That’s great! A cronjob can be effective if your indexer doesn’t mind the extra strain or you have a small library.

Not sure what you mean by that. I occasionally use the web UI as the tool that it is and I’ve played around with opencode, cursor, etc previously on other home projects to get a sense for where things are and what the limits of these things are. That said, I take pride in my own work and this project is no exception. Is there something in this project that makes you think I threw a prompt into cursor and am passing that off as my own? Or are you against the idea of using an LLM and consider any person or project using them at all to be vibecoded?

As a quick edit, I’ll note that, since I documented any use of ChatGPT reasonably well in this project, you can see the number of times it was used and what it provided. I feel the contributions were largely inconsequential and really just time-saving on my end. I also vetted (and understood!) the output and modified it according to what I wanted. Personally, I don’t consider that to be “vibe-coding” but I suppose everyone has their own definition.

Edit again: ugh, it’s far too easy to focus on negative feedback and let that consume you. I am not going to defend my use of ChatGPT but I personally think that someone seeing the word ChatGPT and saying “oh so this is vibe-coded” is disingenuous to the project and my skills as a developer. I spent years learning and mastering Java and this is a lot of my experience and several weekends of my free time. Look, if you feel that the four uses of ChatGPT, much of which have been modified by my own hand and all of which inconsequential, constitutes a vibe-coded system then that’s your take - but I don’t think it’s a fair take. There are many things to be said about the ethics of modern LLMs and over-reliance on them but personally I think understanding and effectively using tools at your disposal is a skill. If you want something completely free of LLMs these days you may very well have to invent the universe.

Phew. Okay, I’m off my soap-box. Consider me got. I’ll try not to think about this too hard but it definitely feels bad pouring your time and skills into a thing and seeing that one comment saying “nah this isn’t worth anything”

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/