Hello everyone, I’ve been a digital video technician for over a decade, and I’ve been using Sonarr at my home server for the past couple of years. I also have been using Plex for local and remote streaming for over a decade.
There is one thing that I’m not getting right about the ways this software allows us to filter by bitrate.
In many situations, I want to download the “best available” quality for an episode, which I think as >40mbps. If it’s 4K, that’s great, but if 4K isn’t available, 1080p is fine too, as long as it is over 40mbps.
In other cases, I want to download small bitrate for easy remote viewing, and I aim for 720p or 1080p under 40mbps (sometimes limiting it to 10mbps).
In the Quality Definitions, there is the possibility to adjust by bitrate, but it depends on the naming of the release. When I’m thinking of what version to download of an episode, I just care about the resolution and the bitrate. I don’t care if the naming says WEBDL or HDTV. And I constantly find myself in this scenario where I set a profile for Sonarr to download, it doesn’t automatically download any files (or it tries to download a file that has no peers), and then when I check the ! rejections it says things like “WEBDL-1080p is not wanted in this profile” in files that suit perfectly for what I’m looking for.
I tried creating a Custom Format, which allows me to filter by resolution, but it doesn’t let me filter by bitrate, it just lets me input the file size, which should change depending on the duration of the episode.
So I believe there is a conflicting mixup of possibilities, where using the Quality Definitions lets you filter by bitrate but has a limitation on the profile namings, and using the Custom Formats is limited by not having the bitrate options.
It would be awesome if we could have the bitrate in the custom formats, or to have a totally different way of setting the rules for how the software chooses which files to download.
Thanks!
Rodrigo