://www.linuxserver.io/our-images

radarr - movies sonarr - tv series / anime prowlarr - searches torrent bazarr - to download subtitles

radarr and sonarr asks prowlarr to search torrents then radarr and sonarr asks qbittorrent to download the torrents

jellyfin grabs metadata and shows them for you. if you have seerr installed it manages searches with radarr and sonarr.

I don’t have any links on hand, but there a post either in this community or !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com that explains how to setup a full arr stack in docker. I’ll see if I can find it in the morning.

Here’s a quick and dirty explanation for your other questions. Sonarr and radarr manage your media. Sonarr handles TV, radarr handles movies. That is the only difference. Without a download client (e.g. qBittorrent) they don’t do anything. Jellyfin is how the downloaded (qBittorrent) and managed (*arrs) media gets played on your screen.

I’m foggy on the details, but jellyfin has specific vulnerabilities that make it not recommended to expose publicly. If you must watch remotely, set up a VPN. If you don’t to manually setup wireguard you can use tailscale, which itself uses wireguard, but it does the hard part for you

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #158 for this comm, first seen 12th Mar 2026, 09:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Stremio does not download the media for offline viewing. It is a great stepping stone before setting up a stack.

I can recommend Yet Another Media Server the only down side is that you won’t really learn how to use and manage containers (docker or podman). But this solution is quick and easy it also helps setup a qbittorent container with a VPN. For downloading Linux ISOs. ;D

::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::

I did this by using Seer and Jellyfin Enhanced Plugin. Also here is a list of Jellyfin plugins

::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::

Good bot

Since I started using Jellyfin and arr, searching and watching have become separate activities. Gone is the experience where I discover something and am watching it immediately. And, search/discovery is done on separate apps than where I watch. So my behaviour has changed. I think ahead. I keep any eye out for what people are watching and download what seems good to me. The payoff is I’m not limited to what’s on any particular platform and I don’t pay subscription fees.

Beautiful. Thank you!

Depending on your download speed, you can manually download a TV show episode in seconds to minutes. By the time you watch that episode, at least the next one will be ready. It is quite rare to have to do this though, me and my family mostly add shows on Seer when we find them (recommendations, adverts, etc) and by the time we’ve sat down to watch it’ll be ready.

I did the whole lists thing others have mentioned but to be honest, we found there was too much choice, lots of crap and quickly ran out of space. Taking an active role in choosing shows and films works better for us and I’ll have a short list at any time to watch.

Ah, I see the unclear part. I read this line…

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?) to download.

As if OP already had a media library, and was outside of their home, sitting on a coach (bus?) and wanting to watch something from their existing library on their phone/laptop/tablet, thinking they’d have to wait for the entire thing to download. This would not be the case. If OP had no content library, and wanted to browse for something new, then yes, you’d need to download the entire thing and add it to your media library first.

1. Getting stuff into your media library require downloading the thing.
2. Watching stuff (even remotely) that already exists in your library does not require downloading the whole thing.

Wow, that’s the most valuable link in this comment section!

Yes, I mean to watch before it downloaded completely to my server via torrents. I would be happy, if qbittorent can enable “download in sequential order” enabled by default.

Got it.

This was such a great starting point for me! I second this recommendation.

I used this to learn and build a “proof of concept” on an old raspberry pi before buying anything new.

This! Using top 100 lists to pull new shows twice a day has made it to where I don’t even mess with the arrs apps now that they are set up.

I think this is the last hurdle with the arr setup: discoverability. Plex has tried to jam in something, but it’s far from good. They’re never going to produce a pirate watchlist, so it would have to fall to Jellyfin. What people are seeking is the Netflix experience of “curated” content, spoonfed, and instantly watchable.

For the record I do the same as you. I think the intentionality is a healthy barrier to mindless browsing and consumption, but once people are hooked, it’s hard to wean them off.

For internet access Plex is by far the easiest. You can use Jellyfin but it can be a lot more effort and can be brittle. Tailscale might be a solution but if you want to share with friends it would mean giving them access to your Tailscale network. Then you’ve got reverse proxies like Nginx Reverse Proxy. This would require buying a domain and configuring something like Cloudflare too, plus port forwarding on your router. Tailscale offers a publically accessible domain now which is similar but you cannot configure the TLD. Still, you’re opening an internet accessible port for a FOSS application and this is far less secure unless you know what you’re doing.

Check out lookmovie2.to

I’d love to have internet fast enough that “seconds to minutes” were a reality.