Everyone here is talking about how to get the latest and best stuff, but no one is talking about how they actually manage it 😜
So, how do YOU manage your Movies / Shows / Music / eBooks / Games?
I begin:
I use Prowlarr + Radarr + Sonarr + Jellyfin.
I have / directory organised like this:
/data
├── media
│ ├── books
│ ├── movies
│ ├── music
│ └── tv
└── torrents
├── books
├── movies
├── music
└── tv
Files added from Sonarr goes to torrents/tv and that for Radarr torrents/movies. Once the torrent client has downloaded the files, Sonarr and Radarr hardlinks the needed files to media’s respective folders. I have set media/tv for shows and media/movies for movies on Jellyfin. Everything is automated, I love it.
I have a similar setup but without the hardlinks. Can you explain the benefits/reason for using the them? I think I understand what a hardlink is, but don’t quite get why you’d use it in this context.
The torrent client can get confused about the authenticity of the files if you make any changes to the files that were downloaded. It can also have trouble finding all the files required for seeding, so moving the needed files to media is a no.
Once the torrent client finishes downloading the files, instead of copying the needed files among them to media’s respective folder, we simply make a hardlink to it to save space and to ensure the authenticity of the files in torrents folder such that the torrent client has no trouble seeding the files.
The seeded folder which contains the needed files can also contain media that can potentially confuse Jellyfin such that it shows it; furthermore, less useless files also decreases the scanning time taken by Jellyfin. So instead of directly linking the respective folders in torrents we have a separate and more clean directory for Jellyfin media.
TL;DR: to save space and to ensure your torrent client can keep seeding the files.
Underneath the file system, files are represented by inodes. (Or is it multiple inodes? Not sure.)
A file in the file system is basically a link to an inode. A hard link, then, just creates another file with a link to the same underlying inode.
source: stackoverflow sym versus hard links
Making a copy simply makes another inode, doubling your storage usage. You can use jdupes to convert duplicate files to hard links.
Pretty much my method. On an unRaid server so that I can have a flat user space interface and expand as needed.
My collecting isn’t as automated and only my video media is aggregated into a viewing platform (Plex), but it’s pretty easy to find anything on a moments notice.
Would you happen to have any recommendations for any compete noob UNRAID resources? I have a GSA and I’m very interested in using UNRAID on that, but I haven’t played around with non-Windows or OSX OSes in over 15 years.
The unRaid forums are the place to go. TBH, it’s so bullet proof I only ever do anything with it when I rebuild my server. The last time was ~3 years ago.
The management is a nice gui, the docker setup is mostly automatic, but doing anything beyond basics is command line. I almost never use *ix but it’s really not that bad.
Mostly the same over here. I also run Jellyseer for automated show/film request handling, autoscan for faster Jellyfin scanning since my drive is a network drive not directly attached to the server, and unpackerr for auto-unzipping files from the occasional Usenet style download with a movie split into 60 RAR files.
For managing my library on disk, I just recently made the effort to set up the *arr apps. I love having the metadata, tagging, organizing, and file naming all consistent and automated. Previously I used mp3tag and filebot to manage them and it was way more manual. Everything is set up with docker-compose and Ansible.
Library file stuff:
- Two Radarr instances, one for 4k and another for lower resolutions
- Sonarr for TV
- Lidarr for music
- Two readarr instances, one for epub/pdf and one for audiobooks
- Jackett
- deluge+openVPN
For library frontend stuff:
- Jellyfin for movies, tv, music, audiobooks
- Plex, for when Jellyfin is acting up
- Jellyseer for TV & movie requests
- LaunchBox for videogames and emulators
- Calibre + calibreWeb for ebooks & syncing to my Kobo eReader
Haven’t set up yet:
- flaresolverr
- unpackerr
- audiobookshelf
Doesn’t exist yet/wishlist:
- *arr app for emulator ROMs (I’ll have to check out romm, looks pretty cool!)
Is readarr really worth it? I’m a heavy reader, but i’ve not set it up.
Also, audiobookshelf is worth the effort. If you’re holding off because you don’t want to organize your library, the folder structure they use is really really good. I run all sorts of services, and I like jellyfin, komga, the arrs, etc. I love audiobookshelf. By far my most used app.
DOOM (see citation) folders mostly
I have a computer running TrueNAS Scale with a network drive accessable on my network from all my PCs and my TVs.
All of my systems can access the drive and play the content via VLC.
Is it efficient? No.
Would I recommend it? Also no.
Citation: DOOM stands for Didn’t Organize Only Moved
@Gormadt
Sergeant Murphys Laws of Combat Operations, 6: If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.
- Jellyfin: Media Center to stream movies, TV shows and music
- sonarr, radar, lidarr: manage collections and download, TV shows, movies and music, respectively
- transmission: torrent client, through VPN connection (NordVPN)
- Jackett: tracker manager
- stash: like Jellyfin, but for linux-iso files /s
All of that runs in docker containers on my NAS, using docker-compose to deploy the stack.
In general just creating folders and keeping everything organized.
