Monitoring of downloaded episodes without using completed download handling

[iamthatom]

Hello,

Firstly, I’ve been using Sonarr for years and its such a kickass program.

However, I only really have one issue and its quite a substantial one.

Although I appreciate the Completed Download Handling feature and I can see how most people would want to use it to automate the process of downloading TV episodes from start to finish, I simply DO NOT want to use it and for a very good reason:

Everything that I download I manually encode to be 100% compatible with iTunes. This involves encoding and renaming the files with iFlicks.

Plus I also want to cross-check episode names to make sure nothing goes wrong and the file doesn’t end up being moved to the wrong location or renamed to the incorrect episode, yes this happens, and if I didn’t check everything manually it would happen A LOT.

So basically I want/need the ability for Sonarr to see episodes that have finished downloading in my download folder and be able to show them as downloaded in the Sonarr interface without having to use Completed Download Handling.

When I download things, downloaded files will stay in my downloads folder until I encode them and I simply just want Sonarr to be able to mark them as downloaded and to be able to see the file without them being moved to their respective season folders.

Please please please add this feature, I would appreciate it so greatly!

Thank you so much

[markus101]

So basically I want/need the ability for Sonarr to see episodes that have finished downloading in my download folder and be able to show them as downloaded in the Sonarr interface without having to use Completed Download Handling.

Why?

If you turn off completed download handling Sonarr won’t process them and since it knows it was grabbed it won’t upgrade them either (if the cutoff was met).

[iamthatom]

Yes it won’t download them again because it knows it was grabbed so why can’t it atleast show that in the interface by having a cloud icon next to the episode or showing it as done instead of showing it as missing and me having to click on an individual episode and look at the history to see if it downloaded.

And I will add that since my download client and indexer and Sonarr are all linked there is no reason why this can’t happen.

Not everyone wants to use the automated system. Its fine for small amounts of media but when you get into the big leagues you can’t rely on 100% automation.

[markus101]

Yes it won’t download them again because it knows it was grabbed so why can’t it atleast show that in the interface by having a cloud icon next to the episode or showing it as done instead of showing it as missing and me having to click on an individual episode and look at the history to see if it downloaded.

You’re in the big leagues, if you want manual control you’re just going to have to do things manually.

And I will add that since my download client and indexer and Sonarr are all linked there is no reason why this can’t happen.

Is it possible? Yes.
Is it something we want to do? No. For the reason that this is a big league feature and adding an option that has a high chance of getting used and creating a support problems for the non big league users. While not every feature is going to be used by every user, this isn’t something I see being popular.

You could leave Sonarr unable to import files from your download client by restricting write access to the downloaded files, that would mean the items are still in the queue, just with a warning status.

Not everyone wants to use the automated system. Its fine for small amounts of media but when you get into the big leagues you can’t rely on 100% automation.

Automation is there to make handling a larger number of things easier, going back to manual because you have more than before seems counter intuitive. I get that if you want ultimate control doing it manually makes more sense, but that doesn’t have anything with being in the big leagues or the minors.

Sorry, but I don’t see this feature being a good fit for Sonarr at this time.

[iamthatom]

Seems to me like you’re just putting down my suggestions Markus.

I have a right just like everyone else here to suggest features.

Automation isn’t 100 percent reliable, thats just the way it is. It would be great if it was but it isn’t. I love automation and I use it for certain things like renaming in iFlicks and appending things to filenames with automator, but I do most things manually for a very good reason, iTunes aside I want everything to have the correct metadata and I give everything I download and encode to a friend who keeps it as a full backup in case one of the hard drives fail. I am not the only person in the world who does it this way. People take pride in their media collections.

I’m not about to risk screwing up my 50+TB library by letting Sonarr move and/or rename my files just because I want it to be slightly more functional.

Like don’t get me wrong if you have like 10-50 shows or something and its small enough to have your own backup of it then that is fine, but when you have massive libraries and are monitoring hundreds of shows, you need more options like this.

Not everyone uses Siri yet thats an option, not everyone likes yellow cars but its an option. Life’s about options Markus and everyone does things a little differently.

Sometimes episodes are marked with the wrong episode, or the wrong season, it just happens, and it happens a lot. I can give you shows off the top of my head that sometimes have the wrong season or episode numbers. American Dad!, Bizarre Foods, Bar Rescue, How the Universe Works etc.

I even contribute to the TVDB and TMDB by adding metadata and artwork because I want this ecosystem to thrive and I want everyone to benefit and not just casual users.

And please explain how this would be difficult to implement? All i want is for Sonarr to tell me that the file has downloaded by keeping the cloud symbol or something similar next to the episode instead of removing it and marking it as missing as soon as it downloads. It already speaks to SAB so what is the problem?

Like what about a different symbol that can show an episode has finished downloading? Instead it doesn’t do anything until the file is in the season folder.

And it wouldn’t even effect casual users because they wouldn’t use it, they would use drone factory or completed download handling instead.

I still end up moving the files to the correct location once they are encoded so I don’t mind waiting til then for it to show as done. But I still need for it to show as downloaded for it to be fully functional for me.

