this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025

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243

Someone finally made a "Sonarr for YouTube" (github.com)

submitted 2 days ago by flork@lemy.lol to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is the post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1myldh3/i_built_youtubarr_the_sonarr_for_youtube/

looks cool I have been wanting something like this for a while

top 43 comments

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[–] fedditter@feddit.org 45 points 1 day ago (2 children)

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Not exactly ideal archival software....

It doesn't store files in a human readable way and requires a separate DB and application to interpret your stored data. Without controls over how it stores that data.

[–] HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Surely, you meant https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

[–] Smash@lemmy.self-hosted.site 10 points 1 day ago

Surely, you meant https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

[–] fedditter@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Whats you personal experience of pinchflat vs tubearchivist?

[–] scott@lem.free.as 3 points 1 day ago

Pinchflat is way less complicated than TubeArchivist and integrated with Plex without any extra work.

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They have a whole list of these in the linked Readme. Thanks for posting - I was considering setting up pinchflat but this might be a lot lighter on resources.

My use case: I would like to run something like this, but either directly on, or syncing to my laptop. I don’t watch much YouTube, but it would be nice to have stuff to watch offline, and cut google out of all the behavioural metadata.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

Take a look at ytdl-sub if you want light weight. I load the resulting videos into jellyfin as series.

[–] illusionist@lemmy.zip 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Sonarr is based on RSS feeds - explicitly designed for this purpose of getting new updates from subscription-like sources. This is much lighter in processing requirements. I've also tried to make this UI as similar as possible to the other *arr apps for familiarity.

Index an entire channel/playlist or get "older" videos. Subarr's RSS approach is specifically for "subscriptions": new video is posted, take some action Media management. Once Subarr kicks off the post-processor (like yt-dlp), its job is done. Use Plex/Jellyfin/etc or another one of the linked solutions above if you require more control over your media

[–] hertg@infosec.pub 22 points 2 days ago

ytdl-sub already existed for a while

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

Sadly no actual search function that pipes it into yt-dlp.
Imagine the releases were done as yearly seasons and their individual videos.

[–] blackbarn@lemmy.zip 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I leverage pinchflat for this

[–] golli@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Just set this up a few days ago and so far am very happy. Ended up choosing it over other options since I wanted something that saves the downloads in a humanly accessible way by simply putting them into channel folders with the video names as title.

[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I've been using Metube but it's pretty basic. Might give this a shot.

[–] melfie@lemy.lol 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It’s based on yt-dlp, which I can’t seem to get working reliably with my VPN, even with manual intervention like using cookies from a browser, switching servers, etc. Guess VPN IPs hit the rate limits pretty regularly, though I don’t want to risk my real IP getting banned. I’ve seen some people suggest using a VPS, but sounds like a lot of effort. Running something like this on a server and expecting it to reliably download videos in the background isn’t going to work that well from my experience.

[+] aislopmukbang@sh.itjust.works -9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

this naming trend needs to die

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 43 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Why? It's a brand at this point and lets you know exactly what its about.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's more *arr tools that aren't aggregator automation tools than there are aggregator automation tools.

Also It was only funny when using an existing words like "sonar, "radar", "lidar". Jellyseerr is dumb, even Jackett was pushing it.

I guess it makes it somewhat easier to associate them as part of a group of software, but now we have stuff like Homarr that is entirely unrelated, but still a useful tool.

[–] augustus672@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

To be fair, jellyseerr is a fork of overseerr focused on jellyfin, so the name at least makes sense.

[–] pycorax@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I mean it is clear that it's an aggregator (? Not sure what the right term is for this) but I can't even begin to count the number of times I access Radarr instead of Sonarr because I forgot which one is for shows or movies.

Prowlarr is way more intuitive at least.

[–] Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Sonarr is for series - that's how I remember :-)

But I use Overseer anyway, so I don't use them often directly.

[–] Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 points 1 day ago

I mean it is clear that it's an aggregator

Did you mean aggrrrregator?

[–] CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Agreed it would be nice if radarr and sonarr were combined into one, but Youtubarr is at least pretty descriptive.

[–] Eheran@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What is a brand? "Sonarr"? Never heard that.

[–] SnowmenMelt@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago

*arr services are well known in the self hosted community

[–] Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

https://wiki.servarr.com/

[–] grue@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (13 children)

IMO the trouble is that there are so many of the things now that I need a damn flowchart to understand how they work together and which ones I need.

(No, seriously: I want to set up an *arr stack but don't understand how. Could somebody please send me a flowchart??)

[–] andrewd18@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago

Sorry, I tried but I couldn't figure out how to use Flowcharr-t.

[–] Cerothen@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Here's a very old flow chart I made for some folks that didn't want to use Linux. Though it mostly applies to any serup

[–] golli@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

If you want to setup a stack take a look up TRaSH guides. Then it goes roughly like this.

You have software that search and make the download requests: radarr (movies), sonarr (TV shows), lidarr (music), bazaar (subtitles, if you need to add more that don't already come with the movie/show). But there might be others e.g. for porn or like here for YouTube.

Those forward the request to a downloader like Sabnzb if you are using usenet or qbirtorrent for torrents.

