I came to this sentiment a few years ago when I first switched over to Jellyfin and was figuring out metadata providers and investigating the -arr services.

To be fair to Sonarr, I never found any kind of communication where they explicitly said “TMDB will never be supported” so I shouldn’t have said so explicitly “Sonarr has made it clear”, but a lot of the responses to support about TMDB that I came across had included suggestions like “stop using Sonarr”, “Sonarr is free so enjoy what you’re getting”, and “if you want a feature, add it yourself”. These answers, while technically valid, had a pretty stubborn tone, at least to me.

Also, while the people providing these kinds of answer obviously don’t necessarily represent Sonarr as a whole, they did claim to be active supporters, and I found enough of them at the time that it soured my impression of Sonarr.

I think I may have found a few of them from back then:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonarr/comments/nqe05n/any_way_around_tvdb/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonarr/comments/l046yc/trakt_is_switching_to_tmdb_as_the_primary_data/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonarr/comments/ljapuq/pulling_shows_from_tmdb/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonarr/comments/pmgmbo/will_sonarr_switch_to_or_at_least_provide_an/

https://forums.sonarr.tv/t/tmdb-for-tv-show-information/3624

Edit: As for why they won’t support TMDB, some of their apparent reasons are discussing in the above posts, but I don’t know how relevant or valid they are today, or even if they were back then.

I need my GIF button

Are you calling the server list on joinmastodon.org “the federation”? Because it’s not; it’s literally just a list. Nothing about the list tells you about any actual federation between instances. Without a doubt there are instances on that list that are federated with ones not on that list and vice versa. It’s not even the only list out there.

This would be a good thing, though I think it’s trickier than it appears:

• How arbitrary are “best before” and “expires on” labels and how do they differ from food to food?
• How do the labels themselves differ from each other and how to do they differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?
• Could acknowledging that “expired” food is still good cause expiry dates to just be extended? How far could they be extended before food actually is dangerous past the label?
• How does liability work when someone gets sick from “expired” food? Does it change when it’s part of a structured donation system?

Lots of comments already telling you to stay home so I don’t think I need to. What I will say is if you don’t want to contribute to the growing number of variants, you’ll stay home. Variants largely arise from mutations in the virus during replication. Humans are virus-replication machines. If you’re infected you could be carrying a new variant right now and the only way to stop it is to let it die inside you. Your body’s immune system will already be in full swing and be in the best position to deal with it as opposed to an uninfected person.

Don’t contribute to the endemicity of COVID.

Jellyfin has certainly improved a lot since I started using it a couple of years ago. I remember when the web UI was much slower and posters would fail to load. Things are faster now and more consistent.

With that said, there are still some big issues that I encounter. Adding a new show has its individual episodes count towards the “Latest” item limit so a single big show can completely dominate that section with a single entry. Adding multiple episodes of a show simultaneously results in randomly ordered “new content” notifications which look really bad when output in something like Discord notifications. The web app has a pretty dated UX.

I think it’s important to be real when talking about something like Jellyfin so it’s not misrepresented. It’s a rough product that is constantly being improved, albeit slowly.

There’s also a whole other conversation to be had about the job of self-hosting Jellyfin vs. letting Plex snoop on your activity and habits.

I had no idea Sonarr supported Discord webhooks!

However, I haven’t considered Sonarr for a couple of reasons:

1. I much prefer TMDB ordering and I think Sonarr has made it clear they will never support TMDB
2. I have specific rules for how I handle special characters in file names and, to my knowledge, Sonarr has no customization for that

Happy to be corrected on the above; if not for them I would gladly commit to Sonarr.

Thanks for the suggestion.