I may have overlooked this, but I don’t see any way to create new qualities in Sonarr. I decided I want to accept 720p on certain shows, but only if the file is encoded with HEVC (x265) and within a specific size range.
Is it possible to create custom qualities or is this more complex than it seems?
No it’s not possible. You can use release restrictions to require specific words in the release name, but that will apply to any series with the matching tag (or all series if no tag is assigned to the release restriction).
That’s more or less what I look for, I’m happy to take 1080p or 720p but prefer x265 encoding.
I created a new Profile in Sonarr (mostly so I didn’t mess with one of the defaults), set it with a Cutoff of Bluray-720p and ticked only the 720p and 1080p Bluray, WebDL and HDTV types with them in the following order:
Bluray-1080p
WEBDL-1080p
HDTV-1080p
Bluray-720p
WEBDL-720p
HDTV-720p
I then went into the Quality controls for those 6 and set very restrictive size limits (0’s for minimum size across the board).
For the 1080p types I set the 30 minute max size at 669MB and the 60 minute max size at 1.31GB.
For the 720p types I set the 30 minute max size at 513MB and the 60 minute max size at 1GB.
I tested that for a while and was about 75% successful in only getting x265 encodes, but I found multiple downloads were occurring quite a bit, so I went a step further. The size restriction definitely helped cut out a lot of the x264’s (and all the avi) - but some low-quality encodes still slipped in.
In Indexers I added a restriction that the release Must contain 265 (because some get labelled with x265 others as h.265).
In practice now I get nothing but well sized 265 encodes. There’s the occasional delay of an extra hour or two waiting, but thanks to my time zone that delay is normally during my work hours so I don’t notice it. If you were to forgo the Indexer Restriction then the delay would go and you would mostly get x265’s. As of right now, for instance, there was a show that finished airing about 1.5 hours ago, the 720p x264 encodes were out within 15-20 minutes, the x265 that fit within my (some may say harsh) specs took about 40 minutes.
Part of the reason I prefer the x265 is the size - it’s less to download/seed. I added the Cutoff of Bluray-1080p to prevent Sonarr working its way up the qualities. It still grabs a 1080p if it pops up about the same time, but it wont download 3 copies before that any more.
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