I’ve posted about this issue with the previous versions as well but even in 2.0 when there are some sort of new releases for old episodes of TV Shows whether it be a DVD or Bluray it will download that even when I don’t have any old release downloaded so it automatically downloads old stuff I’ve already watched. The only real method I’ve seen to deal with this issue is for me to open up every TV show individually and set each of the old season as unmonitored as I can’t just unmonitor the whole thing since I want to receive the new episodes. That seems like a very unnecessary and tedious process to have to unmonitor over a hundred seasons just so it doesn’t keep downloading old stuff. This issue has wasted almost 10GB off my block account. Like you have a button under File Management for ignoring deleted episodes there should be a button there for ignoring old episodes that I don’t have on my drive in the first place.
Thank You
Take a look at season pass, which is linked from the missing page, it allows you to change the monitored status on multiple series (by season) from one location.
that is weird, I have a show “continuum” I added yesterday, season 2 has aired already and I don’t have half of season 2, drone is monitoring all the files but it is not trying to pull them down.
To be honest I am not sure if your or mine is the actual intended behaviour but mine is the preferred for me, anything I don’t have I will manually mark as wanted, just like in SB.
I don’t want to make this a SB vs Drone conversation but SB has an option to auto mark missing epps of an added show as ‘wanted’, ‘skipped’ etc at series add time.
As what is the intended action of a monitored epp, if it is monitored should drone be trying to pull it down?
NzbDrone defaults to monitoring episodes, but it doesn’t actively search any episodes, it only searches when you tell it to, but if those episodes are re-released (appear on the RSS feed) then it would download them.
Missing episodes wouldn’t be enough because you could select a higher quality profile (have SD, but now want HD) and NzbDrone would try to upgrade them. We want to add this feature: https://trello.com/c/vLKpK0hi/56-start-monitoring-starting-at-season-x - which is what season pass allows you do do after the fact, but the season information is not available when adding a series, because we don’t have that information from trakt.
The intended purpose of monitored is to download it if it becomes available. I personally never understood the backlog search, its useful one time, but searching for the same thing over and over is a waste.
We’re going to look at some options to making this easier to do on add series (while we wait for trakt).
Perhaps then set monitored to off for already aired epps as the default state when adding a new show, new Epps as they are aired can be monitored and if you want you can then use season pass to monitor a whole season.
Thats not easily achievable with the way NzbDrone adds series and then scans episodes, but we have a couple ideas we’ll try.
So how should I be using the monitoring flag? What exactly is monitoring and what does it do?
If I am happy with my current files i.e. they are at the correct quality I want should I set it to unmonitored?
Is it safe to set all epps I am happy with to unmonitored?
When would I want to monitor an epp?
99.9% of the time I just want it to grab the epp when it is available, should I be setting my grabbed epps to unmonitored once they are downloaded?
The monitoring flag is used to mark that you want that episode to download when either its missing or NzbDrone finds an upgrade according to your quality profile.
If you currently have a file in SD and the quality profile is HD for that series, you should unmonitor it because if a HD version is posted it would see that your quality profile cutoff had not been met and download it.
You want to monitor an episode when you want NzbDrone to download it automatically (only when your quality profile cutoff has not been met).
There is no need to unmonitor an episode after its downloaded, if additional copies of that episode download its either because the cutoff was not yet met (change your quality profile) or a proper was found (currently no way to disable that).
Thanks for the info, this makes more sense.
However I have a show called contiuum with half of season 2 not downloaded and all epps with monitoring turned on but none of them have tried to automatically download, if I manually search for one it finds it and I can add the download and when it downloads it shows up in the list as available now but the ones not downloaded are not automatically processed.
This was already covered above:
@markus101 said:
NzbDrone defaults to monitoring episodes, but it doesn’t actively search any episodes, it only searches when you tell it to, but if those episodes are re-released (appear on the RSS feed) then it would download them.
Excellent thx for that, sry I missed above.
now that I know it is just monitoring the RSS feeds it all makes a lot more sense.
Ok thanks, makes it easier. Still seems like an unnecessary task to perform but at least its less work.