You’re right, it’s for building a private library, not a “what’s new to watch now” stream. There are other tools for that, like stremio or real-debrid.

Its possible to have seerr search integrated into the main jellyfin search.

Streaming torrents popcorn or stremio style is not very practical and never has been. Popcorntime still has working forks and stremio works with jellyfin to some degree but unless you also use a paid debrid service or maybe if you dont care about tanking your ratio on a private tracker There are jusy way better solutions: like using either an on demand iptv service inside jfin that costs about the same as debrid anyway but also gets you live tv.

Not to say there isnt tons of room for improvement still, but a lot of progress is being made. I suggest to folx if jellyfin doesnt meet your standards yet, try back in a year and see how much progress gets made.

Since I started using Jellyfin and arr, searching and watching have become separate activities. Gone is the experience where I discover something and am watching it immediately. And, search/discovery is done on separate apps than where I watch. So my behaviour has changed. I think ahead. I keep any eye out for what people are watching and download what seems good to me. The payoff is I’m not limited to what’s on any particular platform and I don’t pay subscription fees.

Your expectation is absolutely correct, and I often find myself looking at my current Jellyfin collection and have absolutely nothing I want to watch.

SuggestArr tries to fill this hole by automatically downloading content similar to what you already have, but I have yet to deploy it. (note that its development seems aided by LLMs and it has “AI” powered features)

The whole point of the arrs is to download things in advance. Many users set up Import Lists… There are also apps like Boxarr.

Netflix’s model is to provide the cheapest, low-quality media you can bear to watch. The kind of browsing you are describing is your distressed search to find something watchable. If you populate a server with good TV or at least TV that interests you, you won’t want to hop between media like that.

My media server has more shit I want to watch on it than Netflix does, it’s not even close. Yeah it took some time to build my library but it’s paid off. Even starting out just queue up a bunch of shit ahead of time and it will be ready to go when you go to watch it. I personally watch shows through the week as they take longer to get through and are more adaptable to the amount of free time I have. Then I queue up any new movies for the weekend and new shows as I hear about them. It’s not difficult to stay ahead of the curve with some minimal planning. My backlog will take me months to get through. Also your media library will never remove shit before you’re done and you’re not limited to just what the streaming services you have are currently offering.

1. You can request in Seer and after downloading click the “Watch on Jellyfin”-Button, which then leads you to the movie. So its technically two separate services but feel like one. (With Seerr, Prowlarr, Radarr, a Downloading Client, Jellyfin and Bazarr its actually many selfhosted services but it doesnt feel like it.)

2. With my setup through Radarr I need to download the whole movie. For series it depends it also meeds to download one whole file, then it goes through sonarr and then gets sorted properly into the library with metadata and coverimage and so on.

So yes, I cannot sit down and then decide spontaniously what to watch. But I currently dont work like that: I hear about a good movie somewhere, add it to the library. Then, after 10’ to 2 days (depending on how popular it is) its downloaded. When I sit down because I have time to watch something, I then browse through the library, which I all know, that they are good and interesting movies.

If I have friends over, I ask, what they wanna watch, request it and we eat dinner and afterwards we watch the movie.

i can use the searchbar on jellyfin & if it’s not already there, i can request it using jellyseer within that same search bar, so it’s possible to integrate the two somehow.

i’m afraid i’m not sure of the specifics though, i’m only using a friend’s jellyfin 🫣

Yeah it is, because you can just set it up to automatically download whatever you want if that’s what you prefer. You can just set up lists to watch for content that matches certain criteria. I’m sure there is even one that would mirror Netflix.

At least for me your argument is invalid.

1. I installed Wholphin on my TV and it’s both a jellyfin and an (experimental) jellyseer client
2. Here in Europe I have fast internet, so downloading the whole file is not really a problem. Also I configured my arr stack to prefer a certain size (on the smaller side) for each resolution.
3. I remapped my Netflix button to Wholphin

Closest thing to streaming is Kodi + Umbrella + Premiumize (or other debrid). Search for Movies or Shows in Umbrella and stream immediately, once it scrapes and you pick a source/resolution.

Check out lookmovie2.to

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #158 for this comm, first seen 12th Mar 2026, 09:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

This is not true for just about any use case.

If you use *arr, you’ll likely use Plex or Jellyfin for a media server. That server will do progressive streaming. Netflix by contrast does dynamic adaptive progressive streaming.

Progressive streaming means that playback will start once your client has downloaded and buffered enough of the selected content from the server. The amount is typically a fairly small portion of the stream, like 10 seconds or so, though the specifics are left to the server and client configs.

Dynamic adaptive progressive streaming has a multiplicty of streams optimized for different devices, formats, and quality levels. This might be a few hundred copies of the same video asset, but in a few different codecs, a few different color encodings (ie HDR, SDR), and a quality ladder of maybe 10 steps ranging from low quality SD to moderate quality UHD (like maybe 300kbps at the low end, and 40Mbps at the high end. And these will be cached around the world for delivery efficiency. On playback, the client (player) will constantly test your network throughput in the background, and “seamlessly” adjust stream quality during playback to give you the best stream your network and client can support without stopping to rebuffer.

For example, if you’re on a 4K/HDR TV with Atmos sound, and great network throughput, you’ll get the highest quality HDR streams and Atmos audio. Conversely, if you’re on mobile that doesn’t support HDR and only stereo audio, you’ll get much more efficiently coded HD video (or maybe SD) and stereo audio streams that are more suited to playback on that device. It would be impractical (huge cost and minor benefit) to try to replicate dynamic adaptive streaming just for yourself.

In any case, even if you’re just pulling off a NAS, you shouldn’t need to wait for the entire file to download before you can start playback. If your files are properly coded, you should be able to do progressive streaming in just about any use case.