One of the tools I use to manage my media library is Ombi.
“What’s it for?”
Well, that’s both simple and complicated – depending on how you configure it.
If you share your media with someone, odds are at some point they’ll ask you to add something you don’t already have. Ombi is a tool for managing those requests for content/media.
It lets the user search for the item they want themselves, and request it – at which point you (the admin) can approve or deny the request (or it can automatically approve it, depending on how you configure it).
If you have it linked to a download manager like Sonarr or Radarr, then once the request is approved the requested item gets sent to the relevant software to be watched for and downloaded. Once it’s sorted (and Plex/Emby sees it), Ombi notifies the person who requested it that the item is available.
This takes out the job of finding what you’ve been asked for manually – as the automated search tool looks for it (in my case, Sonarr/Radarr).
“Why use it?”
Simple – convenience. I have several people I share with who used to ask me if I had certain things via message. I’d then have to go out and find it manually, sort it, file it, and tell them when it was there.
This way? I just hit Approve or Deny and the system takes care of the rest – right down to telling the user when it’s available.
“Is there any support for it?”
Yes and no. Ombi is open source. Free. As in beer.
There is no paid support (though donations to the developer are always welcome, and offers of payment are up to the support team to accept or not).
There is one developer, who goes by Tidusjar. He hangs out in most of the support spaces.
There is a wiki that gets updated fairly often, and generally anything that happens for multiple people will wind up with a fix posted in the wiki too. This should be your first port of call.
There is a Discord server with a fairly active community (please read the rules when you join – we’ll know if you didn’t).
There is a subreddit as well – any posts there will notify the support team in Discord.
How do I set it up?
There’s a very comprehensive guide over on github for this. The wiki is set up with a lot of FAQs, as well as how to guides. I contribute to it from time to time.
