[HN Gopher] Show HN: Recommendarr - AI Driven Recommendations Ba...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: Recommendarr - AI Driven Recommendations Based on
       Sonarr/Radarr Media
        
       Hello HN!  I've built a web app that helps you discover new shows
       and movies you'll actually enjoy by:  - Connecting to your
       Sonarr/Radarr/Plex instances to understand your media library  -
       Leveraging your Plex watch history for personalized recommendations
       - Using the LLM of your choice to generate intelligent suggestions
       - Simple setup: Easy integration with your existing media stack  -
       Flexible AI options: Works with OpenAI-compatible APIs like
       OpenRouter, or run locally via LM Studio, Ollama, etc.  -
       Personalized recommendations: Based on what you actually watch.
       While it's still a work in progress, it's already quite functional
       and I'd love your feedback!
        
       Author : fingerthieff
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2025-03-02 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | Looks super neat! A great idea as well.
       | 
       | Any plans to support jellyfin?
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | Thanks!
         | 
         | Jellyfin is definitely on the list to be added, it's probably
         | next in line actually. If it's as simple as Plex integration
         | I'll be very happy.
         | 
         | Edit - Support Added
        
       | nickthegreek wrote:
       | Trakt.tv is the integration you need.
       | 
       | What is the largest library of watched media that this has been
       | tested at? I can see this choking on media fanatics watch
       | histories.
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | Interesting, I've never used Trakt before but that looks pretty
         | cool. I could see adding support for that. I'll definitely be
         | looking into it.
         | 
         | As for the largest library, I only really know of my own which
         | is around 250 series and 250 movies. Not small but not huge.
         | Passing all of that info is fine enough, but I'm also curious
         | how truly massive libraries or watch histories are handled.
         | 
         | I imagine you would hit the LLM token input limit first if you
         | had thousands of series and movies. Definitely need some
         | further testing in those cases.
        
           | nickthegreek wrote:
           | Ahh ya. Big libraries can have over 30k movies. Emby,
           | jellyfin, and plex can also integrate into Trakt. So it's
           | already being used in these apps for many users.
        
             | fingerthieff wrote:
             | That's good to know, there are ways around the limit of
             | course by breaking up the prompt into multiple messages and
             | then you're at the mercy of the models context window which
             | can be anywhere from 4k to millions.
             | 
             | At some point though like you say, it's going to become
             | ineffective and you'd probably want to use the "Sampling"
             | mode that is available to only send a random subset of your
             | library to model as a general representation. Though how
             | well this works on massive library remains to be seen.
        
       | richjdsmith wrote:
       | This is really cool, and very well done! Would love to see it
       | more on a per-user basis, as I share access with my family and do
       | not have similar tastes at all. Perhaps tied in with Overseer API
       | and Tautulli to see what users are requesting, then actually
       | watching?
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | Tautulli proved troublesome in my first attempt at integrating
         | it and got put on the back-burner unfortunately. I would really
         | like to get it integrated properly so per user recommendations
         | could become a thing.
         | 
         | I haven't looked at integrating Overseer yet but that is a good
         | idea as well and worth a try at implementing. I'll be adding
         | that to my list, thanks for suggestion!
        
       | CharlesW wrote:
       | I'm excited to try this! I'd love support for music
       | recommendations via Plex music libraries. (Currently, I use a
       | script to export my music library to a format suitable for LLM
       | analysis.)
        
         | nvarsj wrote:
         | Interesting... any more details on how you do that?
        
           | CharlesW wrote:
           | With the caveat that it's imperfect and not packaged
           | correctly, you can check out music2json.ts at
           | https://github.com/CharlesWiltgen/music2json to get the idea.
           | In short, I just dump a JSON of artists, albums (with
           | genres), and tracks, feed that to an LLM, and then ask it to
           | recommend other artists and albums I might like (e.g. "Please
           | recommend additional compilations, artists, and albums I may
           | like based on this music library"). The biggest problem at
           | the moment is that it will often recommend things that are
           | already in my library.
        
       | phito wrote:
       | This sounds amazing, giving it a try right now
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | Hopefully it works well for you! I just pushed up changes for
         | adding Jellyfin integration as well, so that should be
         | available through the docker hub here soon as well.
        
       | monkaiju wrote:
       | I'd love to see support for lidarr, I need way more help with
       | music recommendations than TV/Movies
        
         | phinnaeus wrote:
         | I wonder if there's way to get access to the music genome data
         | that Pandora uses. Would happily pay for an API and it could be
         | available outside the US since licensing the music itself to
         | stream it isn't needed.
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | I'm definitely not opposed to adding Lidarr support, I've never
         | personally used it so I may tinker around with it here soon and
         | think on how to structure prompts for that etc...
        
       | Nelkins wrote:
       | Cool project! Can you explain a little more about how the
       | recommendation algorithm works?
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | It's hard to really explain how the LLM decides what to
         | recommend if I'm honest.
         | 
         | The general idea is I generate a prompt to feed into the LLM
         | with specific instructions to use the Sonarr (for example)
         | library info which is passed in as a list of series titles. I
         | also provide some general guidelines on what it should take
         | into account when choosing media to suggest.
         | 
         | After that it's in the hand of the LLM, it will internally
         | analyze and recommend shows based on what it believe someone
         | might enjoy based on their media library...Given that every LLM
         | model is different, how they internally decide what shows to
         | recommend will be unique to them. So if you have bad
         | suggestions etc..It's best to try a different model.
         | 
         | it provides nice flexibility but in reality my control of the
         | actual recommendations are limited to the initial prompt that
         | is passed in.
        
           | HyprMusic wrote:
           | Does this mean it is limited to the model's internal memory?
           | Meaning newer shows won't be in the recommendations because
           | they're past the training cut-off?
        
             | fingerthieff wrote:
             | That is a likely true to an extent, though it's hard to say
             | at what point it cuts off.
             | 
             | If a model was trained 6 months ago for example it will
             | likely have some info on shows that came out this month due
             | to various data points talking about that show as
             | "upcoming" but not released. Due to that it may still
             | recommend "new" shows that have just released.
             | 
             | All that being said, I have to imagine that suggesting
             | shows that have just now been released is likely the weak
             | point of the system for sure.
        
         | tills13 wrote:
         | The entire product is a wrapper around a well written ChatGPT
         | prompt.
        
           | fingerthieff wrote:
           | An LLM Prompt, not ChatGPT specific. But yeah pretty much
           | that is the core of everything.
        
       | hi_hi wrote:
       | Has there been any research on how LLMs perform as recommendation
       | engines?
       | 
       | I'd assume there isn't any algorithms provided weighted
       | comparisons based on my viewing habits, but rather a fairly
       | random list that looks like its based on my viewing habits.
       | 
       | Perhaps, in practice, the difference between those two is
       | academic, but I'm really not keen on leveraging such a heavy
       | everything model for such a specific use case, when something
       | much simpler, and private, would suffice.
        
         | fingerthieff wrote:
         | I haven't looked into it too deep if I'm honest, I built this
         | app solely because I find LLM TV and Movie recommendations to
         | be leaps and bounds better than any other recommendation
         | service I've ever used, I find most of them terrible
         | unfortunately.
         | 
         | I just got tired of manually inputting the data and wanted a
         | more automated approach. This recommendations system isn't
         | extracting loads of data yet (like how often things are watched
         | etc..) but instead a more birds eye view of your library and
         | watch history to analyze.
        
       | silvanocerza wrote:
       | Cool project but why use an LLM for this?
       | 
       | Recommendation systems exist well before LLMs and have been in
       | use for a while, wouldn't it better and more efficient even?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-03-02 23:00 UTC)