General Arr Stack Questions

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How much guidance can we provide @skribe? We've been asked as part of the rules not to discuss but if I can offer a keyword answer and shut off the discussion is that appropriate? In this case, I know the exact answer but opted to err on the side of caution and be more...obtuse about it. I'm not taking about posting a guide or links, but is, "look into using X to achieve the results you're looking for on the Radar/Sonarr side. You will want to seek help from a Servarr-based community if you need assistance," appropriate? There are some gray areas where I'd like to be helpful but also be a respectful member of the community.

[skribe]

How much guidance can we provide @skribe? We've been asked as part of the rules not to discuss but if I can offer a keyword answer and shut off the discussion is that appropriate? In this case, I know the exact answer but opted to err on the side of caution and be more...obtuse about it. I'm not taking about posting a guide or links, but is, "look into using X to achieve the results you're looking for on the Radar/Sonarr side. You will want to seek help from a Servarr-based community if you need assistance," appropriate? There are some gray areas where I'd like to be helpful but also be a respectful member of the community.

I think you're fine. People are free to discuss the existence of radarr and sonarr and their cousins as media management tools. You don't even have to use them for downloads. We just don't help set them up because it's not really relevant to Jellyfin and we definitely don't want to encourage their use to download media, which is just a topic that we avoid altogether. If someone has an issue with obtaining media, wherever they are acquiring it from, there are other more suitable communities.

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Thanks for the clarification. There Servarr tools are quite a powerful media organization suite, ignoring the downloading components entirely. There seem to be some pretty strong opinions and there were comments when folks (including myself) shambled over from reddit about the media server stack discussion being the wrong way to approach Jellyfin. I get the principle behind it and the CYA component, but to beat around the bush rather than answer directly and send folks on their way is frustrating from both ends of the conversation.

On that note @Madwish, look at custom formats in your *arr tools to avoid HEVC. *For more help you'll have to turn to those tools' communities.

[skribe]

To be clear: there is no need to beat around the bush. You should not even be alluding to help with configuring these solutions, really. This just isn't the space for it. They exist. They may help. You can tell people that. They can seek configuration help in the support communities for those projects. Thinly veiled references to trash guides and other locations that just tell you how to set these up are probably still crossing a line. We don't need to tell people how to set these tools up in any way, and certainly not how to configure them to acquire content or filter it.

Just send people to their support communities for help.

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Not even meant to be thinly-veiled, honestly. Sending folks to an outside resource that's not this community to keep discussion of those tools away. I did edit both posts to remove mention of that site, however, to better align with the standard you outlined. Still figuring it out.

Yes, those other tools exist and so do communities for them, however "Go away" seems like a poor message to send to folks who integrate Jellyfin into their ecosystem and happen to use those other tools. Particularly when some users have the knowledge to at least point somebody in the right direction. Certainly not arguing a point at all, I wanted to ask and figure out where the "line in the sand" was and this is the first opportunity I've had reason to ask.

Sorry to hijack the topic, good luck!

[skribe]

Not even meant to be thinly-veiled, honestly. Sending folks to an outside resource that's not this community to keep discussion of those tools away. I did edit both posts to remove mention of that site, however, to better align with the standard you outlined. Still figuring it out.

Yes, those other tools exist and so do communities for them, however "Go away" seems like a poor message to send to folks who integrate Jellyfin into their ecosystem and happen to use those other tools. Particularly when some users have the knowledge to at least point somebody in the right direction. Certainly not arguing a point at all, I wanted to ask and figure out where the "line in the sand" was and this is the first opportunity I've had reason to ask.

Sorry to hijack the topic, good luck!

No, listen, you're fine. We can talk about it. I went ahead and split this into its own thread.

I think your framing is more negative than it needs to be. If this helps: it's not about telling people to go away, it's really about the fact that we're here to support Jellyfin, and these tools have their own support ecosystems. If someone seems to have issues with their media naming and organization, tell them, by all means, that sonarr is a great tool that can sort and name their media in accordance with Jellyfin's conventions, and link them to Sonarr's website if you want. But we're not here to support Sonarr. Information about how to configure sonarr to get media, or the permissions, or anything else, is better handled within their own support ecosystem. If someone has a jellyfin specific question about it like "how can I make sure that jellyfin updates the library when sonarr changes a filename?" that's fine. By all means, give them details about that. But the "right direction" to go, in general, is to point them is to the sonarr project site, where sonarr can provide them with documentation and support for the project that they understand much better than we do. And if you have a solid understanding of those tools, you can participate in their communities too.

