Hello! I never used *arr stack, and was interested into it, but one thing is stopping me. I see a lot of articles like how it is Netflix (or any other ONLINE theater) replacement, but as I see it is not online. I see two big factors that stops me from trying seerr + jellyfin (and other stuff in between):
- You have two switch between those apps to search and then watch.
- You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.
I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?) to download. And then you can realize that you not into it and have to repeat all the steps above. Is my expectation correct? Please don’t consider this as negative opinion. Just want to know what to expect. I remember an app called “popcorn time” that does not have that flaws.
This is not true for just about any use case.
If you use *arr, you’ll likely use Plex or Jellyfin for a media server. That server will do progressive streaming. Netflix by contrast does dynamic adaptive progressive streaming.
Progressive streaming means that playback will start once your client has downloaded and buffered enough of the selected content from the server. The amount is typically a fairly small portion of the stream, like 10 seconds or so, though the specifics are left to the server and client configs.
Dynamic adaptive progressive streaming has a multiplicty of streams optimized for different devices, formats, and quality levels. This might be a few hundred copies of the same video asset, but in a few different codecs, a few different color encodings (ie HDR, SDR), and a quality ladder of maybe 10 steps ranging from low quality SD to moderate quality UHD (like maybe 300kbps at the low end, and 40Mbps at the high end. And these will be cached around the world for delivery efficiency. On playback, the client (player) will constantly test your network throughput in the background, and “seamlessly” adjust stream quality during playback to give you the best stream your network and client can support without stopping to rebuffer.
For example, if you’re on a 4K/HDR TV with Atmos sound, and great network throughput, you’ll get the highest quality HDR streams and Atmos audio. Conversely, if you’re on mobile that doesn’t support HDR and only stereo audio, you’ll get much more efficiently coded HD video (or maybe SD) and stereo audio streams that are more suited to playback on that device. It would be impractical (huge cost and minor benefit) to try to replicate dynamic adaptive streaming just for yourself.
In any case, even if you’re just pulling off a NAS, you shouldn’t need to wait for the entire file to download before you can start playback. If your files are properly coded, you should be able to do progressive streaming in just about any use case.
With radarr etc you typically download content and then move and rename it in post processing. You can’t stream it in Plex, as it doesn’t even show up in Plex until after all of this has happened and Plex has scanned the folder.
I interpreted their question differently. It sounds like they’re taking about Radarr having to download a movie before they can watch it, whereas streaming services have a “complete” (compared to a new *arr setup) library available to stream instantly.
Some bittorrent clients can start playing a video before it’s done downloading, and prioritize the torrent chunks in the right order so there aren’t any interruptions as long as there are seeders and you have enough bandwidth. But I don’t think plex or jellyfin can do it, and I don’t know of any alternatives that can.