What can be (realisticly) improved for a better and easier experience
Adding proper metadata to releases. Why are we still trying to decipher release titles, why not add a little metadata JSON file to every release and make the info available to the search API?
Also keeping multiple different versions of a release in Arr apps, like ebook and audiobook in different languages. Right now I’d need 4 Readarr instances to get the English and German audiobook and ebook versions of a book, and don’t even think about letting them manage the same root folder!
Sorry, best we can do is some unrelated ASCII art.
At least they sometimes include insane rants.
and following proper naming conventions too. why can’t releasers decided to choose one single naming convention together so it makes our job better to automate things?
Have you tried maintaining a standard at work?
Now imagine if several thousand people try to decide on a common standard.Several thousand people who tend to be less likely to follow the path most traveled, no less
A separate file or if the first few bytes of a file contained the metadata.
Readarr honestly feels like the most barebones of all the arrs. I tried it for a bit and decided to just use Calibre to manage my library.
Sure, I need to manually grab stuff but it more than makes up for that with the other features it has.
I actually like the release titles. It’s encoded in the name that way, there’s a somewhat good standard for it, and it’s one file. I rarely need more info than what’s in the release title. And I would dislike having to carry a separate json with me.
That dubbed audio tracks of movies could be downloaded separatey and easily merged in the audio, in a way similar to subtitles. This way, the audio track in non English languages would be downloaded very quickly, even with just one seeder, and the whole movie in original language has way more seeders than dubbed ones.
Would be great for commentary tracks too.
I’d love that!
How do you approach the challenge (of getting the movies / series in English and non-English) at the moment?
Do you download two versions of the same movie?
Do you use Radarr/Sonarr and Plex? How did you set them up to be “bilingual”?
I’ve always only torrented movies “manually” until a few weeks ago, when I set up my first media server with jellyfin and sonarr/radarr, and set the language to italian only. often however I see that the requested movies not downloading automatically because no italian torrent is found with the required resolution (1080p), and/or the ones actually available have 0 seeds, while there’s plenty of English torrents with loads of seeders
Which trackers do you use?
Currently as italian trackers Ilcorsaroblu, itatorrents and MIRCrew, do you know other good trackers for italian media?
As someone being bilingual en/de and my family being primarily pl/de:
I will either manually remux my own from torrent/usenet releases or (usually for shows) usually just download the german version.
Usually the uploaders include the english track anyway.Regarding your question for multilingual radarr/sonarr: https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/radarr-setup-quality-profiles-french-en/
Just replace fr with language of choice :)Thank you for chipping in!
I guess I have to keep my eyes open for movies series in my own language and hope they come with the original (English) sound included.
But if not: how does the whole remuxxing work? I have literally zero ideas how to get started with that. Where do you find the right (non-english) audio track(s) for the movies? Which software do you use? Etc…
Thanks for the link for Radarr dual-language setup! I came across it before :)
How to remux:
My program of choice: MakeMKV
How to:
Import two sources
Choose which tracks you want -> Example:
Video: The best video track of the two
Audio: 7.1 dolby EN (source 1) and Stereo DE (source 2)
Subtitle: 2-4 subtitle tracks (if needed). 2 from source 1 in EN, 2 from source 2 in DE
Remux it into a MKV (basically a zip version of a movie folder with each track included)
Rename your own release to fit the naming scheme
Import into *arr/media library.For an actual guide better search on YT/Google as only text might be difficult.
Ditto for audio in general. I notice wild differences between encodings in dialogue clarity and volume. If this were standard we could all mix and match whatever audio is best for our equipment.
I’ve seen some anime releases where they had separate mka files for different languages and a little script to attach whatever dub you want into it. It is technically possible already, but super rare
Where to download separately?
sci-hub doesn’t get new research papers any more, and the new alternatives are all much less user friendly. As far as I can tell, wosonhj.com is what’s currently recommended, where you have to post in a forum and wait for either a bot or a human to send the paper to you. Other alternatives, like annas-archive, nexusbot or STC all didn’t have the paper I was looking for.
