Episodes of the BBC’s excellent Storyville series are generally named only with the series and episode titles, i.e. no episode number or date. As a result neither the “Standard” or “Daily” types result in any matches. It would be good to have a new series type for this kind of release that does not require a date or series/episode number in the episode release title, as the standard and daily types do.
Here’s a typical example: Storyville.The.Internets.Own.Boy.720p.HDTV.x264-C4TV
Potentially that could be handled similar to how Specials are handled, but at this time special support is not very reliable and we don’t have plans to make any changes to it at this time. We’ll try to keep this in mind though.
Forgive me, I don’t want to be one of those people who blithely and naively downplay the complexity of a change they are asking other people to code, but this one does seem very simple to me. At the point of constructing the search string for a given episode, you presumably have access to three key pieces of identifying data about the episode (in addition to the series title): the serial number, air date and title, and depending on which of the two existing series type settings are selected for that series, one of the first two of those data is used. All I am suggesting is adding a third option to tell Sonarr to use a different piece of available data when doing its search.
Searching is just a very small part of the problem. Its finding the proper series and episode from that release name without guessing.
Are you talking about the process of matching existing episode files to the Sonarr episode database derived from TVDB/TVRage? I can see how this might be more problematic without episode numbers in the file names to go on. But in either direction, I would think the series title and episode title would be enough to go on in most cases to get a safe match. Certainly, the reliability of an accurate match would presumably be lower without an episode number, but a 90-95% accurate match seems better to me than no match at all.
I’d like to get a handle on what’s involved here because if nobody is willing to tackle this then I’ll probably have a go myself, even if it must remain only for my own private use. I’m personally very willing to accept an option that offers a slight risk of incorrect matches in favour of having no way to download certain series automatically at all.
Heuristically matching is something we have avoided except for some limited support for specials and for that it hasn’t really worked as well as we would like to expand its use beyond specials.
A lot of the logic is already present within Sonarr, but we have intentionally limited it to specials only, it could be expanded, but its not something we’re interested in doing.
Perhaps I’ve not been thinking generally enough about the implications of trying to match based only on titles. It seems to me it should work well in the example of Storyville, but then that’s a series that will always be likely to have a combination of series name + episode title that is totally unique among releases, others may not.
OK, well I guess I’ll familiarise myself with the Sonarr code and try to enable the use of some of that logic to achieve what I want. Assuming I’m even able to do that, it’ll be interesting to see how well it works…