@MaleEgo The restrictions are OR, so I’ve got the usual suspects in there, x265, h265, hevc, and that has done the trick thus far. You will quickly see if a group tags theirs in some other way that requires a different tag in any case.
“Building on” my musings earlier about the category thing that seems to indicate that Sonarr looks at torrent client rather than the directory to identify whether an existing quality target has been met. If that is so, then “my” method should still work, have two instances, one that downloads the x264, the other the h265, going into separate categories in the torrent client.
You would still have the same result insofar as having to clean up/remove the x264’s manually but on principle should then let you get 720p and above of both encodes. Will adjust one of the shows I’m following to see if it works like that and get back to you, unless I hear otherwise first.
As far as the category method goes there’s nothing much to it. When you add a download client you specify which category to use in that client. If you use different categories in each sonarr instance sonarr appears to treat the downloads from each completely separated, allowing for duplicates (which you don’t normally want but in this particular setup you do, since sonarr can’t mix & match 264 and 265, because the restrictions are set globally on the indexer tab rather than per indexer or any other way that would permit mix & match).
If that helped?
Quick edit: Doesn’t seem to work like that in hindsight, when temporarily changing the quality requirement on my “SD” instance for one of the shows to 720/1080 and doing a rescan the existing HEVC 720 in this case is still seen by Sonarr and thus (I assume) it won’t even try to download an x264 of the same way. Which (probably) means that it won’t try the other way around either since to Sonarr 720 is 720, encoding doesn’t play into it. It works for me since I go for a straight up quality upgrade. You could get somewhatish the same result by going 720 x264 and 1080 HEVC but eh. If you’re going for the ‘best’ quality as I gather you are, then that’s probably not viable either.