From what I’ve seen and understood, in the quality, users choose for a show their quality profile which can include several possibilities.
My problem/issue is the cutoff, it seems I can only choose one as cutoff (where it will stop trying when met). But the way I see it, I would need to cutoff of ANY of those qualities (within a quality profile) is met…
Or do I misunderstood?
***Thanks in advance for our help, I love NZBDrone so far…
The wiki is really self explanatory, even has a couple of examples:
You’re right, thanks.
I’ll read up 
ok, so in this example:
HDTV 720p
Default HDTV 720p profile.
Allowed
Bluray 720p WEBDL 720p HDTV 720p
Cutoff
WEBDL 720p
Scenario 1
No existing file exists. if NzbDrone finds a WEBDL 720p release it would grab it.
Scenario 2
Existing file exists at HDTV 720p. If a Bluray720p release is found it will be grabbed because the cutoff has not been met
Scenario 3
Existing file exists at WEBDL 720p. If a Bluray720p release is found it will not be grabbed because the cutoff has been met.
What if I want the cutoff to be whatever of those choices… I mean, if whatever of those qualities is downloaded, done, never look/try for another… Now, it seems that if I already have other than the cutoff one, it will still try to find the cutoff one… From my point of view, any of those choice is fine…
If you know what I mean…
I think there needs to be an option whereby you tell ND to no longer look for a higher quality, per episode, rather than by series.
Yeah, it would be pretty helpful if we could just say that anything will do and once you have a file, it does not need to be upgraded.
Let’s take a long-running series like One Piece for example. It started 15 years ago so obviously many episodes are not available in HD and probably never will be. Yet for new episodes I want 720p releases. This means that I’ve selected a quality profile with 720p as a cutoff, meaning that Drone will keep looking for the old episodes unless I manually tell it not to. I’d rather just have a quality profile without a cutoff or one where the cutoff is only looked at for the initial download. Or maybe even separate “cutoff” and “preferred quality” so that the cutoff can be used to say that an episode will need at least that quality while the preferred quality marks the quality that a file should have at most before archiving it.
sfnetwork. If you set the cutoff at the lowest quality it will on grab once.
CBers. NO absolutely not, you do not want to add that much complexity. If you’re configuring something per episode, use unmonitor!
NMe. 1. Thats what cutoff is for, and actually, the default profiles do just that.
2. Cutoff would be useless for initial download coz there wouldn’t be a existing download to compare the cutoff against.
3. The ‘at least quality’ (your ‘cutoff’) is the lowest quality in the profile. Your ‘preferred quality’ as you say IS the cutoff.
@taloth - Unmonitor per episode?
yes, the nice bookmark icon you see in front of the series, season and episode? That’s what determine if drone will automatically grab anything for it.
Especially visible & useful in the series view, but also accessible by clicking the episode title in Wanted.
(Hover over it, “Toggle monitored status”)
I’ve already turned off monitoring for old episodes I have deleted, so looks like i need to do they same for all episodes who’s quality I am happy with.
Why does ND recognise mp4 files as SD?
Doesn’t it use MediaInfo to determine quality?
I ask, as a lot of my episodes are 720p mp4 files.
Quality is initially determined by parsing the filename. If it’s not in the filename, drone defaults to the extension, which is SDTV for mp4. (There is a trello card about implementing media info for that purpose)
Please note that almost all scene releases have quality in the filename, so if you don’t that’s probably due to the naming scheme you had in sickbeard.
If you have an old episode in an old series you’re happy with, but want higher qualities for new episodes. unmonitored them. If it’s the same quality as you want for new episodes you’ll need to reconfigure the quality profile.
@Taloth said:
NMe. 1. Thats what cutoff is for, and actually, the default profiles do just that.
2. Cutoff would be useless for initial download coz there wouldn’t be a existing download to compare the cutoff against.
3. The ‘at least quality’ (your ‘cutoff’) is the lowest quality in the profile. Your ‘preferred quality’ as you say IS the cutoff.
That still leaves the problem I posed. If you have a series that started out as SD and is available in HD for newer seasons, you don’t want it to bother looking for older episodes in HD. You can’t put the cutoff on SD either, because that will make Drone download SD quality over your 720p content if there is SD available. In that case the choice is to either unmonitor the relevant seasons for every series that applies (which amounts to a lot of them on my 12TB of series) or to do a lot of unnecessary requests to the indexer.
Would it be possible to change quality settings so that the cutoff is optional so that any quality in that profile serves as a cutoff? Or better, to make it toggle-able as a soft-setting: if that new setting is on and multiple qualities are available when the episode has not been downloaded yet, get the cutoff quality by preference, but if it doesn’t exist, any other quality in the profile suffices. And if an episode exists on disk that has any quality in the profile, don’t look for the cutoff quality anymore. That saves a lot of manual labor and makes it work sort of like the “any” profile does in Sickbeard.