I just want old sci-hub back, honestly.You can maybe try your local library or Wikipedia’s
Honestly my biggest thing is for affordable 10 or even 20 TB SSDs to hit the market.
Unfortunately you’ll be waiting for a while. SSDs were at the lowest last year to the point that manufacturers were almost losing money. So they reduced production. We will only see the prices going up from now, at least for a while.
You can’t really even find a 10+ TB SSD easily right now let alone anything approaching 20, so it’s a moot point for now anyway. All that pricing stuff is cyclical though. There was a big spike in SSD prices a couple years ago prior to that huge price drop we just saw. It’ll come back down again eventually.
We just moved over to a HDD setup recently because I had run out of space on SSD and the amount of space is great, but I forgot how much I hate HDD seek and transfer times and I’m not gonna invest in RAID for now so I guess this is my life.
Might be smart to maybe keep my most active shows on an SSD and the rest of the catalog on the HDD.
An HDD’s sequential transfer speed is good enough. If seeking is a problem, don’t do whatever you did.
Seagate rather invents new tech to create 30TB HAMR drives than making 3.5" SSDs and laying 3/4 PCBs with each 2TB TLC capacity in the caddy…
Can’t be that expensive in comparison to squeezing 10TB on a 2.5" drive.
What’s the current price roughly?
I have not seen a consumer SSD of 10 or more TB for sale anywhere and absolutely not 20. So the answer is, I have no idea.
Samsung has started selling 8TB drives for around 500-600 which is really not that bad, but I’m just gonna wait a couple years for larger capacities to hit the market and skip 8. It’s in my opinion kind of a middling size if you’re archiving a lot of video.
For now I’ll just stick with the high capacity HDD setup I’m using.
Guessing you’ve got some sort of raid setup going on. You could always get lower capacity SSDs and do some work on a revolutionary compression algo 😉
Thanks, now I gotta watch Silicon Valley again
Last time I checked:
500GB = 50-70€
1TB = 60-80€
2TB = 110-150€ (depending on product tier like samsung evo or pro models)
4TB = 250-400€ (same here)
8TB = >600€Obviously different pricing for M.2/SATA/SAS drives.
About tree fiddy.
Not seen this low quality meme in years
Tree fiddy years?
what’s the point of SSD for archival purposes? seem like less safe option than HDD and speed is not really issue for long term archiving or watching TV shows/movies, I don’t really see point in SSD besides running OS/apps
To each their own. I don’t care for the bulk of RAID setups or the transfer and seek time of individual spinning disks.
I’ve been waiting for that for over ten years now. I thought it would take two at most.
Samsung is selling some somewhat affordable 8TB drives but I feel like that’s kind of an odd spot for size where it’ll hold a lot of stuff, but when you get to that level of kinda semi-deranged collector mentality file hoarding, you’re gonna blow past 8 pretty easily. I’m hoping it’ll actually happen in a few years.
Might be a silly question, but aren’t SSD’s supposedly worse than HDD’s for storing data long term? Or is that just a myth?
I’ve read that if you only store data and then read it off the disk without overwriting then it’s comparable to HDD data degradation wise. Not sure how true is that.
If you dump 8tb of data onto a 10tb SSD and only read from it, it will probably last just as long as a hard drive. SSD’s wear from lots of write operations, reading from them doesn’t really do much other than the cache will be damaged over time.
From what time are we talking here? 1 year 24/7 or 10 years 24/7?
Continued losses, in the billions, for ad-riddled streaming services is all I can ask for.
Being able to find, download and seed old series and movies.
Nobody ever stays seeding anymore because big private trackers make it all about ratio and small ones simply don’t have to userbase to support “old” series.
Back with RARBG I had every season of that 70’s show and had around a ratio of around 50. For old scooby doo, red green show, Mr. Rogers, Tom & Jerry, some cartoons from when I was a kid, etc… Now it is difficult to even find a lot of that media, much less have a good ratio from it on smaller private trackers where it might get 1 download per 6 months or so. There is absolutely no incentive for keeping around older media. If you want to get in good in trackers, you HAVE to pump and dump the most popular torrent of the week once a month or so to get a good enough ratio.