And the warning that is always there in settings saying turn on drone factory or completed download handling is annoying, this program relies too much on the thought that every single person is using automation. It’s just not true. And I read the article that said turn on and off completed download handling to remove the warning and it did but it showed up again a while later.

Look, I’ve said before, the program is awesome and other than the 2 issues that I have with it I really can’t fault it, its way better than Sickrage, its reliable, its simple to use and has a beautiful and elegant GUI yet its packed with advanced features all I am trying to do is help improve it for people like me who don’t want to use full automation or who have their own ways of doing things.

I just want to contribute or help make this program all it can be by giving you the insight from someone who uses the program daily and has been for years, I hope you understand that.

[markus101]

I wasn’t putting it down, I was giving a semi sarcastic response based around your “big league” comment, admittedly harder to understand through text/the forums.

to a friend who keeps it as a full backup in case one of the hard drives fail.

I hope that’s in case multiple hard drives fail, because 50TB+ or a fraction of something you care about that isn’t redundant in some way seems like a dangerous operation.

And please explain how this would be difficult to implement? All i want is for Sonarr to tell me that the file has downloaded by keeping the cloud symbol or something similar next to the episode instead of removing it and marking it as missing as soon as it downloads. It already speaks to SAB so what is the problem?

I didn’t say it was hard or something we couldn’t do I said it was something that didn’t make sense to add for the majority of users, even as an option because even with the best intentions options cause issues for users, mostly users with smaller libraries, which I would imagine is majority by a large margin and new users.

And it wouldn’t even effect casual users because they wouldn’t use it, they use drone factory or completed download handling instead.

There is a 100% chance that they would not understand it and use it, not every user, but it will happen. We see this time and time again with Drone Factory, Completed Download Handling works automatically and properly handles both usenet and torrents, but users setup drone factory and it can cause issues. Lot’s of people are used to how they did things with another app and try to replicate it with Sonarr or start flipping settings.

And the warning that is always there in settings saying turn on drone factory or completed download handling is annoying

Drone Factory is going away in v3, CDH replaces it and when that won’t work the API will be able to ease the loss of Drone Factory. We have an existing issue to allow health checks to be ignored: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/issues/481

There are tons of features that people want added (and that we want to add) that we haven’t had time to do, in some cases years later.

Telling people no is hard, we don’t get joy out of it and nor to they, but it needs to be done. One thing worse than hearing no is a yes that never comes to fruition, we could easily say yes to everyone, drop it in the backlog and never touch it.

At this time, this feature doesn’t fit with our plans and would only get sent to the end of list to one day maybe get added.

[iamthatom]

Completely understandable. Yeah text can be misconstrued easily.

I certainly didn’t mean for my “big league” comment to be taken as an insult or anything like that, i just simply mean that I am not a casual user and I’m someone who takes things like this very seriously and I have a lot of experience with collating media and being a perfectionist with it, and I know I am the exception with nearly 80TB of media. But I just can’t leave it up to automation to do this for me and expect that it will work which is why I don’t use it.

I realise that since completed download handling was added drone factory became redundant, that makes sense.

And of course I understand that you can’t say yes to everyone, but I would hope that serious users like me with concerns or suggestions would be taken seriously as I have so much faith in this program and I just want to see it fulfil all my needs.

Other than this and my other suggestion regarding the multiple download client categories the only other thing that I would add would be the ability to sort unmonitored shows only on the main page. There seems to be everything but unmonitored which seems odd, seems like that would be an easy feature to add.

Thanks for taking the time to respond anyway, I appreciate it and I appreciate all the hard work you guys/gals do.

Cheers.

[Taloth]

80TB a lot for sure, and I understand why you would want such a nice collection to be organized properly, however it’s not the biggest I’ve seen, we’ve got some genuine data hoarders around.

Please bear in mind that Sonarr wasn’t intended as a fully flexible and configurable system, it’s aimed at a solution for 99% of the users. The reluctance of us to add certain features doesn’t mean we dislike you, it’s because we have to keep that goal in mind and keep things easy enough for the bulk of the users. Otherwise we’d just be creating another FlexGet.

Allow me to offer you a suggestion, which definitely for power-users only:
Create Remote Path Mapping via Settings->Download Client->Remote Path Mappings. Normally it is intended to tell Sonarr where a remote server is mapped locally. But you can use it to change where CDH is looking for files.
Imagine you have sabnzbd at localhost, downloading stuff in /home/sabnzbd/downloads/completed
Add a remote path mapping with host=localhost, remotepath=/home/sabnzbd/downloads/completed, localpath=/home/sabnzbd/pending_imports

When a download completes, and Sonarr queries the sabnzbd api it will get back the download path /home/sabnzbd/downloads/completed/NzbName/…, the mapping will change it to /home/sabnzbd/pending_imports/NzbName/…, which is empty, so Sonarr won’t find anything to import. It’ll keep showing up in Activity->Queue as a warning.

This allows you to do the transcoding and file verification manually, then move the file to the appropriate subdirectory in pending_imports, and sonarr would pick it up. Or you could move it directly to the series directory.
Either way, you would be in control.

PS: You should test the mapping before using it on your real series, to verify that the mapping is indeed applied. Also be sure to configure a Recycle Bin folder in Sonarr settings.