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.

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.

Looking through the cached files I’ve found at least one image file that’s 694x694px, not exactly thumbnail size.

I’ve wondered this too. I have a similar enough server and think it might be worth it, but it depends on what is causing your issues. Your 8600k should have a UHD630 in it and this forum post describes great 4k HDR transcoding performance.

It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with your compose file or directory structure. Could it be a problem with the Library settings within Jellyfin? If you haven’t tried, it might be worth trying to start completely fresh i.e. delete the cache and config directories.

At the beginning of the pandemic I looked into ways to de-Google and found Nextcloud. It wasn’t the easiest thing to start with, especially for a novice, but I had the time and the hardware, and I’m the type to not mind jumping into something difficult if it means solving a specific problem. I then found out about Bitwarden and had a great experience setting that up. After that I was confident enough to try hosting anything I could find. It’s been good times ever since 😀