Those above are the main ones and from there you can add things that make your life easier:

Prowlarr: sonarr/radar need an indexer to search, instead of configuring them in each software this allows you to do it once and then sync across the other apps
Overseerr/Jellyseerr: if you want a nicer frontend to search and make download requests instead of doing so in radar/sonarr.
Recycler/Notifier/Configarr (all do roughly the same): sonarr/radarr allow you to configure specific profiles to score the quality of downloads so you can get them in the format you desire (e.g. so you want 1080p or 4k, HDR yes or no). These allow you to sync custom formats with sonarr/radarr that others like trash-guides have developed.
Tdarr: if you would like to reencode and compress movies to save space this allows you to do so in an automated way. Although you usually I'd imagine it might be easier to just setup a better profile in sonarr/radarr and download the desired version (should you e.g. want x265 encoded versions)

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 day ago

It’s honestly not that complicated.

You first need an indexer. This is the software that Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr uses to search for torrents. Prowlarr is an indexer and is where you connect to a tracker.

Then you obviously need a download client. Something like qBittorrent. Then on Radarr, Sonarr and Lidarr you add qBittorrent as the download client.

When you search for a movie on Radarr, it will send the request to Prowlarr, which looks at your tracker and then send the results back to Radarr. When you click the movie you want, then Radarr sends the torrent to the download client aka qBittorrent.

Simple, yes. I probably forgot something though. Plex or Jellyfin to actually watch the content.

Prowlarr > Sonarr > qBittorrent > Jellyfin

[–] DesolateMood@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For the purposes of this explanation sonarr and radarr are the same, but keep in mind that sonarr only does tv shows and radarr only does movies

You tell sonarr what you want to watch --> sonarr tells prowlarr what you want to watch --> prowlarr will search websites for magnet links to your show (you have to specify which websites) --> prowlarr will give the download manager (qbittorrent, etc) the magnet link and it will download it --> sonarr will take the downloaded file and copy it somewhere else for organizational purposes --> media server (jellyfin) will see the copied file and download associated metadata (thumbnail, episode name, episode number, etc) and allow you to watch it

The only programs you need for a purely functional arr stack are sonarr/radarr, prowlarr, qbittorrent, and jellyfin, or any other media server. Anything else is purely icing on the cake

[–] AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If I remember correctly, you don't really need Prowlarr. It's useful if you're using multiple *arr services, but Prowlarr manages your indexers, the place *arr services look for content, and syncs them to your other *arr services so THEY can do the search. I don't think Prowlarr itself ever looks for content automatically, only if you manually search through Prowlarr.

[–] westingham@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not a flowchart but I would recommend the following site: https://trash-guides.info/

Lots of useful info and guides

[–] d00phy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Trash is a great place to start. There was another guy I found helpful, too. Dr Frankenstein, I think? Also, I can't remember where I found the swag write-up I used for my current setup, but swag/dockerproxy are awesome. No open ports on the router, and automatic subdomain/SSL setup w/ Cloudlfare by adding 1 label to the compose file.

Only 2 notes I have about Trash guides are:

Include some kind of ingest directory for qbittorrent. Helpful when you want to d/l a torrent that's not managed by one of the arrs. Just save it there and thy will be done!
Pay close attention to the quality settings. Most don't have a fallback quality. So if you say you want 4k for movies, it will often fail to find something, especially if it's older, and you have to go see why, change the quality to 1080, etc. Instead, use the quality guide to understand how it works, and set up what you want with appropriate fallback. For example, I prefer to get 720p for TV. Especially w/ long running shows they can take up A LOT of space, even at 1080! BUT sometimes 720 just isn't available. 1080 is usually the first thing that comes out, so I add 1080 as second choice. For older shows, I add DVD quality as third choice, HDTV next, and 480p last (probably have those last two backwards). This way, it will pretty much always get something decent, and if the quality I want is ever released, I have it configured to continually search. Looking over the Trash guides definitely helped me dial this in, but I'm not using the stock version of any of their presets.

One thing I need to figure out is identifying shows that have hearing disabled tracks as their default/only. I've been watching Taskmaster, and lots of the episodes in more recent seasons have the descriptive voice-over that's annoying to me since I don't need it.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

https://trash-guides.info/

[–] metaStatic@kbin.earth 3 points 1 day ago

https://github.com/Rick45/quick-arr-Stack/raw/main/img/architecture_diagram.png

[–] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

All you actually need are sonarr (tv) radarr (movies) overseer (request management) and prowlarr (indexer management) you don't actually need the last two.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 1 points 1 day ago

Flowchart? Try googling it maybe. I'm not sure if there is anything useful, but it's worth a query. The site Atherel posted has some guides that might be useful in general information and more detailed installation and configuration.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

If you want movies you use Radarr, and if you want TV Shows you use Sonarr. And if you want either of those to use torrent sites to find things rather than Usenet, you setup Prowlarr to convert from those random sites into the format Radarr and Sonarr support.

There are others, but that's a place to start.

[–] SilentKnightOwl@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

This is a very informative video The Ultimate Torrent Setup - Jim's Garage

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 day ago

Why would you need a flowchart? You go to the Servarr wiki and pick the ones that sound nice. It’s pretty easy to understand what each one does because, you know, they tell you in plain English.

[–] Zozano@aussie.zone 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

aislopmukbangarr