Radarr

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 777 words

The setting that decides whether Radarr grabs a clean 1080p release or a camcorder recording from a cinema is called Minimum Availability, and it deserves a deliberate choice before you add a single film. Set to Announced, Radarr searches the moment a film is added, which for an upcoming title means the only things it can find are fakes and CAMs. Set to Released, it waits for the release date from TMDB, and the first thing it grabs is usually the file you wanted. That one dropdown, plus a quality cutoff so it stops re-downloading, does more for a movie library than everything else in the settings combined.

Announced, In Cinemas, Released: pick Released

Movies differ from TV in one way that matters for automation: there is one file per title and it appears once, months after the film exists. Sonarr can grab an episode an hour after it airs; a film has a cinema window, then a digital window, and only then a release worth keeping. Minimum Availability tells Radarr when to start looking. Released, applied per film or as the default in the add dialog, is right for almost everyone. In Cinemas suits people who accept an early web rip that may not exist yet. Announced is a trap that fills the activity queue with rejected junk and, if your indexers are loose, occasionally imports a fake.

A quality profile with a cutoff, not a ladder to 4K

A quality profile lists allowed qualities and an upgrade-until cutoff. The common mistake is enabling everything from HDTV-720p to Remux-2160p with no cutoff, which means Radarr downloads a film four times over a year as better versions appear and ends with a 60 GB remux of a comedy you watched once. Pick one profile for the library: WEBDL-1080p and Bluray-1080p allowed, cutoff at Bluray-1080p, and Radarr grabs a web release on day one, upgrades once to the Blu-ray rip, and stops. A second profile with 2160p allowed for the 20 films you genuinely want in 4K is the right amount of complexity.

Custom formats, and letting Recyclarr write them

Quality alone does not separate a good encode from a bad one, or a release with the audio track you want from one without. Custom formats score releases on pattern matches against the release name, and a profile's minimum score rejects anything below it. Building these by hand is an evening; Recyclarr pulls the maintained TRaSH guides definitions into Radarr on a schedule, and it is the reason most experienced arr users have not opened the custom format screen in years. The one thing to hand-tune is a negative score for release groups that have burned you. If you run Sonarr as well, the same Recyclarr config handles both.

The compose file and the shared /data mount

services:
  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
    volumes:
      - ./radarr-config:/config
      - /srv/data:/data
    ports:
      - "7878:7878"
    restart: unless-stopped

Port 7878, a /config volume, and one /data mount that contains both downloads/ and media/movies/. Give Radarr and your download client that same /data, so a completed download is hardlinked into the library instantly, still seeding, using no extra space; separate mounts turn every import into a copy. It idles around 100 MB of RAM and spikes during a library scan. Indexers come from Prowlarr, which syncs them in with one click; the download client is whatever you already run, and the whole chain is laid out in the arr stack explainer.

Lists: the feature that fills a disk overnight

Radarr can subscribe to IMDb lists, Trakt lists, TMDB collections and a Plex watchlist, and add every entry automatically, monitored, with a search. That is how someone adds a top-250 list on a Friday and finds 200 films queued on Saturday. Use lists with monitoring off, or with a tag and a profile that does not search, and let Jellyseerr be the way the household requests things instead: one title at a time, with an approval step you control.

What I'd do

Released as the default availability, one 1080p profile with a Blu-ray cutoff, Recyclarr on a weekly timer for custom formats, the shared /data mount from the first minute, Prowlarr feeding the indexers and Jellyseerr as the front door. Lists off, or unmonitored. Run that way, Radarr is the service you set up once and never open again, and the library it builds for Jellyfin looks like someone curated it by hand.