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Since I started using Jellyfin and arr, searching and watching have become separate activities. Gone is the experience where I discover something and am watching it immediately. And, search/discovery is done on separate apps than where I watch. So my behaviour has changed. I think ahead. I keep any eye out for what people are watching and download what seems good to me. The payoff is I’m not limited to what’s on any particular platform and I don’t pay subscription fees.

You’re right, it’s for building a private library, not a “what’s new to watch now” stream. There are other tools for that, like stremio or real-debrid.

Depending on your download speed, you can manually download a TV show episode in seconds to minutes. By the time you watch that episode, at least the next one will be ready. It is quite rare to have to do this though, me and my family mostly add shows on Seer when we find them (recommendations, adverts, etc) and by the time we’ve sat down to watch it’ll be ready.

I did the whole lists thing others have mentioned but to be honest, we found there was too much choice, lots of crap and quickly ran out of space. Taking an active role in choosing shows and films works better for us and I’ll have a short list at any time to watch.

Its possible to have seerr search integrated into the main jellyfin search.

Streaming torrents popcorn or stremio style is not very practical and never has been. Popcorntime still has working forks and stremio works with jellyfin to some degree but unless you also use a paid debrid service or maybe if you dont care about tanking your ratio on a private tracker There are jusy way better solutions: like using either an on demand iptv service inside jfin that costs about the same as debrid anyway but also gets you live tv.

Not to say there isnt tons of room for improvement still, but a lot of progress is being made. I suggest to folx if jellyfin doesnt meet your standards yet, try back in a year and see how much progress gets made.

The whole point of the arrs is to download things in advance. Many users set up Import Lists… There are also apps like Boxarr.

Netflix’s model is to provide the cheapest, low-quality media you can bear to watch. The kind of browsing you are describing is your distressed search to find something watchable. If you populate a server with good TV or at least TV that interests you, you won’t want to hop between media like that.

Your expectation is absolutely correct, and I often find myself looking at my current Jellyfin collection and have absolutely nothing I want to watch.

SuggestArr tries to fill this hole by automatically downloading content similar to what you already have, but I have yet to deploy it. (note that its development seems aided by LLMs and it has “AI” powered features)

Any reason not using Streamio?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #158 for this comm, first seen 12th Mar 2026, 09:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Yes and no. You need to understand that no home service truly replaces Netflix, for a few reasons (the media might not be available on any of the services you’re using, for example).

It’s also not as simple as searching for a media in Jellyfin/Plex (or whatever other media frontend you choose, like Emby). There’s a fixed flow.

But let’s start by explaining the layers:

1. The frontend - Plex/Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi. This is what your users see, aka the “Netflix experience” - open the app, and all the media available on your storage device will be shown. Then they can click one and play it.

2. The request manager - Seerr (previously Overseerr/Jellyseerr). This is a separate interface where your users can request media. You still need to manually accept it (unless you set it up to automate things fully, but make sure you trust your users!). If something isn’t available, your users will come here and ask for it, then the manager will show the status (requested, accepted, downloading, available). Once available, your users can watch it through the frontend.

3. The media managers - Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr/etc. This is the software responsible for keeping a list of media you want, regularly looking them up on torrent trackers, Usenet servers, etc., and matching your requirements (resolution, language, encoding, file size, and so on), then grabbing the release and passing it on to the download client.

When you accept a request in the request manager, it passes on the info to the media manager, which adds the requested media to its internal list and begins looking for it.

4. Download client - torrent/Usenet downloader (qBittorrent, sabnzbd, etc.) pretty straightforward, this thing takes an incoming download request from the media manager, and downloads the file according to protocol, then signals the manager that the download is ready.

At this point, control is passed back onto the media manager, which finds the freshly downloaded file, copies/moves it to the right place according to settings, renames it according to settings, marks it done then sends a signal to the request manager to indicate the request was fulfilled.

Finally, the media frontend, which is set up to watch the folder where the new media items are copied/moved and renamed, gets a notification that a new file is available, scans it, prepares metadata (poster, background image/music, description, actor and production lists, ratings, etc.), and makes it available in the search interface.

So the key differences with Netflix are:

• limited content compared to Netflix
• the ability to request new media
• no CDNs, so if you have lots of users and not much bandwidth/processing power (latter in case of transcoding), your users will struggle. A standard home server and internet connection can serve 3-4 users at the same time.
• limited language support. since these are pirated media, and most pirated media has at most 2-3 audio tracks, you’ll lose that Netflix perk of having 6-8-10 audio tracks available. subtitles can be supplemented though (audio tracks too but they rarely match perfectly to the video so it’s not as simple as downloading a file and call it a day).

That about covers all the functional differences between an arr stack and Netflix.

Aside from the point that Jellyfin is meant to browse your own personal collection of files usually after the fact…

Some file formats like mkv do work even if partially downloaded, so if you’re downloading a torrent for a free libre open source movie, choose the option to download chunks in sequential order, and I think there’s a way that you can watch while downloading.

My media server has more shit I want to watch on it than Netflix does, it’s not even close. Yeah it took some time to build my library but it’s paid off. Even starting out just queue up a bunch of shit ahead of time and it will be ready to go when you go to watch it. I personally watch shows through the week as they take longer to get through and are more adaptable to the amount of free time I have. Then I queue up any new movies for the weekend and new shows as I hear about them. It’s not difficult to stay ahead of the curve with some minimal planning. My backlog will take me months to get through. Also your media library will never remove shit before you’re done and you’re not limited to just what the streaming services you have are currently offering.

Watch the trailers first ;)

You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

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.

So, yes, you’re basically correct.

There are search layers that remove the need to access radarr / sonarr directly when searching for shows (someone mentioned jellyseer, for example), so that part of the process can be streamlined, and once you’re watching a show it’s generally very good at pulling new episodes as soon as they’re available, so you’re typically, at most, a day behind actual airing dates. But if you’re trying to just bounce around and try a bunch of different shows it wouldn’t be the best for that. The biggest constraint is generally the speed of your internet and the popularity of what you’re watching. With a high speed connection and a well seeded torrent it’s often only a a couple of minutes to download a pilot episode, and you could have the whole season done by the time you finish watching that.

The other question is one of storage. If you’ve got plenty of hard disk space then you can probably afford to just throw anything that sounds interesting on your pull queue and work your way through it when you actually have time to sit down and watch. Basically you sort of pre-emptively build your “Netflix at home” library and then do your bouncing around channel hopping stuff with the five or so vaguely interesting shows that you added while you were at work.

Is it a replacement for Netflix et al? Not strictly speaking, but if you don’t mind changing up your habits a little it’s probably close enough.