A pirate's life for me!

Do you enjoy watching TV shows and movies, but you’re tired of giving your hard-earned cash to greedy corpos that push low-res video streams and ads even after you pay them?

Well, let me tell you about the *Arr stack, which will make your life easy and let you enjoy watching the media you love.

The Arr stack is a bundle of OSS apps, the main ones being:

• Sonarr - Monitor TV shows
• Radarr - Monitor Movies
• Bazarr - Manage subtitles
• Prowlarr - Manage torrent indexers and use them to search for media

The idea behind all of those apps is to automate searching, downloading and organizing all of your media. Set it up once and forget about it. More details on the Servarr wiki.

Docker is the preferred way of running them, since ‘It just works.’

Choose a torrent client of your liking (transmission, deluge, qbittorrent) and connect it to the *Arr apps, so it will auto-download and seed media for you.

Now that you have a big folder with TV shows & movies, you can stream them to any of your devices with Jellyfin.

Jellyfin is an alternative to Plex that can also be ran in Docker. Point it to your media folder(s), and it will pick up and parse all available files.

One odd requirement that Jellyfin has is that TV shows need to be arranged in a pre-defined structure of folders, ex: ShowName/Season1/Episode1. The *Arr apps take care of that, but there could be corner cases where you will need to import an episode that was downloaded, but Sonarr didn’t pick it up properly.

What about if you want to share your media stash with your friends?

Jellyfin has different user levels, so you can create accounts for all your friends and let them connect to your Jellyfin instance.

What about if they want to request a missing TV show or movie to be downloaded? Here comes Jellyseerr.

Jellyseerr is another side app that is integrated with Jellyfin (registered users can log in both apps), where people can request Movies or TV shows to be added to the media library.

The Jellyseerr administrator can approve or decline requests. If approved, the download request goes straight to the *Arr stack, where search & download starts without you doing anything.

If you don’t have where to run all the mentioned software on your local network (or you don’t want to), for $13/month you can buy a Linux VPS with 1TB storage and run everything there.

The initial setup of the *Arr stack can be painful, but once done, you can sail the high seas and enjoy your ad-free 4K viewing experience.