Firstly, the core *arr suite is not a streaming service, whatsoever. It’s a media file manager meant to help with running a private server streaming app, like Plex or Jellyfin. With that out of the way:

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?)

Download speeds depend on your own setup. IMO, a Usenet connection is the only way to use *arr. Downloads happen at the maximum speed and don’t rely on some other person’s seed rate. You, conversely, don’t need to worry about seeding.

When you manually add a show to Sonarr, you can select it to only pick up the pilot episode of the show, which could cut down on DL times by focusing bandwidth. You can also select a lower definition. With Usenet and something like a 720p quality, there’s no reason why this should take more than 5 minutes to be in your library.

I’ll also paste my comment I left below about connecting to lists:

You can connect your *arr profiles to monitor external lists of new titles by pointing the list manager to something like MDBList. They might not be as instantaneous as you might like, with a 24hr refresh period, but it’s pretty much a 0.99:1 Netflix replacement for me

I’ll also add that I’m not some CompSci nerd, either, so don’t be scared to give it a shot. My server runs off Plex on my Windows 10 desktop because I don’t know how to do any better but I’ve never had an issue watching what I want to watch

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.

Watch the trailers first ;)

Any reason not using Streamio?

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.

Anyone has a good tutorial on how to setup a complete are stack with docker on Linux?

Already one that quickly explains what arr does what would be helpful. I know there is radarr, sonarr, bazarr and loads more and I have no idea which system does what or how to connect them.

I’ve found tutorials about individual pieces, but those are of little help

And then the biggest one: I have jellyfin, I’d like to use it over the internet, bit I need to have that obviously VERY safe. How to do that? I know of a popular reverse proxy for those things (name escapes me for a sec) but again, the tutorials I’ve found were lacking at best.

I’m looking for something where I can write a bunch of docker files and start it all up from scratch on Linux, is that possible?

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.

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.

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.

i can use the searchbar on jellyfin & if it’s not already there, i can request it using jellyseer within that same search bar, so it’s possible to integrate the two somehow.

i’m afraid i’m not sure of the specifics though, i’m only using a friend’s jellyfin 🫣

Closest thing to streaming is Kodi + Umbrella + Premiumize (or other debrid). Search for Movies or Shows in Umbrella and stream immediately, once it scrapes and you pick a source/resolution.