in Media Management (click Advanced) there’s an “Analyze Video Files” option to get more data about your actual files. If I remember correctly this also re-tags downloaded media with your profiles if it was mislabeled. If you already have quality profiles set up and gated (you can add profiles that look for these attributes, like 7.1 or 5.1) then you can simply hit the search button on your media and rely on the *arr app to do the rest. If you don’t want to upgrade stuff that’s already satisfactory to you then you can do the same thing with the “Cutoff Unmet” filter. Fetcharr allows you to do either of these with the new USE_CUTOFF environment variable.

If you’re looking for ffmpeg media analysis and health checks you can also check out something like tdarr.

good catch! I forgot that existed.

glad to send someone on another Sunday rabbit hole! To be clear, Fetcharr is essentially automatically hitting the “search” button for you on a few semi-random items in your library. If your profiles are set up well, it will naturally handle the rest itself.

That said, there is a plan-in-my-head for “plugin” support so I don’t end up shoving a bunch of stuff into one app but still allow anyone to make something they need. If profiles don’t fit your use-case then that’ll be an option at some point in the future.

I think you may have nailed what’s happening to my stack. I remember looking into it a couple years ago and RSS was stuck in my head but I wasn’t sure why. This tracks, and explains why active fetching works significantly better for me.

it was strangled to death by the maintainer (probably) after a breaking story on Reddit about its security flaws though since they disappeared from the internet nobody knows for sure what happened to it.

if you haven’t yet, I’d check out Configarr and the trash guides as a baseline to create profiles that upgrade media to a certain standard so simply hitting the search button will give you what you want. That’s likely the best option, though it could theoretically be done in Fetcharr itself.

I don’t want to balloon the project but I had an idea early on that people would want customization if I released it, so I thought about adding a sort-of “plugin” system where Fetcharr loads jar files from a directory and they get an API to access and use as needed.

I haven’t figured out the details yet. That’ll be another weekend, or a contribution from someone. The idea and skeleton is there, though.

Edit: missed the dry run part. That’s a great idea! The worst that can happen is that it triggers upgrades (there’s no code to modify anything) but it’s still a reasonable ask.

absolutely! As with everything, try it out and see if it fits. Personally, I prefer apps that do their job well, and as few of them running as possible. If you don’t think it’ll be useful or try it out and find that it’s not, then that’s for the best. It means you’re good to go without any extra hangers-on. I tried the app as I was developing it and not only found it useful to myself, but it worked so well for me that I thought it might be useful to other people as well.

ah, yeah, that would make sense as to why these types of systems are so popular. Since I’m a devops type by trade, my arr stack lives in a couple of kubernetes clusters. I use a Configarr cronjob with a fairly customized configmap to sync the trash guides with some minor preference edits. Maybe my issue is that it’s too defined, but I think if that were the case I wouldn’t be getting any benefit out of Fetcharr. Honestly even if it weren’t the case you’d think I’d at least be picking up movies that are completely missing. I’m not sure what to blame, here, but if other people are verifying that the builtin systems work for them (as well as something like Fatcharr does) then I assume it’s a skill issue or bad luck on my part.

yep! If your arr stack already does what you want then I don’t really recommend adding more to it for the sake of doing so. The issue I have (and maybe it’s a layer 8 problem) is that mine does not. At least not as well as I want. If Sonarr ever did find anything on its own I never saw it, and while developing Fetcharr I definitely grabbed a few movies I was missing. It definitely seems like I’m not alone in this issue so I think it’ll be helpful for folks.

If you want, try it out and see if it does anything for you. If you think it’ll be helpful or a good replacement than great! If you find that you already have everything you need then that’s even better.

honestly if they work for you then awesome! Maybe mine is misconfigured somehow or maybe I just have bad luck, but Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, etc have never caught everything. Once I started playing with this I realized just how much I was missing.

Either way, if your current system works for you then I don’t usually recommend changing it. Give it a try if you want- the worst it can do it accidentally find something that could be upgraded or missing. Or if you’d rather leave your stack alone that’s perfectly fine as well.

that’s a decent point. Not everyone knows about the Huntarr saga (Reddit link but that’s where the story broke) and what it did.

The idea is that you’ll occasionally want to go through all your media and make sure it’s the best quality available and that nothing’s missing. New releases get published, remuxes sometimes fix issues, etc. This little CLI container goes through and periodically searches everything you connect it to, so you don’t have to sacrifice hours of your weekend doing manual hunting.

Edit: as a couple have pointed out this is supposed to happen automatically with built-in searches. In my experience this isn’t the case but ymmv and if what you’ve got works for you then that’s great!

That’s an interesting point. In my years of running them all I’ve always needed a third-party something to upgrade or find missing media. I don’t exactly know why the built-in systems don’t work, but they genuinely do not seem to. I’ll occasionally see a scan go off but, for some reason, nothing ever gets picked up.

So, yeah; long story short, the built-ins don’t work and I don’t know why and this was still easier than trying to figure it out.

Edit: if you’re curious, give Fetcharr a try and let me know if it does anything for you. It’s free and takes a couple minutes. It should be pretty immediate, if your experience ends up being anything like mine.

Wouldn’t it be called Foragarr then?

it’s today’s trend! One I happen to agree with, which is nice.

I’m trying to limit LLM exposure on this one to “as little as possible, within reason”. It’s still a tool and can be used effectively in some areas.

https://xkcd.com/979/

You haven’t watched this video, then ;)

Rocky 9 as my daily driver on both desktop and laptop, yeah. Ever since starting my current job a couple years ago, where we use RHEL everywhere from servers to desktops I just started switching my entire homelab to Rocky.

Personally it’s perfectly fine. Not as flashy or glamorous as Pop OS (which is definitely a fun choice) but I like the stability. I need my computer to be secure and also just work so I can use it to do what I need or want to do.

Still have Steam, Discord, FF, Thunderbird, YTMDA, etc all running just fine on it, though I normally stream from my Windows PC when I’m using it for gaming.

As a sysadmin and developer, I prefer Linux as my daily to Windows (hey, this was a surprise to me, anyway), and from that list I prefer Rocky over others currently. Maybe one day that’ll change, but I don’t see me moving any time soon.