Yes, I read the FAQ, but maybe I didn’t understand well?
Sonarr doesn’t actively search for any episodes on its own; it uses the indexer’s latest releases to find recently posted episodes. It does this using the indexer’s RSS feeds.
Indeed, I used this for 2 days and no episode has been automatically downloaded. I can’t afford to leave my PC on and anyway the RSS feed, in my opinion, is a bit unreliable.
Moreover, Sonarr has the ability to search for a specific episode with manual searching… so why not automatically?
It’s unusable for me, if it can’t automatically search and download episodes. Like a box wrapped nicely, but empty inside.
Search is a waste of indexer resources, if you need 5 episodes thats at least 5 searches, one for each episode times the many searches you end up doing because an episode wasn’t there
It’s insane (this mostly applies to back log searching, but ties into the above reason as well), I think this poster says it best:
Sonarr will go back through pages of RSS results (assuming your indexer supports paging) to find results, back to the last time is ran an RSS sync, which eliminates most issues related to your system not being on. As long as Sonarr is online periodically to catch up it won’t make much of a difference.
Thanks for the answer.
I use oznzb and the rss sync produces no result - I usually keep my PC on for about 4-5 hours per day.
As for the ‘Search is a waste of indexer resources’ , I think the user should decide this. Lets suppose I have a paid account on oznzb (I don’t , actually). Then the indexer lets me do some thousands searches per day. Isn’t this a waste for not using all the available resources (or I don’t know how to put it)?
Moreover, just an idea, but you don’t need to do the same thing over and over again. Sonarr knows the exact time when an episode is released. So you only need 1 search/episode, at the right time (lets say al least x minutes after the episode release time, x being configurable). If it doesn’t find anything, then, although I don’t quite agree, maybe then it’s ok to stop searching for it and let the user do the search when they want. In the perfect scenario, you could have a configurable y as the number of times to retry the search, with lets say z minutes between the searches. By default, they could have a ‘-1’ value - disabled - so you’d have the current behavior.
Sonarr only knows when the episode airs (assuming its correct from TheTVDB), the episode could be released immediately or days later depending on the series.
Make sure you set a longer RSS Sync interval or your free indexers won’t last the 4-5 hours your PC is on.
API hits is your limit then, not sure what OZ gives, but its usually about 10 and a few grabs, you’d blow through that very quickly.
Sorry, but we do not have plans to support automatic searching.
Ok, thanks.
Actually 500 is the limit for free accounts, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m stuck with SickBeard it seems
I’m a developer and I already have an application that is able to manually search for movies/music/tv episodes… maybe I’ll extend it to search for them automatically, if I have time.
But again, thanks for the fast and clear answers and I do admit that other than automatic search, Sonarr looks and behaves great.
