I have a Plex server running on Mac OSX. Whenever I want to add media, I remotely connect into the Mac, login to my private tracker, download the torrent, wait for it to finish, then update my Plex library.
I’m hopeful that there’s an easier way. I’m imagining a way I can remotely tell the Plex server what I want to watch and it takes it from there. Does such a thing exist?
Are you using the *arr apps? https://wiki.servarr.com/
OP said he’s using a private tracker, are all private trackers guaranteed to work with the arr stack?
They works with almost every single reputable private tracker. I can only my think of one niche one that doesn’t support prowlarr.
All the small obscure ones I’ve ever been apart of have worked just fine with the *arrs
Not sure if it’s all of them but it looks like a lot.
Sure it does. You use prowlarr to automate connections. It doesn’t actually make a connection to a particular tracker or use net host though. It just instructs your regular download client to download from a given source. If you want to use a source that is not listed, you can just add it yourself.
As others mentioned, Arr-Stack and then add Overseer to add new movies or series.
Oh boyo! You can have literally everything automated. All you’d need to do is search a movie or show and click request and then bam it will appear on plex.
How?
Arr stack (as everyone is commenting here with)
Prowlarr (to pick your torrent indexers), sonarr (for shows), radarr (for movies) and overseerr for requests (this one’s optional but it’s so nice).
Add API codes from your sonarr and your radarr into prowlarr (and overseerr if you go with it) and add your qbittorrent web ui server to all of them.
I port forwarded overseerr so that it can be accessible by web and made a web app to it on my wife’s phone. Now while she’s bored at work she can scroll through recent releases on all streaming sites in overseerr and pick what she likes and click “request”. The requests get automatically approved and my prowlarr starts searching and sends the download to sonarr or radarr, which automatically moves everything into their right folders into my plex library.
I come home and open plex and bam my new releases are there, ready to be watched.
Idk if you knew this, but LunaSea can add things to Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr from both Android and iOS using the APIs for the Servarr apps. You can also send notifications to your phone via LunaSea if one of your Docker containers goes down using Uptime Kuma.
Neat! I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check it out.
Lidarr where.
I just started using soulseek and it seems to be a lot better than what I could source through lidarr as I’m not in any music-heavy private trackers like RED and the public ones only maybe have top-40 type artists available.
Now I wish I could integrate the two because I hate having to do everything manually again along with needing to run everything through MusicBrainz Picard so that it’s all tagged correctly.
Rutracker has a lot of music, as far as public trackers are concerned. One downside is that they package a lot of it as image+.cue, which is annoying to deal with
Check out Soularr, pretty new, scripts to integrate slskd and lidarr, works great for me paired with Deezer downloading through arr-scripts.
Yes, Radarr and the rest of the *arr stack.
Have a look through the tools section on the Megathread in the pinned post. For this specific use case you’re probably going to be wanting to look at tools like Sonarr (for TV shows), Radarr (for movies), some form of torrent client that those tools support (Transmission for example), and depending on what your tracker supports, possibly something like Jackett to provide a bridge between your tracker and your downloader tool.
The benefit of this kind of setup is it’s very easy to add Usenet into the mix if you choose to.
There’s some extra steps needed if you run it directly on the Mac but you can also do something like run Docker on the Mac and run those tools within Docker instead.
I’m pretty sure it’s possible to integrate something like Overseerr (which is a web frontend for handing requests for new content) into the Plex watch list meaning you could add a show to your watch list in Plex, Overseerr would pick that up, send it to Sonarr or Radarr depending on the type of content it is, which would then do a search on your tracker for the content, send the torrent to your torrent client, and then when it finishes downloading automatically import it into Plex.
A lot of suggestions for the *Arr apps, which I fully endorse.
I will also point out that if you set up Ombi, it can automatically add titles from your Plex watchlist. So you can add titles to your library with one click.
Install prowlarr to troll your trackers and then radarr to deal with your movies. On Mac iirc its best to run them natively, and you can set up radarr to alert Plex that the new movie has arrived.
You need the Servarr apps. Sonarr for TV shows, Radarr for movies, and Prowlarr to handle search indexers or trackers. Bazarr for subtitles, if you watch international shows or anime. The apps are available as docker containers. Not all of them can be installed as standalone apps. Pipe the media into directories for a Jellyfin server to stream them, since Plex is corpo shit.
You can use LunaSea on Android or iOS to add shows from your mobile. You can also install Jellyseerr if you want an app to help you discover media. If you want music or ebooks/audiobooks, there are Servarr apps for that too.
Lots of suggestions for Arr. I also have a Mac and use Plex. I explored setting up the Arr suite but promptly got lost in the weeds. Is there a guide that doesn’t include “install this executable from an untrusted source” to set this up? There are Arr docker setup files available but I have no idea who made them and if they are trustworthy, I’d rather go to the source than third party.
the first dockerfile linked on the official site is pretty simple. read it to make sure it’s safe, then build it locally yourself.
