New poster and new sonarr user so bare with me if some of these questions seem rudimentary.
Currently I share a PLEX media server with my neighbour. We do this to capitalize on downloading and because we often have movie nights together, it’s nice to know that our PLEX library is available at both houses.
The PLEX server is located at his house. I connect to it through a wireless network we’ve set up between the two houses. At present (pre-sonarr use), I was downloading torrents on my Mac, then using hazel to rename them and upload them to the PLEX server over this local network via FTP.
My (very broad) question is:
What is the best way to get sonarr to communicate with this remote PLEX server? Is it even possible? I love sonarr so far but I don’t want all my files on my local computer taking up huge amounts of space (hence the remote PLEX server).
Name: Plex On Grab: No On Download: Yes On Upgrade: Yes Host: his ip (if he doesn’t have static ip, you will need him to setup something like dyndns) ip: 32400 (or whatever port he has forwarded in his router to his plex server) username: Your Plex Username password: Your plex password Update Library: Yes
Great, thank you for the quick reply. This is a great start. As far as me downloading the content locally and pushing it to the PLEX server, how does this connection effect this? For example, the PLEX server has both a TV and Movie folder. How does sonarr know which one to put it in? Also, will it cause any conflicts when I delete the media from my computer once it’s uploaded to the PLEX server?
Sorry i miss read this a little. That is just to setup plex to refresh it when you have something automatically downloaded. So you should setup this and also:
You will have to mount a remote folder to have Sonarr manage the downloaded content on his machine/server
/settings/downloadclient (scroll to the bottom) /Remote Path Mappings
I haven’t used this before so i am not what needs to be done.
Remote Path Mappings are only applicable for your download client I believe, so not applicable here.
If I understand your situation, both sonarr and your download client are running locally, and you have a remote file server that happens to run Plex as well.
So, depending on your OS, you should tell sonarr to put files in \remoteserver\path\to\series. In Windows, the “easiest” to do is to map a network drive, e.g. X:\ to \remoteserver\path\to\series.
Then, when adding a series, choose “add a different path” in the path dropdown, and browse to X:\
This is all assuming you’re not running sonarr as a service, because then drive mappings in Windows are another circle in hell.
Yes Thirrian, thank you. You are understanding it correctly. Currently I am running Sonarr and uTorrent locally then using FTP to upload media to the remote PLEX server. My local machine is a Macbook Pro. The PLEX server is a PC running Windows 7. I will look into what you’ve said and see what I can come up with.
You current set-up will work, it’s just that you will not maintain a full library under Sonarr. The only way you could do that is to setup every show’s path to the FTP destination – but it would only give you a sort of history of all the shows you have downloaded. Not a life or death issue here.
If you keep your current setup, you might want to activate the option “Ignore deleted episodes” so that Sonarr stops monitoring the files you have moved.
Make sure though that you setup Hazel to detect new file as sometimes Sonarr will overwrite files with either a PROPER or a better resolution one until cutoff is met.
The other possibility that you have is to set a blackhole mode where Sonarr will only download the torrent file/link and save it on the FTP. Then your neighbour’s torrent application picks up the torrent from the FTP and does the download. He will take care of the file management, you just have to map the correct paths in Sonarr’s TV shows – and instead of setting up a downloader (unless you want to connect to the neighbours uTorrent), set up the drone factory folder that will monitor every file the torrent app has downloaded and move/rename them in the right subfolders.
In any case, you don’t have to connect to the PLEX server for notification. You can just go in PLEX options and set a library scan every X minutes to force refresh; added to the option to rescan when changes are detected on the destination folders.
– current setup –
monitoring: Sonarr
TV Show paths in Sonarr: local
downloader: uTorrent (connected)
post-processing: Hazel to FTP
– other setup –
monitoring: Sonarr
TV Show paths in Sonarr: full hierarchy on remote FTP
downloader: blackhole on remote FTP folder (independent folder)
post-processing: drone factory mapped to destination remote FTP (independent folder)
Thanks Evil_Flanders. The way I currently have it set up does in fact work, as you’ve stated. However, because my neighbour and I are so happy with Sonarr’s functionality and want to take full advantage of it, we’re now looking at setting up a second server at my location to be able to use Sonarr to its full potential. We will continue to bridge the connections so that he has access to my server and vice versa. As for now, my current set up works well, save for the fact that, as you mentioned, Sonarr loses track of my uploaded files - not a huge issue.
Thanks to everyone for your help. My neighbour and I eventually came up with a better solution. We’ve installed a second server at my house. That way, I can download and keep stuff locally and so can he but we still have the wireless bridge so we can watch each other’s content. Works great.