Regarding not being able to select encoding, etc - you setup profiles and it automatically chooses the best release for based on the criteria you set. Again, it’s one less thing to think about.
And why is there a separate *arr app for every content? (music album, tv, movie, book, subtile(!),...)
I guess I just consume media more haphazardly than most people. The whole point of my PLEX is only exactly what I’ve requested shows up.
You just tell the apps ‘follow this tv show/movie/whatever’ and it grabs it when it becomes available.
There are settings for setting the desired quality parameters, and even for transparently replacing the on disk version with a higher quality version becomes available.
There's probably different *arr app's because it's easier that way. Each one already has enough bloat and settings to it to be overwhelming.
Overseerr [2] was the key to making me love the radarr/sonarr experience.
[1] https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/radarr-setup-quality-profil...
Now that being said, the plex app blows on Apple TV with h265 codecs for some reason, so I'm now using the Infuse app which is ok, but yet another thing. But overall, yeah, I've been able to cancel multiple streaming services (hulu, sling, soon netflix) and have MORE content available than before. saving a grand a year in streaming services ain't bad for a few hours of learning how to set it all up.
Sonarr? TV shows. Radarr? Movies. Books. Music. Etc.
"missing something obvious" the UX might be horrible... but once you set it up? you don't have to look at it.
"And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin)" if all you think Plex is a "tiles UI" then there's no wonder you don't understand it... I have hundreds of movies, dozens of shows, audio books, music, etc in Plex and all the metadata gets automatically added and I can automatically play anything on my phone, tv, etc.
Oh... my friends/family has access to my Plex library as well so they can request and watch when they want.
Plex does transcoding and all that fun stuff.
You're missing all the details that go miles beyond a "tiles UI".
As streaming gets split up into little fiefdoms it can become difficult to have access to the content you want, furthermore as some content for various reasons is never made available or fully available - for example if you want WKRP in Cincinatti with the original music you will need to pirate it (I would of course like to hear I was wrong about this - other than find some CD somewhere with all that content at a yard sale)
I tested radarr and readarr recently. Didn't find out why people use them. Like libgen was better than readarr and I couldn't even select the encoding/file size of a movie title in radarr (there are some predefined profiles and you can define yours too but I expected something waay too simpler to do this. Like if you select fhd, it may download a very large file. You have to manually set the bitrate slider for all profiles, but then you may risk losing some available item if the release is very new and not encoded. I mean the UX was confusing)
And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin) on top of that just to show a folder structure with pretty thumbnails? Each one of these apps is usually written in C#, taking ~300MB of RAM mind you...
What would help me is simply a search box that crawls all available torrents and presents rows with filtering based on size and encoding. I tested prowlarr for this but the UX was poor.
I must be missing something very obvious here.