So I have most of my series profiles set to SD, just because I don’t need a higher quality. But sometimes for a special or a specific episode that hasn’t grabbed an SD release yet, I’ll snag an HD episode. Because of the way Sonarr works, even if I have an HD episode, it will still look for the SD episode, download it, and then delete my HD file later.
It just wasted more bandwidth for no reason, and there’s no way to have some episodes be HD and others SD. It would be nice if there was a check box with something like “Keep HD”, but it won’t try to find HD for every episode.
Only if you told Sonarr that you want to rank SD episodes higher than HD episodes, that is not the default behaviour. Sonarr will grab releases until the cutoff has been met or exceeded. https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/wiki/Profiles
I think the problem is when you only use SD in your profile, because if you have HD in the profile, it usually grabs that first, and I don’t want it to grab HD for everything. So if I just have SD, I can’t have an HD cutoff, because it’s not tin the drop down. So I guess an easier fix would just be to keep all qualities in the cutoff menu regardless of the profile.
You can’t set the cutoff to something thats not wanted, but the cutoff will apply to something thats not in the allowed list if it exceeds the specified cutoff. If SDTV is above HDTV-720p in the list SDTV would be more preferred causing HDTV-720p to not meet the cutoff.
You could un-monitor the episode after you grab a HD version manually. Then Sonarr has no reason to ‘upgrade’ the episode.
Alternatively, you could create a new profile to use with both SD and HD entries, ranking them so that SD is highest (because that’s what you’d prefer) but setting the cutt-off at an appropriate HD quality so Sonarr won’t upgrade those episodes. The drawback here is that potentially the HD quality may occasionally be available before the SD quality and be grabbed. Adding a delay profile would probably reduce the likelihood of that, if it’s a real issue.
What does the History for that Episode show? (Take a screenshot)
Quality is the most important decision when weighing if a release should be grabbed, unless the HDTV-720p release was not detected properly or the SDTV release that replaced it was labeled wrong there isn’t a scenario where this could happen.
Ultimately without debug logs of the decision that Sonarr made in this case there is a lot of speculation.
Okay, here’s the one that happened last night. On the episode history it says it grabbed and downloaded SD, but there was no SD episode on my hard drive. I did a manual search, snagged the HD episode, and then the HD was deleted and replaced with SD about an hour later.
Here you can see I re-ordered them, so HDTV-720p is above SDTV. This in no way affects the cut off. The only two options in the cutoff are SDTV and DVD. Rearranging qualities that are turned off have no effect on the grabbing and replacing of episodes.
Like i mentioned previously, wouldn’t a simple fix be to leave all the cutoff options available, regardless of quality selected? So in something like this case, I could select a cutoff of HDTV-720p, but only have SDTV and DVD qualities selected?
If HDTV-720p is above SDTV (as it normally is) the cutoff is exceeded and nothing else will download. The Cutoff specifies the lowest quality that will stop Sonarr from looking for upgraded qualities.
Ahhhhh, after re-reading https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/wiki/Profiles a couple times, I can see what is intended. Sonarr only cares about the order of the rankings NOT the quality of the rankings. This certainly isn’t very clear, and not at all intuitive, as most people would assume (and of course no-one ever assumes anything) that a higher quality indicates a higher ranking, no matter the order, i.e. HD > SD.
I just ran a test and indeed re-arranging the qualities, even though unchecked, gave the result I was looking for (keeping the HD version).
Thanks for the clarification, but again I would suggest making the cutoff drop down the only thing that affects the cutoff, rather than the cutoff menu and the order of qualities, as that just makes more sense, at least in my mind. Thank you for the help!
I can’t speak for the developers but I suspect that they’d be more likely to consider an improvement to the wording if it’s unclear.
It’s easy for people to confuse ‘higher priority’ with ‘better quality’ (resolution, source, etc.) when talking about this stuff, since you could refer to both things as “higher quality” depending on the context.
