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Comment by growingentropy | Hacker News Reader

I hand-change every file name.

Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.

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The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.

These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.

You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.

Oh, I will most definitely be checking that out. Thank you so much.

It's funny, I've heard of radarr and sonarr, but I never looked into them because I was learning other stuff.

Also check out Ombi once you have the arrs set up. It's a combined UI for your users (or just yourself) to request a movie or show and then you just wait a bit and it shows up in Plex/Jelly.

...super cool. Man, glad I had this conversation. I have projects again.

Maybe it's just me, but ombi was no end of issues for me (and resource hungry). I switched to Overseerr a while back and haven't looked back. Would highly recommend giving it a try. I found it to be a very polished experience and has been set and forget.

The *arr applications can automate it but I personally don’t like doing it that way, unless you are good with your quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it’s not the best with removing unnecessary files

I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and move files.

So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename, skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to move em

I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will recognise.

The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been brave enough to try that feature.

For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.

Same here! But for me it was "Title (year in Sumerian Ur dynasty calendar).type"

The only format that stands the test of time, IMO

something like tinymediamanager?

I'll look into it as well. Thank you.

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