My humble requests

Feature Requests
1

Hi,
I’m still new to NzbDrone, but really like it so far! Here is what I would love to see in the future:

Manual status

The ability to manually set episodes/season to a certain status (e.g. SDTV, DVD, etc.) and only download a better quality if applicable, especially if they are not present in the folder. Obviously that means that if episodes are missing from the folder, they will not be reloaded until there is a better quality available (this thread seems to suggest that this is not the case right now).

Bonus: Have these statuses show up in the show/season info header or even the “Series” overview.
Reason: Further establish NzbDrone not only as a downloading tool but also as the most comfortable solution to manage one’s collection that may be spread over different hard drives or even PCs.

A workaround could be to be able to set the quality profiles of the episodes/seasons individually, so that older seasons can be set, for example, to DVD, while the current one is set to SD. It would still be nicer to have the ability to set and thereby also view the correct quality (of owned and desired episodes/seasons) directly.

Indexer/Download Settings

Additional settings for downloading episodes like 1) Download/try oldest found episode first ... in my experience the first posted episode is usually the correct one. When I set up NzbDrone and downloaded older episodes, most of them were corrupt at first because it downloaded the later (broken) ones first. 2) Try one indexer at time (slower) ... NzbDrone searches all indexers for each episode, meaning that even though I have many indexers added to the list, I quickly run out of free API requests. It should be sufficient to query only one indexer at a time and only move on to the next if the episode is not found or the indexer returns with an error, right? 3) <

Built-in Indexer

Or better yet, have a built-in indexer like SickBeard that reliably downloads the correct episodes. This is very user-friendly (no need to sign up & set up other indexers, also less settings to worry about, no need for paid indexer and even more control over quality).

Renaming (fix):

Currently, a file named "Show - SxxEyy - Title DVD groupname" in the drone factory is renamed to "Show - SxxEyy - Title DVD groupname Title DVD groupname" or "Show - SxxEyy - Title DVD" to "Show - SxxEyy - Title DVD Title DVD "

Improve the Help

The wiki is kind of useless for noobs, imo, as searching for keywords results in endless posts with code and not all the options are listed there. So much suggestion would be either to separate the help wiki from the code wiki or use protocol77's excellent guide as a starting point for a document-based help.

Alright, I think this is it for now. Thank you so much for creating such a great program and still work on improving it! :)

2

  1. You can set it for an episode already (click the quality in the episode details modal), setting it en mass for a series/season is already on Trello: https://trello.com/c/75MOaJ92/397-change-parsed-quality-for-entire-season

a) My experience is the complete opposite of yours, especially with DMCA targeted shows (older even by a few hours would be done but new would be available). Not something we can easily provide an option for
b) Which could result in a lower quality than wanted episode being downloaded, we have no plans to change this behavior, 2 solid premium indexers is all you need, regarding prioritization: https://trello.com/c/gwz5wiAo/350-indexer-prioritization
c) If someone wants to run on and open it for drone great, but I have enough to do keeping up with support/features/bugs/etc

  1. Sounds like your naming settings are set wrong, open another thread if you’re having issues.

  2. What code wiki? The source code is there, but thats how it works on github; why host our own wiki when we have one available? The API docs are there, under a separate section, the rest is help and information. I’m not going to rewrite a help document that is already done, @protocol77 and I already discussed making it available/in another form so it can be updated easily as things change. I try to document things that come up more than a couple times (though having people read them in another problem), if information is lacking people can ask questions and the wiki can be updated, or once people have a solution they are welcome to update the wiki as well (thats why its on the wiki, not in sticky posts).

