The only way I can see switching my Luddite family off of the streaming sites is by making it easier. Up until now, I’ve torrented the old fashioned way, but now I’m moving into plex (ik, ik, jellyfin is better) and want to start using the -arrs. As I understand it, which I’m not sure I do, the -arrs will automatically grab torrents. In my mind, this would eat up a TB pretty quickly. Do you guys all have massive SSDs (heh), or am I misunderstanding?
You seem to be partly misunderstanding. They only grab what you tell them to, so they won’t automatically fill your disks with random videos.
What they do is grab any movies or TV series that you specify, and give you the option to upgrade them to a file size and quality limit that you set. For example, you could tell them that movies can be a maximum of 10GB per file, and TV can be a maximum of 3GB, and that you’d prefer 4k.
There are profile options that let you grab any available copy of a video, and upgrade it as better versions come along.
I really need to just hook them up and play with the settings, but are there options to auto delete, or should I just do some manual maintenance? We don’t typically rewatch movies, for example.
Plex can be set to auto delete. You can set it to delete after something has been watched (after a delay if you want), or to keep a pre-set number of items (e.g. only keep the five latest episodes of show X) or a combination.
Just make sure you set up the *arrs to not re-download the thing that Plex auto deletes.
I’m a hoarder so I keep a lot, but anything that’s time-sensitive like current affairs shows, I delete after watch and set to only keep the latest three episodes.
To be honest, I’m not sure if there’s a way to auto delete, I’ve only ever done it manually. I think Plex can be set up for it, but I’m not sure.
There are plenty of ways this could technically be achieved, but the arrs are not where you would be looking IMO for content deletion (that’s automated).
Though there is a option in the arrs that sets the content to “unmonitored” once it’s deleted on disk. This way the content is not regrabbed once deleted.
Think of the arrs as your downloaders, Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi as your viewers.
If you are using something like unraid for your OS you can set a script that deletes files older then a certain date, or if you use truenas you can do the same. This all really depends where you host/store your files.
And Plex does have the ability to delete content once watched, though I don’t use it as I have multiple users that watch my content, so I have no good way to classify what watched means, as well as there is content that I don’t want deleted as it’s not available online anymore.