For example, on SceneTime I have a ratio of like 0.1 because it simply doesn’t have users. However, they assign bonus points based on how long your torrent is seeding, if I am not mistaken, so my site “effective ratio” has gone up to 2 because you can spend the bonus points to add “upload GB” to your account if you are keeping alive “unpopular” torrents.
I like the trackers I’m in that have a point system that awards indefinite seeding and makes it possible to have a decent ratio even if you can’t ever actually seed because of people with seedboxes.
Wdym all seedbox users stealing your ratio?
Some can’t even participate with homeservers due to laws or don’t even autobrrr through their whole wishlist.I didn’t say that they steal anything. It’s just really hard to seed without one.
Currently seeding
Tom & Jerry Collection 1940 1080p BluRay WEBRİ H265
Looney.Tunes.and.Merrie. Melodies.HQ.Project.v2022Pretty big in size for my rented seedbox though… :(
Which tracker is this on?
I don’t know what to do with my stuff from RARBG anymore because nobody can connect to it, but I don’t want it to go to waste.
Maybe I should repackage it is AV1 and put it on a tracker or something.
As this tracker is always talked about: TL
The other tracker is much smaller and I prefer to not mention the name in public. If interested send me a PM.
Edit: The RARBG stuff should still be connectable over DHT and other trackers.
I also share the rarbg db so users searching for the rare unicorn in the database might choose to connect to yours over a magnet link.
FWIW, every episode of Red Green is on youtube. Just have to rip it, which is always fun /s
Honestly? Resurrection of Rarbg. That site was gold.
That was the cleanest and most curated movie site I have ever come across, honestly a big loss to have them gone. Consistent naming scheme, amazing torrent video quality (unlike low bitrate YTS), icons/logos to show what medium the rip was from. Literal gold
I don’t really care about the site, but their releases were fast and had consistent X265 quality, nothing new matches them
Pahe is quite fast, PSA recently did something to their encoding and often/mostly can’t play them anymore on my TV, they worked fine up until last year, not sure what they messed up, at least with pahe X265 I have guarantee it will work
there are some entry level private trackers that are good as rarbg but you have to keep track of minimum seeding time and ratio for that, plus you have to wait for open sign-ups if you are a beginner.
Yeah, over the decades that was the golden era is convenience and quality.
A way to fairly pay the original content creator.
If I really enjoy a movie, series or music, I often actually want to send the actual creator some money to reward their creativity. May be just a dollar, may be ten. But I can’t.
But I can’t
You sure?
I don’t pay for movies or series of (I just don’t). But when I like some music (bands, producers, or even a record label) I end up buying some physical records or merchandising. If you don’t care about that, the most direct way is to go to Bandcamp and buy something on friday. People often want to put a price on their work, and not just “a dollar” like it’s your spare change, but there are several options and websites to do it.
With games I do the same but in Steam.
I wish anime/manga/etc studios were transparent about their costs and profit. I want to see if my favorite show has so far made enough money to afford the next season or for the team to afford their next project.
Kickstarter/Patreon should have shown creators that people will support what they like and even if they have made enough money people will continue to buy/donate to creators they love.
Fairly pay og creators … But how do I pay RARGB if they don’t exist anymore? :(
Arr service that links with SoulSeek, automatically downloads music, passes it through beets, calculates ReplayGain values and the rest of the missing metadata and then organizes and renames it
This is the fucking dream. Lidarr is serviceable to get a library going, but we could do so much better.
Functional music sharing would be amazing. In the SuprNova days music was so readily accessible. Now it’s a crap shoot with most trackers and newsgroups.