Who’s official site, docker? I legit have no idea where to start
sorry no, the servarr site. look at this section for docker info. I think the links from there should have most of the background info
the docker builds it uses are unofficial technically, but the source is here, you can see that the only thing it does is download the official build
I used to run my stack on macOS and back then I used Catch to grab episodes of shows I was subscribed to via ShowRSS and Filebot to rename and sort the downloaded movies and shows in a Plex-friendly layout; Plex then grabs new additions autmatically, pretty sure you don’t need to rescan manualy.
like most here I replaced that mess with Sonarr/Radarr and eventualy switched over to Jellyfin when Plex introduced one “feature” too many.
Switch to Jellyfin. Plex doesn’t need to know that you yanked some MP4s. And also, set up the *arr stack.
Jellyfin and Linux folks can’t help but tell people to switch to their service regardless if anyone was asking. Obnoxious userbases.
OP is asking for help with Plex. It has nothing to do with Jellyfin. Go away.
No. If yours ask for help, then people are going to give it, and there’s no reason for them to avoid giving their own opinions on what’s better. If yours don’t like it, don’t ask for help.
Go away.
Lol what help was provided? It was just Jellyfin spam that had nothing to do with what OP had asked.
If you just replaced Jellyfin with some obnoxious VPN voucher in that comment it would be obviously spam but because its something you like you can’t seem to see it.
If OP had been asking about Jellyfin and someone thought it was “helpful” to suggest they switch to Plex I would of said the same thing.
I’m going to keep pushing Jellyfin over Plex anytime someone posts something that mentions it, as it is the obviously superior choice. I don’t care if you disagree.
You have two choices. Block me and ignore it, or fuck off. I don’t care which you choose, because I’ll quickly forget you even exist unless you bother replying, but you don’t have any power to make me do otherwise. So you might as well save yourself the trouble.
Corpo bootlicking scum.
Lol butthurt much? If you really didn’t care you wouldnt have felt the need to lash out like a child.
As good of a product as jellyfin might be, every time I run into someone promoting it I am reminded why I never use it.
Hey let me just say that jellyfin is shit. It’s shit and it sucks ass. Thanks 👍
I’ve never used Plex. I’m curious what issues you’ve had with jellyfin that makes you say this. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with it, along with a friend who’s been using it a lot
It’s a hammer in search of nails. If you don’t want transcoding it simply doesn’t work. It’s nice that it exists and works for some people, but I despise ‘solutions’ that have no reason to exist except the devs needing an excuse to do thins they like. If jellyfin had a normal, regular, honest and simple option to just turn off transcoding I’d probably switch to it (even if the library scan process takes days instead of seconds). I don’t want to transcode anything ever, I use things in my lan, my devices can play all of the formats in my librabry - this is like archiving and unpacking every single file I move around on my pc.
Now plex is not opensource freeware nice things - it does what I tell it to do. That’s about it
I see what you’re saying. I don’t really mind doing the transcoding but I’d never looked to turn it off. Maybe it’ll be a feature added at some point.
You may disagree but I’m of the opinion that making an open source version of an app is enough of a reason to warrant it’s creation but to each their own of course. Thanks for sharing your input.
You can already disable transcoding, and it doesn’t transcode at all anyway if your device can handle the format. The person you responded to is just an idiot.
I know I was having issues trying to transcode media the server wasn’t able to transcode. I didn’t know it wouldn’t transcode period if device could handle it. I feel like I was always transcoding no matter what but maybe not the case. I certainly would not consider myself an authority on the inner workings of Jellyfin
If your client device supports the format the media is in, Jellyfin doesn’t transcode it. You can also disable transcoding entirely, if the user doesn’t want it.
Library scans also take just a couple seconds, and that’s on the old 2016 quad core desktop I nabbed out of the trash at my workplace. If yours was taking longer, it indicates an issue with your PC.
What other bits of misinformation do you have to share?
I can’t disable transcoding globally, I have to mess with horrible config menus on every client I want to use. Library scans take more than 30 minutes on my i7-4790k NAS - after that I just stopped and removed the jellyfin server from it. Just being open source is not enough. Once it starts working as a user-first app I’ll gladly switch over.
Jellyfin has come a hell of a long way since it first forked from Emby. sure its not as feature complete and polished as plex but it’s far from shit, and it’s free and open.
I run both side by side with several clients on each and have been a plexpass holder since 2013.
Why would OP want to downgrade?
Because Plex doesn’t need to know what you’ve stolen. And it’s proprietary garbage.
Jellyfin is wack shit lol
It’s a good start but feature wise it has a LONG way to go.
Jellyfin users are as bad as vegans. No one fucking cares lol
For not caring, you obviously felt the need to write a comment. Just can’t get Jellyfin out of your mind, huh?
More like Plex lives like a boogieman rent free in the heads of jellyfin users to where if someone so much as asks a question about Plex, jellyfin users just have to come and shit all over the thread.
Come back and do that shit when the product is actually better. It isn’t even feature parity yet.
Jellyfin has every feature Ples does, and more, since those features are free.
Lmao ok buddy. Whatever you say.
