Ability to tell Sonarr to prefer smaller downloads of same quality

[BluntsNCinema]

So while we have quality profiles specifying acceptable size ranges (which I’m not a fan of personally as they tend to vary a lot, so I’ve just found myself making them more and more lenient over time), I often find Sonarr just goes for the first release it finds within the size range which matches the quality. So say I want 720p for a 30 minute episode, it could end up going for a 2GB file when there is also a 720p release that is only 400MB (presumably lower bitrate). I don’t find that it affects the quality enough for me to care so long as the resolution is high enough - and since the quality profile can keep the minimum size from being too small, I’d like the option to have Sonarr prefer lower sizes over higher bitrates for certain (if not most) shows, in order to conserve space for shows where I care more about the quality.

Generally I prefer my animated shows to have the higher consistent quality and don’t really mind when slower paced live action shows show their lower bitrate, so it would be great to have this linked to quality profiles (where I already opt for 1080p for the animated shows and 720p for the live action stuff), so we can spend the GB’s of space we have on the shows that matter.

[markus101]

Smaller sizes are preferred, but in 200MB chunks, 200 vs 205 would be equal, but 400 vs 800 would prefer the 400MB release. If Sonarr sees the 800MB release first then that would be grabbed, if you prefer Sonarr to wait to have more options, you use a delay profile.

[BluntsNCinema]

Well, as a quick example case, I have an episode where the downloaded file size is 1.5GB, and it’s actually HDTV-720p… yet there are two eligible downloads where the sizes are 1.2GB (Bluray-720p) and 1.0GB (WEBDL-720p, though it’s a much older release now)… is this just a case of Sonarr taking it’s time to try and download an improved release for this particular show? As according to the active profile it should prefer WEBDL over HDTV and Bluray over WEBDL even despite the sizes…

(Oh, and the cutoff is WEBDL).

(EDIT: BTW, I consider 100MB per episode to be worth it for a series with over 100 episodes, so maybe as a compromise, we can just edit the chunk size?)

[markus101]

If the cutoff hasn’t been met it’ll depend if Sonarr ever saw the other quality releases and if they were successfully downloaded. Sonarr could have seen them, tried them and failed, history for the episode will show if that’s the case.

Impossible to say why a particular release from before wasn’t grabbed, but checking the episode history is easy to see if it tried and failed.

EDIT: BTW, I consider 100MB per episode to be worth it for a series with over 100 episodes, so maybe as a compromise, we can just edit the chunk size?

To save 100MB per episode?
Chunk size won’t be configurable and is irrelevant outside of the same quality; quality trumps that ordering.

[BluntsNCinema]

Yeah, 100MBs an episode can easily add up to enough space for a whole other show, or a few movies. I hit my capacity a while back and had to remove some stuff I probably wasn’t ever going to watch again so I’m really hoping to delay running into that issue again for as long as possible. I can’t yet afford more cloud drives.

[Mean_Gene]

@BluntsNCinema

I second this option.

@markus101, I hear what you’re saying but I’m grabbing Downton Abbey (720p) and it seems Sonarr ALWAYS goes for the biggest 720p release it can find. I let Sonarr grab a season and it went for, what seems like, every, single 2-3 gig (per episode) file it could find.

I nuked them all and manually grabbed the versions that were around 1 gig in size.

I tried playing with the sliders but it was taking me too long to get them balanced so I just manually grabbed what I needed. A simple “grab the smallest size of the selected quality” type of option would be nice!