Can you remind me again why there’s no option to search for cutoff unmet episodes? I have 31 pages of these and it would be very cumbersome to go through each page and use the “search for all selected” button.
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Generally speaking: because it’s usually not useful at all to do this.
Sonarr’s philosophy is to monitor RSS feeds and grab desired episodes as they appear.
When adding a series to sonarr which already has a number of seasons/episodes, you can choose to add the series and immediately kick off a search for old episodes.
If that search didn’t turn up any results, it’s not going to turn up results tomorrow or next week or the week after. Unless a desired episode would be (re)posted, but then it would appear in the RSS feed anyway and sonarr would grab it.
It’s like going to the library looking for a particular book.
The first time you want to search the entire library and their archives, to know if the library has the book or not. Next week, you’re not going to search the entire library again, right? That would be silly, because you already know they don’t have it in their archives. You just have a look at the bookshelf with newly acquired books, maybe meanwhile they have bought the book you want. And you come back every week, just to check out the new shelf.
Anyway, if you have added a lot of series and have a lot of things to backfill, I feel it’s easier to keep an overview by having sonarr do a search on e.g. an entire series or particular seasons. It’s also much more economical when considering API calls to your indexer(s).
If you click the search button on season level, sonarr will make a single “give me all releases for season x of series y” call to your indexer.
Searching on series level, the season call is repeated for each season, so for 5 seasons you’d use only 5 calls.
(I’m omitting some details where sonarr might make a few more calls, but that’s the general idea)
If you search from the cutoff unmet page, it’s making a call for every single episode…
Ok, that totally makes sense up to a certain point. What if your Sonarr machine is not turned on 24/7 and it misses an RSS feed of a certain episode? The next time you turn on the machine, you need to make sure that it did not miss any “announcement” for a certain episode. That is my use case. And everytime I search selected episodes from the cutoff unmet page, I have a lot of new things getting downloaded.
I can do the search from the series level, yes, but if you have a lot of TV series in there it also gets cumbersome. But if you have a way to do a series level search for ALL TV series in your library, then that will solve the problem, no?
It’ll exist in v3.
Ok. Great. But why don’t you set an option to search all “seasons” in all “tv series” too so that it can save a lot of API requests?
If Sonarr does a search for multiple episodes in a season it does a season search, not one for each episode.
Right. And this is the same as checking for each episode if the cutoff is already met, no?
Not really sure what you mean.
My goal is to update all cutoff unmet episodes with the least API requests to the server as possible. As far as I understand, doing a “season search” triggers significantly less API requests compared to doing an “episode search”. If, say, there’s 10 episodes for one season and they all need to be “updated” (because my machine was turned off for a long time), will doing a season search (1 API request) have the same effect as doing an episode search for all (10 API requests)? I hope that is clear enough.
Assuming the indexer properly returns results for a season search (some “indexers” through Jackett don’t and return 0 results), then a season search will have the same effect.
Will there be an option in the future to do a season search for all tv shows?
For every season of every series?
No.
Won’t doing a “search all seasons” be smarter than “searching for all cutoff unmet episodes” if they have the same effect anyway?
No, it’ll aggregate searches in the exact same way.
But I thought triggering a season search will produce less API calls compared to searching for all cutoff unmet for the same season? I’m not sure I’m following here.
Correct.
A simple example: If you have two episodes missing and they’re both from the same season and you tell Sonarr to search for all missing, it’ll search for them via a season search.
That’s what I mean by aggregating in the same way.
Right. And that’s 1 vs. 2 api calls. So, wouldn’t be a smarter option?
1 season search is the same as 1 season search if multiple episodes are missing in the same season. Not sure where you’re getting two API calls from.
For example, there’s 1 season that has 10 cutoff unmet episodes. You said that if you do a season search for that, you get 1 api call but effectively searching all 10 cutoff unmet episodes. Compare this to doing a search for all those 10 cutoff unmet episodes, which produces 10 api calls. Like I said, I’m not sure if I’m following what you mean.
Sorry, I put missing instead of cutoff unmet. Missing and cutoff unmet are handled the same way in that regard, so your example is the exact same as mine, except with 10 episodes instead of 2.
Sonarr will make 1 API call via a season search for those 10 episodes.