To be clear, this is just a joke, and I don’t look down on direct downloading. It absolutely has its place, and sometimes I do it myself if it’s just faster to download a file directly. Torrenting is just so much more convenient, though, especially when using Jackett’s manual search.
As I mentioned in a different comment here, I’m already familiar with the arr suite. It’s how I found Jackett in the first place, and I’ve already determined that setting up the .arr programs isn’t worth it for me. Stremio suits me just fine, the .arr programs appear to be better suited toward those with the time and money to setup a whole dedicated server for their media needs. I only consume media on my personal computer, so I have no need for that.
I have tried Prowlarr though, just yesterday in fact. I didn’t really find its manual search feature to be any better than Jackett’s, and in fact it had some issues. In any case, since I don’t use the .arr programs, I’ve no reason to switch. Thanks for the suggestion though.
I understand your reasoning for not setting up the other *arr apps, due to not having a dedicated server to run them, however you’d still benefit from running them on your PC. They handle the downloading, extraction, categorising and naming of the media you want and they can do that automatically.
Even on your computer, that’ll save you time and effort, you can just tell it what shows you want - even shows that aren’t out yet and it’ll grab them for you whenever they appear. It’s great for when you enjoy a show and the next season starts, it just grabs it for you and the show appears one day.
A lot of people start this way and it’s only then they think about getting a dedicated device for it - such a device can be a decent little Synology or QNAP NAS, something small, quiet and power efficient but I’d definitely say you don’t need to start there. It’s worth the effort to try though, believe me.
I’m good with handling this manually, or rather, I don’t even have to handle any of this since Stremio takes care of it, and I have neither the hard drive space nor the bandwidth to devote toward allowing a bunch of programs to just start downloading large files perpetually in the background, filling up my hard drive and taking up all my bandwidth lol. The .arr suite is best combined with a seedbox and a dedicated computer. All I have is a 1.5 TB hard drive and no gigabit internet speeds.
And honestly, I don’t see what appreciable amount of “time and effort” this is going to save for me. With Stremio, it’s as easy as going into the catalog (or using the search bar), clicking a movie, and picking one of the releases from the menu. If I wanna watch a show or movie that isn’t out yet or whose upcoming season is yet to be released, I can just add it to my library and turn on notifications.
It doesn’t get any easier than that, doesn’t require a massive hassle with a set-up process involving several different programs and trial and error, and I don’t have to devote hard drive space for every show or movie I want to watch, since Stremio keeps files on a temporary cache that gets deleted at regular intervals, so it doesn’t end up filling my hard drive. This system is perfect for me, I have no reason to change it.