I’m loving the feature. So far, I haven’t had any trouble finding torrents on KickassTorrents. I haven’t experience any glitch except on uTorrent side where the label/path refuse to work. I found a workaround by using the uTorrent webUI and activating append the torrent’s label.
My only concern is having Drone stop looking for a newly aired episode when it finds the torrent, even if the file is made available a bit later (before the torrent is done downloading) on NZB. Is there or will there be a way to setup Drone to keep looking for the same episode on NZB?
In my case, Drone was looking for the new Haven episode and it found it on KickassTorrents 3 hours ago. I checked the episode via manual search, while waiting for the episode to finish downloading via uTorrent just to find out the episode was made available 1.3 hours ago via NZB. Due to low amount of seeders, the torrent still had about 1 hour 30 minutes to go. If Drone had picked up the NZB and stopped/deleted torrent+data in uTorrent, the download in SAB would have been completed 1.3 hours ago.
Paying for Usenet access for fast downloads vs Free Torrents, but slow downloads…
I understand your problem and I can only think of using the Delay function in the Profile to delay both nab & torrent downloads, which would mean the nzb gets grabbed first, but might cause issues with takedown.
Stopping/removing the torrent after an nzb is found is not something we’re considering. Too many potential complications.
However, I’ll ask @markus101 about whether we can use the tag-system he’s working on to apply different Delay settings to certain tagged indexers.
Drone could pause the torrent and then download the NZB. It should make sure the download is completed before deleting the torrent+data. In the event the download doesn’t complete, Drone can either try another NZB (as usual) or unpause the torrent.
That would make no sense. What if the download is at 90% and would finish before the NZB has a chance to get downloaded? What if it’s 80%? Where would be the threshold where you would like it to switch from the downloading torrent to an NZB? Drone can’t even take speeds into consideration since it has no idea how fast your internet connection is.
It is simply a suggestion, but Drone does display the time left on downloads in the Queue. I don’t know if it will be implement for torrents in the future. If it is, then there could be a setting where you can tell Drone that if it finds the NZB version of the file, and there’s still X minutes or more time left to complete the torrent download, to pause it and download the NZB.
For example, using NZB, I download 50 minutes shows in 4 minutes. It’d set the setting to 10 minutes to also take into consideration the download speed instability of torrents. So if there’s still 10 minutes or more time left to complete the download via torrent, to pause and download the NZB. Obviously, if there’s less than 10 minutes to complete the torrent download to keep it going.
The point I’m trying to make is that Usenet will always be superior to downloading torrents for the simple reason that SAB will always download at maximum speed/SAME SPEED making the results predictable. If people don’t mind getting torrents and sticking to longer download times, even if the NZB is made available after the torrent started downloading, the whole thing could be disabled to not look for NZB files if torrent is already started. Same thing for people that have a monthly download quota.
Most private trackers have ratios, if you leech, and stop before seeding you’re wrecking your ratio. This means the feature you describe is only useful for public trackers where the practice seems to be common place.
It’s a (debatable) unfair practice and I don’t think Drone should encourage it by automating it.
That said, you won’t have that problem if you keep on seeding the torrent even after you’ve successfully imported the nzb. But I don’t think a lot of people will want that behavior.
I’m thinking my original suggestion of using Delay in profile for torrent indexers would solve the bulk of your problem.
Assuming markus gets the tagging system in place, it’s easy to implement.
Can you add a setting that allows us to give preference to either nzb or torrent? Similar to couchpotato’s setting to search first nzb and then torrent, or give extra score to certain indexers to influence the automatic search results?
We currently sort by preferring usenet over torrent. We don’t have the intention to adding a configuration option for this. Definitely not for v1 anyway.
With automatic search you already have the problem that frequently torrents get posted first, so priority wouldn’t help you there.
There is a Delay function in the Profile, but that’s global and applies to both usenet and torrent releases.
First time poster. Thanks for a great media app and for all the hard work that is put in to it. I apologize for bumping an older topic but this seemed to be an existing thread that is related to my question/request.
I am a Usenet guy. I do not use torrents unless I have to. So with that being said, I guess I am seconding the request for some sort of delay in searching the torrent sites. My thought is different from @tamara_ - I don’t even want Sonarr to look for the torrent unless it has to as in my (anecdotal) experience, torrents almost always get posted before nzbs, so as it stands now torrents will always get pulled if both are enabled. So I guess my request does not require the pausing of a torrent download after a successful Usenet search as suggested above - just the option to delay a torrent search entirely for a reasonable amount of time (maybe 4 hours? or a configurable amount of time if possible?) before Sonarr determines that the nzb just isn’t being posted and reverts to a torrent download.
In addition, I have a second somewhat related request (that probably isn’t necessary if the above is implemented). Many of my wife’s shows (Real Housewives of [Fill in the Blank], I’m looking at you) are generally not posted on Usenet at all but are readily available via torrent. Is it possible to implement an option on a per show basis as to whether Sonarr searches Usenet or torrents? In other words, independent of any delaying as referenced above, Sonarr could use Usenet to search for all my shows that aren’t terrible, and search torrents for certain shows that I know will not be available via Usenet?
I am currently using both Sonarr and Sickrage due to the way that the searches are implemented at this time - I keep shows I know are only available by torrent in Sickrage. I would rather just use Sonarr because it has a significantly better GUI and doesn’t crash all the time.
Sorry for the long winded question and the thread bump and if I can provide additional information please let me know. Again, thanks for all the hard work on this great app.
Pretty good timing, we’re almost done with the design and development of the new priority system.
I think we came up with a pretty simple, yet powerful delay/prioritization system, its not ready for testing yet, but hopefully soon.
The basics are:
Preferred protocol (Usenet or Torrents)
Separate delays for Usenet and Torrents (gives you the ability to delay Usenet grabs to deal with propagation issues and still prevent grabbing a torrent before you want it
There will be a default profile that applies to everything out of the box, this will prefer Usenet and have no delay set for either Usenet or Torrents.
Additional profiles can be set and will be tagged (custom user tags), these tags can be applied to one or more series and will make the profile only apply to series with one or more matching tags. A tagged profile will override the default profile (that is to say, the default profile will be ignored, so you can have completely different delays and not worry about your default profile).
Note: Existing use’s with delay’s set on their Profiles will be migrated to this new system (tags will be created and applied to matching series during the upgrade).
If you search for an episode the delays will be ignored, but given two releases of the same quality, your preferred protocol will be grabbed. I mention this because if you set a 4 hour delay and search after 3 hours and the nzb hasn’t been posted yet the torrent would be grabbed. This might change, but for now its how its been developed.
I think we covered all the use cases with this, but let me know if you think its lacking.
GET OUT OF MY BRAIN. What number am I thinking of right now?
Seriously, thank you for the quick response, and I must say that what you have proposed actually sounds better than what I was suggesting as people can apply different sets of criteria to on a series by series basis as they see fit and customize however they want. I think the action when searching manually makes a lot of sense - if you’re doing a manual search, you probably don’t care how the episode gets found, just that it gets found quickly. I am very excited to see how it turns out!
I do have one clarification question though:
Can the profile system accommodate my second use case? In other words, my Standard (not the Default) profile would be Usenet first with no delay, torrents second with 4 hour delay. However, for shows that are not available on Usenet, I would want to use torrents but with no delay so that my ears can bleed from the voices of shrieking reality show banshees fighting about which one disrespected another one at some party blah blah blah. I note that you only mentioned customizing the delays though. Can I create a profile that uses a different preferred protocol from the global setting? Or does the profile system only allow you to fine tune the delay and not the preferred protocol?