Before i got into scale, i had no clue of the absolute rabbit hole that is a fully automated media setup: I thought i would have installed Jellyfin, maybe a Qbittorrent container, and then i would sort this stuff out myself.
But as i read various resources on the web about this stuff, i heard about the *arr apps, and i got curious.
For those who don’t know, the *arr apps (Mainly Sonarr and Radarr) are applications that keep track of tv shows and movie releases, and automatically download such things via torrent or UseNet. Sounds pretty cool, especially for a use-case like mine where id like to keep track of currently airing anime.
So i got into Sonarr.
And the level of pointless complexity skyrocketed from there:
- Install Sonarr
- Install Qbittorrent because Sonarr does not handle downloading
- Find the internal DNS names for both services, issued by K3s, so they can talk to each other
- Install Prowlerr, because Sonarr does not manage torrent/usenet trackers, and add individual trackers from there
- Install a selenium-based CAPTCHA solver (🤨) so i can make API calls to trackers behind Cloudflare
Sheesh, good thing we are down now, right?
NOPE
Once i tried actually using Sonarr, the results were utter garbage when running a search, it would download the most random stuff. Also the torrent management didn’t quite work right: series were not downloaded and moved into the right folders, but that was easily fixed by enabling ‘Automated torrent management’ in Qbittorrent.
As it turns out, Sonarr needs quite a bit of help to figure out what anime to download: the results will be utterly terrible, unless you implement an algorithm to rank results based on information on the download name (format, quality, group that made it…)
Luckily for us, there is a great resource out there called the TRaSH Guides that will walk you through setting all of this up.
Another great resource out there is the SeaDex spreadsheet, which is a pretty sizable spreadsheet that lists the “best” releases of many anime series. I do not know exactly by which criteria the author picks them, but it broadly prioritizes raw video and audio quality over anything else.
This is true for the TRaSH guides as well: they are both authored by insane people, that think that having a 70GB download for 12 episodes of Frieren is a good and fair compromise.
I suggest you take their advise with a pinch of salt 😉
SeaDex is particularly useful when adding completed series to your library, as sonarr seems to struggle in finding whole seasons or whole series.
I suspect this is a limitation of its logic, where it looks for ‘Batch’ releases and it has trouble parsing what is a full series.
Sonarr is quite good at tracking and downloading single episodes, like for currently airing anime, provided you have sufficiently fudged the numbers in the ranking system to make it pick what you want.
My current setup is to use Sonarr for simulcast anime, and shows that don’t yet have DVD/DB releases, while i manually download and import older series.
The last major problem with Sonarr, which is quite annoying for me, is that it was not designed for anime, and that has consequences:
The anime community has long had a de facto rule, where seasons of a show are considered completely separate items, and so are tie-in movies.
Sonarr, which is a piece of software created for western serialized television, has no concept of this: Seasons of a given anime are organized under a Series’ folder, and any kind of OVA/Movie will go into a “Specials” folder.
This creates a lot of problems with metadata fetching in Jellyfin, which will not behave as i expect as an anime fan: movies are hidden behind a “Specials” season, while ideally id like them to be a separate item in the library once i click on a series.
Another long-standing tradition Sonarr seems to break, is that in the anime world most seasons of a show are considered separate items: it is kinda silly when you think about it, Konosuba S1 and Konosuba S3 are still part of the same series, but that has long been the custom, and what i expect.
Sonarr does not abide by this, and instead groups all seasons in a single library item.