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Comment by somehnguy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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(!),...)

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/

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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