Exactly the title. I’m researching having a jellyfin server and downloading media seems like it would be tedious (the way I’ve done it once or twice previously). I could use some clarity on what Sonarr is, what it looks like (like is there a GUI?? I’m too stupid to run something off of a terminal), and how it works. I’m familiar with torrenting but not with usenet, and I use the megathread from this community. Can someone explain Sonarr/Radarr to me in a way that would be understandable to someone at my level of understanding?
If you aren’t already self-hosting services and aren’t really comfortable with command line, you might want to look at something like CasaOS and this video: https://youtu.be/QfpZcXXGpVA
I watched it several times when building my stack and still go back to it from time to time.
Ultimately, Sonarr and Radarr take away the tedium of running your media server. You tell it what you want, it does the work of finding, obtaining, naming, and sorting. Then Jellyfin picks it up automatically. Jellyseerr, as others have said, puts a nice shiny coat of paint on it.
The other comment has a pretty good explanation. But its important to know that its really difficult to get it working without access to some private trackers. The normal free ones will start giving you issues with file quality, naming, or not finding anything. This only gets worse if you want anime and even worse again for dubbed.
Radarr (Movies) / Sonarr (Shows/Series) - You search for a movie/show, you hit the “I want that” button, it does the searching through Torrents or Usenet, once it find a match it send a signal to your download client to begin downloading, once done Radarr/Sonarr will take that file and neatly manage it for your media viewer (Jellyfin) essentially automating the entire process.
There is quite a bit of configuration needed for things start to flow smoothly but relatively straight forward.
Sonarr lets you create a list of TV shows you want, and it automatically searches for episodes from sources you specify (eg. Bittorrent, Usenet) and passes them to your download client(s), and organizes all of the media files.
Radarr does the same thing for movies.
You manage them both with a web interface. Installing and setting them up requires technical steps, but there are guides.
I will add, I find the interfaces for these very obtuse, but there’s frontends like Ombi and Jellyseerr that let you more easily manage what you want to see.