3

Maybe I’m just stupid, but

  1. I don’t see where I can set the quality for episodes that have not been read. If I click on an episode I get a popup with 3 tabs (Summary, Activity, Search), neither one has an option to set the quality. Only files that have been downloaded/read can I set the quality.

a) Interesting. If I go on NZBIndex, search for ANY show episode, the oldest ones are the right ones (just tried with the latest Arrow, Supernatural, Walking Dead, Mentalist, Psych). It’s usually a.b.teevee@EFNet or scnzb@efnet.
" Not something we can easily provide an option for ": Shouldn’t be too hard to “ORDER BY age”, right?
b) I don’t see if that results in a lower quality. If the download fails, it’s wrong and should download another one, especially if I set min. size, or not? Or is there a special algorithm that selects the best download from all the indexers? But even so, since I’m the one adding the indexers in the first place, you have no control over the quality I’m actually getting. Only the end user can notice if his indexers (and in this case the ones with higher priority) deliver crappy files, so it is up to him to do something about it. I don’t see how this option changes this.
I do see how this is not as easy as ordering results by age, but on the other hand it is still easy compared to all the other great stuff you already have working.
c) I totally get that. There are definitely more important things than to cater to cheapos like me who are reluctant to pay for indexers (admittedly after getting burned two times including NZBMatrix)!

  1. Will do, thanks.

  2. Yeah, I totally understand and it’s great that you put the code out there. All I’m saying is that for a noob (like me), getting code as the first results when searching for keywords that one doesn’t understand doesn’t really help and my suggestions were the first ones that came to mind. I think it is so great in the first place that you are spending so much time responding to lowly noobs like me! Still, a working help system can avoid a lot of redundant questions).

Thank you again for your time! Keep up the great work! :slight_smile:

4

  1. sorry forgot to finish my thought, click the quality (beside the filename) and you can change it (you get a dropdown)

a) Should I wait for a PR? We already order by age, preferring newer ones. Having the option is possible, but I don’t think its the magic bullet solution. There is a timeframe where older posts are better because DMCA hadn’t hit, and then another point where an older post is worse because it falls under DMCA, but a new recently posted release wouldn’t, we would need to have to calculate if the release could possibly fall under DMCA and make a decision based on that, not something

b) Depends what the indexer gets and how fast, if I wanted WEBDL and HDTV both in 720p and searched when indexer one only had HDTV, but indexer two had both, I’d get HDTV with that system, which would be confusing if I knew WEB DL was out. drone attempts to get the best quality across all indexers you have configured, it processes all the results received before it decides which one to get.

  1. How/where are you searching?
5

Before I respond I would like to make clear again that I’m not trying to be overly negative and think NzbDrone is great and I appreciate your time and effort! All I’m trying here is point out some issues that I’m having with it. :slight_smile:

1) See my post above: For episodes that have not been downloaded or where the files have been removed, there is no filename (which by itself makes sense).

According to your post in this thread simply keeping episodes monitored and ignoring deleted episodes should do the trick (though your linked page does not address the issue of deleted episodes!).

However, I just had to move some files to my other PC and now the downloaded episodes have the exclamation mark again and in the overview they are shown as missing. ;(
I assume they are not being downloaded so I cannot test whether or not it actually works as you say (although this thread seems to suggest it does not!), because I have run out of API requests for a while now.Maybe in the future I will disable one half of the indexers in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, but as of now I have subscribed to all free indexers I could find (7).

But I’m not happy with this at all, even if it does work as you say. Having shows with a red bar, indicating that episodes are missing, is irritating as you don’t know if it is due to missed downloads or (re)moved files.

An option to set the quality even if there is no file is definitely needed, combined with an option to remember it until a better quality is found/downloaded/set. Actually, I don’t see why this should not be the default setting…after all, who deletes their files on a regular basis just to download them again?

2) “Should I wait for a PR?” …sorry, I don’t know what you mean. :frowning:

a) If you already sort by age then adding a switch to reverse the order should not be a problem.

