How it compares¶
Rexarr overlaps with a few well-known tools without replacing any of them. This is an honest read of where each one is stronger, written while Rexarr is still in beta.
Automatic Ripping Machine¶
ARM is a ripping appliance: insert a disc, wait for it to eject, let Plex or Emby pick up what landed. Rexarr is an *arr companion that happens to rip discs. The pipelines overlap; everything either side of them differs.
What ARM does that Rexarr does not
- Handles any disc: video, audio CD (through
abcde), and data discs as ISO backups. - Decides movie vs TV and names the folder from OMDb.
- Rips with MakeMKV or HandBrake, main feature or everything, and transcodes with HandBrake presets.
- Sends notifications on more of the pipeline than Rexarr does, through more services.
- Years of use behind it, a large community, and a Discord. Rexarr is in beta.
Where Rexarr differs on the same job
| ARM | Rexarr | |
|---|---|---|
| Identifies a disc by | the disc label and OMDb | your own Radarr / Sonarr library, alternate titles and AniDB season names |
| Episode handling | folder named for Plex / Emby | titles mapped to real episodes, with specials and extras (S00, OP / ED / OVA) |
| Audio tracks | all, or HandBrake's preset | best per language, or whatever you tick, per title |
| Encoding | HandBrake presets | FFmpeg profiles — x265 / SVT-AV1 / AV1, hardware encoders with a test button, subtitle and HDR rules, output renaming |
| Hand-off | writes to a folder for Plex / Emby | Manual Import to Radarr / Sonarr, then verified — the file is gone from the rip folder and the item has a file |
| When the import fails | the files are simply there | the rip fails with the reason and both paths, and a sweep retries every 10 minutes |
| Missing from the library | — | the show or film is added for you, unmonitored |
| Runs on | Linux (udev), Docker | Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Docker |
And the half ARM does not cover at all: searching and grabbing remux and full-disc releases through Radarr / Sonarr / Prowlarr, auto-transcoding every new remux the *arr apps import, and music through Lidarr — CD ripping with MusicBrainz tags, single-file albums with a cue sheet split so Lidarr can import them, fre:ac profiles.
Honest caveats: Rexarr has no data-disc ISO backup — that is on the roadmap — and its published Docker image cannot rip on its own because MakeMKV may not be redistributed, so you build the image with it or run on the host. ARM is the steadier ripper. Rexarr does send notifications now: Discord, Slack, Telegram, ntfy, Gotify, Pushbullet, an Apprise server or a script of your own.
Pick one per drive
Only one program can hold a disc at a time. If ARM already owns your drive, turn Rexarr's disc detection off and let it do the *arr side — or point it at what ARM produced; see MakeMKV and Docker.
Pick ARM if the optical drive is the point and your media server reads the output. Pick Rexarr if you live in Radarr and Sonarr, and want discs to arrive as verified imports with encodes you control — plus the same tool handling remuxes and music.
Tdarr and Unmanic¶
Tdarr and Unmanic are library optimisers: point them at a folder and they work through everything in it, on a schedule, to bring the whole library to a target codec — Tdarr across several machines with worker nodes, health checks and plugins, Unmanic with a simpler single-box design.
Rexarr is narrower on purpose. It encodes what the *arr apps just imported (or what you select in the library), using the profile for that media type, and it knows what a file is: a Blu-ray remux of a specific episode, which it can rename so Sonarr stops calling it a remux, and whose source it can replace and rescan. There is no worker fleet and no library-wide sweep.
The part of Tdarr that Rexarr does have is conditional encoding: a smart profile decides part of itself from the file in front of it — whether the audio carries Atmos or DTS:X, how many channels it has, whether the title is animation — the way a Tdarr flow decides with plugins. It is a chain of branches rather than a plugin graph, and it runs on one machine.
Use Tdarr or Unmanic to re-encode a 20 TB back catalogue across three machines. Use Rexarr to keep new remuxes and disc rips in the shape you want as they arrive — and for everything to do with discs and search, which neither of them does. A library-wide option is on the roadmap, behind stability.
MakeMKV and HandBrake on their own¶
That is the manual version of the same pipeline, and it is fine for the occasional disc: MakeMKV for the rip, HandBrake for the encode, then move the file somewhere Sonarr or Radarr will take it.
What Rexarr adds on top is the bookkeeping — which title is which episode, which audio tracks to keep, a profile instead of remembering settings, the cache so half-finished files never reach the library, the import stated and verified rather than hoped for, and a log of what happened to each file.