The fact, that lidarr has no slsk integration…
filenames following the standards of library apps like jellyfin, plex, etc.
i don’t want every file to be named “[ASDF]some.shitty.show.S3E7.MULTI(360p h264 7.1 dual audio).mkv”
jellyfin can’t identify most of these, and the relevant information can be found out easily by tapping properties (in windows, anyway)
Errrm, sonarr/radarr can sort that out perfectly
Give FileBot a try. I liked it so much, I even bought the license. It works really well.
been using antrenamer, filebot looks like it’s gonna make my job much easier.
the next time i’m reorganizing my (3TB btw) library, i’ll give it a try.
i don’t want every file to be named “[ASDF]some.shitty.show.S3E7.MULTI(360p h264 7.1 dual audio).mkv”
That file name contains the S3E7 bit, which is enough for it to get parsed by plex. Seems to be a jellyfin issue.
that may very well be the case, but it’s still excessive. i would much rather have a .txt file with relevant information and the “ShowXY S03E07” naming.
at least manually identifying shows is easy in jellyfin.
Literally *arrs…
More people to get in to I2P.
What is I2P?
Fully anonymouse and FREE P2P network great for torrenting and somewhat encouraged even.
It needs a modern rewrite atleast in terms of ui but ideally a complete rewrite. I tried it 10 years ago and it still looks just as complicated
i2pd
Still the same ui tho
I agree that the web UI looks a bit outdated. But it is more then functional and imo not that complicated. Personally I use the container version with podman so idk about the windows version.
I need people to submit more of the research papers that I need to be able to read to lib Gen or sci hub
You might know this already, but try emailing the primary authors directly and asking for a copy, it’s often the easiest way to get them if you haven’t got any other way to access.
This actually works way better than people expect. Many authors are tied to a publisher but are still allowed to personally give away copies to students.
Yeah. I just don’t like trying to email 100+ authors haha. But you are right in general they do like to share most of the time
Better matching with dubbed versions of non-English shows. I have to manually search, since the “language” isn’t English in the original, even though there’s an English dub. Using Sonarr
The return of RARBG
Hopefully they’ll find a sanctuary country soon and restart it.
Arr software for YouTube with Sponsorblock built in.
A way to use Sponsorblock on podcasts.
You wouldn’t want the Sponsorblock to be part of the download process, but rather the player. Being crowdsourced, it’s not immediate and often gets improved/corrected over time, so a video’s least likely to have good Sponsorblock timestamps right after being uploaded (when an automated program would likely be downloading it).
We need a Plex/Jellyfin/etc. metadata provider with the Sponsorblock info included. Could keep the data up to date, even after the videos are downloaded.
Interesting. I’d not considered that Plex could build it in. That of course relies on accurate YouTube metadata but it’s not impossible.
I don’t know how common they are anymore, as Plex has moved toward hosting their own metadata and I’ve never bothered using any myself, but there historically have been some number of YT metadata agents (e.g., this one) folks could add onto their Plex server and pull the metadata from YT directly. Expanding something like this to also query the Sponsorblock API seems like it wouldn’t be terribly difficult.
The harder part would be getting the player to incorporate Sponsorblock to actually use that data to skip the segments. Plex, in particular, seems unlikely to ever try something like this, as their business model is moving more and more toward ad-supported streaming content rather than improving the self-hosted media server that got them popular.
It does seem unlikely Plex would include this ever. Hate their generic pivot to ad supported bs. But as a lifetime sub to Plex I’m riding it down.
I hear jellyfin supports plugins which is one step easier.
At home I watch on an Apple TV with a nas running isponsorblock. Works well but is a single device/location solution. And I am still paying for YouTube premium.
For things I don’t care enough to archive to my own collection, I use a Shield TV with SmartTube, an alternative client that blocks ads, incorporates SponsorBlock, and a few other nice tweaks. Definitely my favorite YT experience of all the ones I’ve tried.
You can use sponsorblock with yt-dlp, if that helps at all.
Interesting. Just need it to work on a server with an interface as effortless as sonarr.
Like to download videos from your subscriptions?
Yep. Add to the server with ads and sponsor bs removed.
why? ublock works fine to block sponsored stuff
Sponsors, not ads.
Ie sections of the actual video the creator uploaded, dedicated to their own sponsors. Not the extra video ads youtube then puts in as well.
What if I want to watch on my tv or download for offline use?
Since we’re talking about sponsorblock, https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/1927