All I can say is that for the past 6 months (when my SickBeard setup broke completely after an update and moving some folders), I have manually downloaded the 32 shows we are watching. And in my case (astraweb), downloading the oldest episode is usually (!) a safe bet. I just set up my server all nice and fresh (hence the discovery of NzbDrone) and that is exactly what I did when NzbDrone downloaded a bunch of wrong files…manually search with NZBIndex and select the oldest file.
Sure, considering DMCA notices in the search would be even better, but why not give users like me the option to choose for now?

b) Again, I don’t see how that is your problem and not mine. If I set this option and the wrong indexer at the first place, that’s my fault. But the result would be the same if I had just this one indexer and not even bothered with adding more. By giving me this option, at least you give me the choice and if I’m unhappy, I could change the order myself (if you let me).

4) "How/where are you searching? … ???

I go to the wiki and, in the search bar (“This repository”) type in the search words. For example “Retention”, “Release Restrictions”, “Update library”, etc… all return just code. As a matter of fact, I have never found an actual article, leading me to believe this wiki is for coders only.

6

  1. Sorry, I misunderstood the original question. Drone either has the episode imported, or not, if not its missing, this might work, but its not something we have planned soon: https://trello.com/c/kLTsJLJW/251-archived-status

  2. I was being a bit sarcastic, due to the suggestion its easy.
    a) Added to Trello, but one person preferring an option doesn’t make it a priority for us. https://trello.com/c/1qlY7s4o/637-prefer-older-releases-over-newer-ones
    b) Something like that would require significant change, its come up before, we’re not interested in such a solution. The option to disable searching may be added, but that will be on or off.

  3. Ahh, that doesn’t search the wiki, that searches the code base only, AFAIK there is no way to search the wiki, which is an issue.

7

Thank you, markus101!

I’ll just cross my fingers and hope that at least 1) will be implemented eventually, as I firmly believe that this is the only way for people who don’t have all their files in one place.

A workaround could be to set the desired episode/season quality individually, so one could set old seasons to DVD only and newer ones to whatever is available. :wink:

Sorry, I still don’t get it concerning PR. But oh well, I’m not a native English speaker. :frowning:

I guess I’ll just have to bite the bullet and pay for yet another indexer (but they are going down left and right!). Or just see how it goes and hope for the best (I guess I’ll have to download the DVDRips manually anyways for now due to 1) ).

  1. Alright, that explains it. :slight_smile:

Again, thanks for your time!

8

If you unmonitor episodes they won’t appear as missing, but you won’t be able to see what quality they are. You can also set deleted episodes to be ignored automatically (advanced setting on media management).

PR = pull request in the git/github world, means it’s been added by someone else and they want it to make it to the main release.

What indexers are you looking at? A number of the free open ones aren’t nearly as good as the invite only or limited registration sites (nzb.su, dognzb, etc). Well worth checking out reddit and watching for some of the popular sites to open registrations.

9

If you unmonitor episodes they won’t appear as missing, but you won’t be able to see what quality they are.
Yes, that’s exactly why I think the requested feature is essential for a tool that strives to be an all-round solution! :slight_smile:

You can also set deleted episodes to be ignored automatically (advanced setting on media management).I know, but how does that help when I want to keep track of what I have on my various hard drives and maybe only download a certain quality of a season?

@PR: Ahh, I see, that makes more sense. :slight_smile:

I currently have free accounts of OZnzb, NZBNDX, NZB Finder, FastNZB, Usenet-Crawler, NZB Index and NzbPlanet.
I already have dognzb.cr/register in my “News” bookmark folder that I open every morning in case they open registration. :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t know what else to do, I just checked out Reddit, but it appears there are issues concerning invites? See:

10

If you still have the media “online” (not sitting on an unplugged external drive or DVDs) then you should be able to point drone at it, at least until we look at archiving.

Looks like usenetinvites is back now.

11

Thanks, but my other PCs are not always online, so for now I will have to manually un-monitor everything as soon as I move it to the final destination.

Concerning usenetinvites: I will post there and keep an eye on it. Let’s see how it goes today (lots of shows on tonight). If it doesn’t, I will just have to revert back to SickBeard for now.