Custom Quality Definitions, Configuring manually without slider?

Help & Support
1

Under Setup > Quality is the “Quality Definitions” where the size-range for each category can be defined.

The problem is this UI only supports a range entered by a slider. The slider is not very granular and I can’t get the settings I’d prefer. It wouldn’t matter except the large difference at the cusp of my preference, causes Sonarr to either download shows that are too small or skip shows that are not large enough.

Is there a way to enter the “Quality Definition” ranges explicitly without using a slider? Maybe through a configuration file?

Thank you in advance!

2

The quality limits aren’t granular because one slider controls a range of 0-100, not an exact size, which controls the actual limit based on the run time.

For a 30 minute show each step works out to 31.46MB and for a 60 minute series 62.91MB (if the runtime is 45 minutes then the exact size is in the middle).

In the usenet world the release sizes are usually off due to par2 files, so its not super accurate anyways. Do you have a concrete example where 30 or 60MB is making a drastic difference?

3

Sure, of course I’m familiar with the way NZB’s and the PAR2 issue; however, Sonarr appears to go by the published size which includes the PAR2’s. Therefore, the numbers I quote below will be based on that observation / quoting sizes with PAR2’s.

I can give you an example of where it breaks the intended functionality in my case, yes.

First, some background.

I only download episodes in SD. Recently, maybe 6 months ago, there was a change where some new release groups started putting out crap releases in smaller file sizes. For example, a one hour SD release is typically about 250 MB as published size (which includes PAR2’s on my indexers and is used by Sonarr to determine whether it should download). This is pretty consistent; however once in awhile a good one-hour release might be as low as 230 MB when including PAR2’s, which again, is the way it’s shown in Sonarr for my indexers when running a Sonarr manual search and watching the expression evaluation.

This 230 MB number is important because some of the crap releases would get up over 200 MB with PAR2’s, but they didn’t generally go over roughly 220 MB. Therefore, I had wanted to set the threshold to 225 MB, but I could only chose from 190 or 251, because of the 60-step you mention on a 1-hour episode.

If you think about that, 60 megabytes is a pretty big delta on a 230 MB target threshold. With HD it’s surely not a big deal, but at SD with the smaller x264 file sizes, it is an issue.

Just today I noticed Blacklist Ep 16 did not download because it was below the 251.66 threshold, yet it was a perfectly good/valid LOL release.

I could take it one step lower and go to 190 MB, but then I get the occasional bad release based on my experience when they first started showing months ago.

I wish I could remember some of the series/release group names I witnessed with the low-quality SD releases, but I can’t find them at the moment. I think one was something like 20-40 or something.

Anyway … short story long … if I were able to set with twice the granularity, it would work fine. Stepping 30 instead of 60, for example.

It would also eliminate the issue with 30-min South Parks not being downloaded, which is a very fine line, nearing the size of the bad releases (but still maintaining enough difference to use the rule as intended).

4

If you’re having issues with particular release groups you can block them via release restrictions.

As for altering the granularity of size limits, its something we’ll discuss, but we don’t have any immediate plans to change them at this time.

5

I will look into release restrictions.

I hope you can at least see where the granularity is indeed an issue with x264 SD releases.

6

@markus101 - This same issue just happened again with this weeks “The Slap” SD episode. It came in smaller than normal, about 237MB. Looks like LOL is encoding SD releases with slightly smaller files, so with the granularity issue, the only way I can catch these is by going down to 188 MB minimum for the 1-hour setting, which will catch the crap releases as well.