I am almost done building my first self hosted streambox through Docker. That’s a total of 16 instances, each fulfilling 1 specific role.
As I’m new to the *arr world, could you please help me understand why it is standard to deploy multiple *arr services for each media type (ex: readarr1 for books + readarr2 for audiobooks) instead of using 1 that does multiple media types?
Thank you.
In the software world, based on personal experience and the UNIX philosophy, software should aim to do one thing and do it really well.
Then there are also the bloat complaints (why should I download a whole stack of arr services when I only care for movies)
The most unfortunate one however can be them mixing. If my child looks up Star Wars but instead the suite ends up downloading a Star Wars porn parody… that’s just… bad
I do wish I didn’t need to run a second Radarr instance to have both 1080p and 4K media.
Not everyone has to, though. I use one instance for a wide variety of resolutions, depending on the show and consumption model; including 360,480,720,1080, 2160 (HDR/10-bit). But I run Plex on a box with quicksync that is doing my transcoding for me.
So why have you chosen to run different instances?
It’s not as relevant today as it used to be, that’s for sure. Originally it was to limit transcoding of 4K content (which used to be a lot harder), and also to avoid the HDR tone mapping issues with 4K content during transcoding, both of which are largely resolved with newer hardware and Plex software updates.
The only reason I keep them separated now is because most of the folks I share with can’t direct stream 4K content anyway, and so I only share out the 1080p libraries in Plex. It keeps bandwidth usage down and limits having to go to hardware transcoding, which can reduce quality and introduces startup delays. The library I use locally indexes both the 1080p and 4K content, so Plex will always prefer the 4K if it’s there.
If diskspace ever became an issue, I’d probably consider merging the libraries again.
Sure but they also seem to share quite a bit of GUI code at least. Couldn’t all of these just be plugins for a core *arr service?
