Greentext

You can set up sonarr/radarr to use torrent clients but it’s more effective with and built for Usenet for sure. But it still works fine with torrents. It’s also not terribly difficult to setup quality profiles if you know basic regex

My setup does the following: For movies: downloads 4k remux from private trackers first, then Usenet filtered by ideal release groups, then 1080p remux from private trackers, and then Usenet by ideal release groups. If those all fail then I am notified so I can take a look at the releases that are left over

For tv: pretty similar

For anime: releases pulled from sneedex when possible. When not AB/nyaa remux preferred, then fall back on BR rip hevc from either those trackers or Usenet via AT.

Regex to also filter for things like I prefer Dolby vision and atmos audio with my setup whenever possible. I filter for English releases unless it’s a foreign film or anime (refuse dubs, yuck). With anime I filter for common fansub groups like subsplease, commie, etc to ensure a release has subs.

And jellyseer so that my family and friends don’t have to deal with any of the above and can just type in “movie name”

It’s not perfect of course mainly because sometimes people upload stuff with bad tagging and file names, but it works well the overwhelming majority of the time and I am able to grab media extremely quickly on gigabit internet. A 4k remux movie downloads in 6-10 mins usually because I have the connection throttled a bit so that my other computers in the house don’t all choke just because a movie started downloading

Then there’s the other benefits: a komga server with all my books, sheet music, and manga that can be served to my ereader/phones/laptop via mihon or any of the Tachiyomi forks. No need to bother with mangadex or bato, my manga all loads extremely fast, ad free, no watermarks/credit pages and is the highest possible quality.

I have a navidrome setup for all my music and finamp (I use jellyfin, fuck plex and their snitching). I have a dns server so I can adblock everything in the house, I don’t have to worry about installing extensions and can run adblock on devices that typically can’t run extensions like smart TVs.

I also now have a significant amount of network storage, over 100tb. My computers all back up to that and the server is archived to tape once a month. I don’t need to bother with google, apple, dropbox, amazon, etc. having copies of my files.

This all took about 2 days to setup and runs on hardware that’s worth about $150 (minus the drives but you don’t need to start with that much storage). You just need some e waste pc from 2015 or so and the know how, which isn’t that hard to gain. This is all well documented online. The trash guides will get your sonarr/radarr setup 85% of the way there. if you’re like me you’ll diverge from their decisions pretty quickly, but that’s just a matter of modifying the regex a bit and their discord is very active and helpful with questions if you don’t understand something. Plus there are thousands of reddit posts, youtube videos, etc.

All the software is free (unless you use something like unraid or the premium plex) and a Usenet subscription is dirt cheap if you wait for a major sale like Black Friday, I pay $40/yr for unlimited

It definitely depends on your trackers and how smart sonarr/radarr are with picking a useable torrent. I think 80-90% of the time I don't have to think about it, but there are some shows I've had to really dig for. Private trackers make it way easier

Doesn't sound to me like they actually understand what they're talking about. Sonarr and Radarr both use trackers to download files from either torrents or usenet. Emby is a media server that displays the downloaded files (like netflix). You don't typically have to reencode what you download.

reencoding is not required in advance, it happens on the fly if needed.

download still needs to be completed first usually, but you can save a lot of time if you compromise in quality.