Requesting movies and shows¶

This page is for everyone who asks the server for something to watch: how to request a movie or a show in Seerr, what happens after you press Request, how long it takes, and why everything arrives in 1080p. Music and games have their own pages: Music and Games.

Where to request¶

Open Seerr:

Sign in with your Jellyfin account. The owner uses JELLYFIN_USER / JELLYFIN_PASSWORD from .env; everyone else gets an account from viewer-add.py (see Giving someone access). Seerr works the same in a phone's browser, which is handy for requesting from the sofa.

You can also request without leaving Jellyfin: its search shows Seerr results with a request button, and the Discover rows on the home screen and the Recommended and Similar rows on every detail page are requestable. See Watching.

Browsing and requesting¶

Seerr's Discover page is a catalogue of everything that exists, not only what you have. It pulls from TMDB, so it knows about films and series no indexer carries yet.

Every poster carries a badge:

To request something:

1. Search for the title, or find it on Discover.
2. Open its poster and press Request.
3. For a series, tick the seasons you want, then press Request again.

That's all. Nothing needs watching over.

What happens after you request¶

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Pending: a viewer requests
    [*] --> Approved: the owner requests
    Pending --> Approved: the owner approves
    Pending --> Declined: the owner declines
    Approved --> Processing: Radarr or Sonarr searches
    Processing --> Available: downloaded and imported
    Processing --> Failed: could not reach Radarr or Sonarr
    Available --> [*]

• Approval. The owner's requests go straight through. A viewer's request waits for the owner's approval, unless the viewer was added with viewer-add.py --auto-approve or given Auto-Approve in Seerr → Users.
• Search and download. Seerr hands the request to Radarr (movies) or Sonarr (series). They ask Prowlarr to search every indexer, pick the best release that fits the quality rules, and send it to SABnzbd (Usenet) or, as a fallback, to qBittorrent inside the VPN.
• Import. The finished file is renamed and filed into the library, and Jellyfin is told to rescan at once, so it appears without waiting for the scheduled scan.
• Subtitles. Bazarr fetches English subtitles a few minutes later.

The whole pipeline, step by step, is in Media requests.

How long it takes¶

Why a torrent waits: Radarr, Sonarr and Lidarr search Usenet and torrents on every request, and their delay profile makes a torrent release wait 60 minutes before it can be grabbed. If a Usenet release turns up in that hour, it wins. Usenet downloads at the full speed of your line and shares nothing, so it is the preferred source; torrents are the fallback for titles Usenet lacks, often old or rare ones. French series (tagged french in Sonarr) don't wait: Usenet rarely has their current seasons, and on the French ratio trackers an early grab is what earns ratio.

Radarr's automatic searches wait until a film is out for home viewing, so a film still in cinemas isn't grabbed early (fakes labelled "WEB-DL" circulate on public trackers).

The owner gets a push notification on the phone (ntfy) when a request becomes available, when it fails to reach Radarr or Sonarr, and when a request that is already out has still downloaded nothing two days after approval.

Why everything is 1080p¶

Radarr's quality profile is HD Bluray + WEB and Sonarr's is WEB-1080p, both from the TRaSH Guides and kept in sync by Recyclarr (apps/recyclarr/recyclarr.yml). Two limits point the same way:

• The server should never have to convert video. A Raspberry Pi 5 has no hardware video encoder, so every file must play as it is ("direct play") on the device you watch on. 1080p files play directly on practically everything. On an x86 server with Intel or AMD graphics you can switch on hardware transcoding (compose.gpu.yml, see Getting started), which removes this limit but not the next one.
• Your home upload decides what you can watch away from home. A 1080p stream needs 8 to 25 Mbps; 4K needs 80 to 100 Mbps, which few home connections can send. See Watching away from home.

A few details of the rules:

• x265 (HEVC) is allowed, scored neutral (0). Apple TV and iPhone decode it in hardware, 10-bit included, so it plays directly. It is not preferred, so existing files are never re-downloaded just to change codec, and a re-encode (WEBRip) still loses to a WEB-DL taken straight from a streaming service. Some desktop browsers can't decode HEVC; if that ever matters, set the x265 score back to -10000 in apps/recyclarr/recyclarr.yml.
• Audio-description releases are rejected. A release named "Audio Description" can carry a narrator describing the scenes as its only audio track, with no way to switch it off. configure-arr.py adds a custom format scoring those at -10000 in both apps. It doesn't match a bare "AD", which would hit titles such as Ad Astra, and recyclarr.yml lists it under except so the nightly sync doesn't reset its score to 0.

Watching it happen¶

In qBittorrent, the turtle icon means the automatic 20 MB/s download cap is on: someone is watching, or the server is busy. It lifts by itself once nobody watches and the load drops (downloads-throttle, every minute). Uploads are always capped at 10 Mbps, turtle or not.

For the owner: asking Radarr or Sonarr directly¶

Use this when you want to choose which release is grabbed, or want only part of a series.

• A movie: Radarr (:7878) → Movies → Add New → search → quality profile HD Bluray + WEB, root folder /data/media/movies → Add Movie (tick Start search to go at once).
• A series: Sonarr (:8989) → Series → Add New → search → quality profile WEB-1080p, root folder /data/media/tv → Add Series.

Monitor decides how much Sonarr chases:

For one specific season, add the series with None, open it, tick that season and press Search next to it.

To pick a release by hand, use Interactive Search (the magnifying glass on a movie or episode). It lists every release found with its size, seeders and score. Greyed-out ones are rejected by the quality rules; you can still grab one by clicking it and confirming, but it may not play smoothly everywhere.

When nothing arrives¶

1. Radarr or Sonarr → Activity → Queue: is it downloading, or stuck?
2. "Stalled with no connections" usually means a poorly seeded torrent. Cleanuparr removes a download that makes no progress for about an hour and blocklists it, so another release is tried. You can also pick a better-seeded release with Interactive Search.
3. Nothing found at all: public trackers are patchy for older, foreign or obscure titles. See Indexers.
4. Everything rejected: see Releases shown as rejected.

More in Troubleshooting.