Prefer Full Season Pack

Sonarr version (exact version): Sonarr Ver. 2.0.0.4118 - develop
OS: Windows Server 2008 R2
((Debug logs)) (posted to hastebin or similar): n/a
Description of issue: Is there a way that I can set Sonarr to prefer Season packs? Sometimes it refuses to download a pack that contains episodes that are not available on their own with the flag “Full season pack”. If it tried these first then it would get all of the episodes requested and not need to download individual episodes.

If you search for a single episode Sonarr won’t grab a full season pack, also if all the episodes aren’t monitored or the pack isn’t an upgrade (taking the quality profile into account) Sonarr won’t grab it.

There isn’t a way to influence grabbing of a season pack over individual files, but its something we’re considering.

The truth is,

its only useful in the specific case that you have added a new (old) series.

Essentially when a series is added it should (IMO) do a search prioritising Season Packs. After that search is concluded it should proceed to search based on episodes again.

The specific problem I encountered is that I added a series and the searcher grabbed some of the episodes that were available but as some of them were not available as individual episodes then I had to manually go in and download a season pack anyway.

In the event that all the episodes are monitored and have no existing files (or at least none that have reached the cutoff) then a season pack is preferred over individual files of the same quality, but if the quality is lower for the season pack(s) the individual files will win. The whole process depends on actually getting results though, in a lot of cases the results aren’t there for Sonarr to process because the indexer never returns them, often then can be found on the site, but for some reason aren’t in the results, sometimes its naming, sometimes its the indexer failing to parse it properly to link it to the correct series (when searching the API by ID), possibly other issues as well.

I think in this case it was because some of the results had been blacklisted. so episodes 1-10 of the series downloaded without problems.

The episodes 11-14 were available on NZB but when I came to check why I was missing 4 episodes I saw that they had been blacklisted.

This lead me to carry out a manual search where I saw that there were no alternates for the individual episodes other than the season pack (that was SDTV instead of 720p like episodes 1-10).

Ultimately I would prefer the higher quality episodes however if the choice is to have them, or not, then I want them in the lower quality and the only way to get them (in this case) is to download the season pack, even if it is just for the 4 episodes.

Personally I have kept episodes 1-10 in 720p and now have a partial torrent seeding ep11-14 however I wouldnt be dissapointed if it had picked up all episodes in SDTV.

As I said, I would prefer to have an episode in any quality than to not have it at all.

This isn’t something that will ever be automated then, if it was the same quality it could potentially be handled by the preferring season packs, but it being lower quality it won’t win, thats something that you will need to decide if its worth it and grab it manually.

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