The rules in this area have been greatly relaxed since this forum was created, btw. The old rules didn't permit discussion about them at all. Now the discussion is fine, but it needs to be limited specifically to jellyfin and not general configuration and usage. But you're free to recommend these tools as specifically relevant to jellyfin and its use. Just helpfully link users to their support communities for help with setting up all of their features, rather than doing it here. Honestly, we would want users to come here for Jellyfin support rather than seeking it in their spaces too. We're better equipped to help them.

Does that help with parsing things?

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For sure. I have no intention of setting up shop to support the Servarr stack, but when issues like the one that brought this to a head for me come up, it's easier to say, "Look you really need to focus on custom formats in Sonarr/Radarr, split your server to a different machine than the one you're gaming on, get a different device for HWA, or find a client that supports the media you're trying to play."

Knowing that presenting options, without any offer or intention of supporting the tool, configuration assistance, etc. feels like a good balance. Appreciate you taking the time.

EDIT: Shit I think I broke the latest posts widget.

[skribe]

For sure. I have no intention of setting up shop to support the Servarr stack, but when issues like the one that brought this to a head for me come up, it's easier to say, "Look you really need to focus on custom formats in Sonarr/Radarr, split your server to a different machine than the one you're gaming on, get a different device for HWA, or find a client that supports the media you're trying to play."

Knowing that presenting options, without any offer or intention of supporting the tool, configuration assistance, etc. feels like a good balance. Appreciate you taking the time.

EDIT: Shit I think I broke the latest posts widget.

Nah, you're fine. I broke...something...by splitting out these posts as their own thread. Post away.

I sounds like we're largely on the same page, but just to extrapolate a little more for the sake of posterity:

I think the thing that gets lost in translation sometimes, or maybe just often overlooked, is the implication of something like "custom formats in Radarr/Sonarr" and why I'm saying that it crosses a line. That stack has no ability to format shift media. If they were transcoding tools, you could and should of course share information on that. But they are not. There is exactly one way that radarr or sonarr can filter formats or provide formats, and that way is one of things that is explicitly against the rules here: content acquisition. They do this by telling other things to go out and GET media in a given format, and we're not going to help with that configuration here. It's perfectly fine to tell someone that they might need files in h264 or HEVC, or whatever. It's even fine to explain how they might convert their existing files themselves. But implicit in what you're talking about here is configuring a tool to acquire media in a specific format for Jellyfin, and that's where the line has been drawn with respect to the rules.

We are talking about the difference between saying, "you might need source files that are encoded differently," and letting the user sort out how they want to approach that, and, "sonarr and radarr can get you source files encoded differently if you adjust these settings." And the latter is exactly the sort of thing that the team has decided we're still not doing even under the new, relaxed rules. You're not wrong that this is less helpful, it's just something the team doesn't want us to help with here. As a bit of background, Kodi has had trouble with approvals on app stores and such because it has such a reputation as being a tool that enables piracy, and Jellyfin's team does not want that to happen to Jellyfin as well--hence these arm's length rules. Sonarr and Radarr do a lot of things, and some of them, like library management, are directly related to Jellyfin and completely fine to support. But they also do a lot of things are not, and it's generally better to let their own support communities accept those risk if they wish to. The fact of the matter is that most guides related to this stack step pretty far over the line for Jellyfin's community standards, so it's best to just send them to the official support channels for these projects and let them go from there.

Jellyfin is FOSS, and people can use it for what they want, and we certainly want to encourage a broadly helpful support community. But this is just a line in the sand that Joshua and the project team have drawn to protect themselves and the project, even if it means some extra steps for users to take at their own personal risk.

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Roger, fully clear now. Having to play politics with the big boys is dumb. Fairly certain Apple and Google aren't a moral or ethical authority on just about anything.

Anyway, gives me a line to walk. I tried participating in those communities on Reddit and I was seriously unimpressed by the tenor, level of support, and attitude. No interest in participating in a community as toxic as what I experienced.