@NMe said:
That still leaves the problem I posed. If you have a series that started out as SD and is available in HD for newer seasons, you don’t want it to bother looking for older episodes in HD. You can’t put the cutoff on SD either, because that will make Drone download SD quality over your 720p content if there is SD available. In that case the choice is to either unmonitor the relevant seasons for every series that applies (which amounts to a lot of them on my 12TB of series) or to do a lot of unnecessary requests to the indexer.
Drone doesn’t actively query indexers looking for missing episodes or episodes that haven’t met the cutoff quality. It will grab releases if they appear on the RSS feed again after being reposted.
Would it be possible to change quality settings so that the cutoff is optional so that any quality in that profile serves as a cutoff? Or better, to make it toggle-able as a soft-setting: if that new setting is on and multiple qualities are available when the episode has not been downloaded yet, get the cutoff quality by preference, but if it doesn’t exist, any other quality in the profile suffices. And if an episode exists on disk that has any quality in the profile, don’t look for the cutoff quality anymore. That saves a lot of manual labor and makes it work sort of like the “any” profile does in Sickbeard.
Set the quality to the lowest quality in the profile, once the cutoff is met or exceeded it will stop accepting new releases. The wiki page on Quality Profiles explains this in more detail (with examples): https://github.com/NzbDrone/NzbDrone/wiki/Quality-Profiles
Let me phrase it in a definition:
Cutoff is "If the existing episode file is of equal or higher quality than the cutoff, never automatically download any other file for that episode."
Thus
Cutoff is not met if the existing episode file is of lower quality than the cutoff.
This means that:
"If a higher quality version is available compared to the existing one AND the cutoff has not yet been met THEN download the highest quality version."
Drone will NEVER download a lower quality version.
This does mean, if you have a quality profile with SD & HD and Cutoff at SD, that if the SD version of a new episode gets released first it will be downloaded, and if later the HD version comes along it wont be downloaded (because cutoff was already met by the SD version)
If however both SD & HD versions are release simultaneously, the HD version will be downloaded because it has higher quality.
Personally, I suggest you look at the Season Pass function to quickly unmonitor the relevant old seasons.
Also Drone doesn’t do automatic backlog searching, it uses the indexer rss feed. So unless you actually manually trigger a search the indexer doesn’t get any more load than usual.
@markus101 said:
Set the quality to the lowest quality in the profile, once the cutoff is met or exceeded it will stop accepting new releases. The wiki page on Quality Profiles explains this in more detail (with examples): https://github.com/NzbDrone/NzbDrone/wiki/Quality-Profiles
I did, that’s why I’m confused. The advanced example at the bottom says that if you have your cutoff set at DVD and Drone has downloaded 720p, it will still attempt to download a DVD release if it can:
Existing file exists at HDTV 720p. DVD release is available and is grabbed because it is more desired than the HDTV 720p release.
Which directly contradicts Taloth’s last message:
Drone will NEVER download a lower quality version.
If the docs are outdated and Taloth is right, it should work in my situation. However, then doing what the advanced example says is impossible I think. I don’t personally need that so I’m not worried, but I would like to know which of the two statements is true. 
Thats a custom ordered quality profile. DVD is placed higher in priority than HDTV 720p so it “upgrades” to DVD when available.
Lower quality is defined in the profile, by default DVD is lower than HDTV 720p, but in a custom profile the order can be flipped.
Added a couple of newlines, but we probably should add some screenshots.
I never realized you could change the order of items there. Fair enough, works great. 
OK… Not sure if I’m missing something but there is still a scenario that is so confusing in NZBDrone for me…
I fully understand ordering the qualities, and selecting the lower as cutoff so it won’t download again…
BUT
For everything that was previously imported, the existing quality may not be the cutoff but I still don’t want it to redownload or even try; basically, if there is an episode, already, done, whatever quality setting the show has (or cutoff). My settings for future episode can be different from previous, already downloaded ones…
As an example, one imported show has quality set to HD-720P with in order:
-HDTV-720P (cutoff)
-WEBDL-720P
-Blueray-720P
But this imported show after imported, has ALL previous episodes already BUT in Bluray-720P and NZBDrone still tried to find and download HDTV-720P…
In wanted, I have a bunch of old episodes I already have but I can’t stop them since there are the future ones in this as well.
Very confused here…
sfnetwork, the highest item in the list is considered the highest quality. So atm with
-HDTV-720P (cutoff)
-WEBDL-720P
-Blueray-720P
You’re telling drone to consider HDTV better than Bluray.
Lets go about this on a different way and take one of your real scenarios.
Tell me for one of your shows:
What the existing episode qualities are and what quality you would consider ‘good enough’ for those old ones.
Which qualities would be acceptable for future episodes and what you would consider ‘good enough’ for those future episodes.