Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skills --skill arr-playbackgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skills/arr-playback)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skills/arr-playback"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skills/arr-playback.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00147 | $0.02096 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00073 | $0.01048 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00029 | $0.00419 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00210 |
Grade A, and why
arr-playback scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 192 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Arr Playback
The arr decides what lands on disk. The media server then has to hand that file to a client. If the two disagree, the server transcodes, and transcoding is where the stutter, the fan noise, and the "4K is broken" reports come from.
This skill is the feedback loop that most profile guides omit: tune the grab to the hardware that will play it, not to an abstract quality ideal.
Diagnose before you touch a profile
Every transcode has a reason and the media server will tell you what it was. Get the playback decision before theorising:
- Check whether the session is direct play, direct stream, or transcode. Only the last one re-encodes video.
- If it is a transcode, find which stream forced it: video, audio, or subtitle.
- Reproduce with subtitles off, then with a different audio track. Each toggle isolates one cause in about thirty seconds.
Then look at the file itself:
ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=index,codec_type,codec_name,profile,pix_fmt \
-of compact "$FILE"
Two signatures worth separating early, because they look identical to a viewer:
- Transcode session, GPU or CPU busy: a format problem. This skill.
- Direct play session, no encoder load, stutter anyway: not a format problem. Look at the client's thermals, the network path, or storage throughput. Changing quality profiles will not help and will waste a day.
The big one: image subtitles force a full re-encode
Bluray and UHD sources carry PGS subtitles, which are images rather than text. Media servers generally cannot overlay an image subtitle track onto a video stream the way they can with text. So when subtitles are enabled, the server burns them into the picture, and burning in means re-encoding the entire video: 4K HEVC, HDR and all.
The tell is exact: the title stutters or shows momentary grey or garbled frames with subtitles on, plays perfectly with subtitles off, and plays perfectly in a client that renders PGS itself. Players that do their own subtitle rendering direct-play the same file that the media server chokes on, which is why "it works in the other app" is a diagnosis rather than a mystery.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 7d ago First seen · 192 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 8ed1f41bf450
arr-playback is a skill published in the GitHub repository t3chnaztea/arr-stack-skills (1 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 2,096 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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