Just recently switched to Sonarr from Sickbeard - very impressed - except it doesnt support searching torrent providers for episodes - this would be really useful for filling holes in seasons where stuff is missing on usenet. Couch potato does this really well, surely the code can be ‘borrowed’ 
Not sure what you mean.
As explained in the ((FAQ)) Sonarr doesn’t automatically search for missing episodes, but does watch RSS feeds for releases. Sonarr only supports searching on sites that have an API, if you want to search on sites that don’t have a proper API take a look at Jackett, which will work alongside Sonarr.
The problems is… as proud as you clearly are of your flawless logic to only try once to look for an episode then give up forever…it doesn’t work in practice. Here I was just sitting down to watch Last Week Tonight…on a Tuesday. But oh it isn’t there, why not? My machine is on 24 hours, it should have read the magical RSS feed…but it didn’t work, so I don’t have the show. I go to Sonarr, and see the “missing episode” icon. I click on it which brings up 12 versions across nzb and torrent and pick one.
This happens all. the. time. Clearly the logic doesn’t work. It didn’t download the show. I moved over from Sickbeard, I thought it was the promise land! I may have donated to you guys…can I get my money back?
Or better yet I would pay you for your time if you could just make a damn routine to get the missing episodes, let me know what it costs, I am serious I will you pay you to fix this!
What a great way to ask for help…
Where does it say it only looks once?
Watching the RSS feed means it’s constantly looking at the new releases and grabbing things when they’re available and match all the restrictions. RSS is the most logical way to fill in missing episodes, searching because an episode might be available is inefficient and multiplied by the number of users and episodes wouldn’t be a small impact.
Besides your machine being on there are lots of other variables, connection to the indexers, previous grabs that failed, your indexer(s) never having the episode on the feed. The only way to know for sure is looking at ((debug logs)), that will show you every release Sonarr processed and whether it was accepted or rejected (and why it was rejected).
It happens, but far from all the time, unless your indexer(s) are not reliable or something else is affecting it, otherwise there would be a never ending list of threads with this issue and there aren’t.
Thanks, maybe? and no…
That’s not how we operate, if there is a legitimate issue that we can determine from logs we’ll fix it, but without any logs or information to go on we can’t help.
Markus,
Thanks for replying. Please accept my apologies I was frustrated at the time, because Sonarr has never really worked well, as I said it misses episodes.
I do stand by my position, it sounds like you are developing software to work in a “perfect environment” not to deal with missed connections etc? Seems like you are blaming the indexers…the server, etc. I don’t think you need to defend yourself or the software at all it is good stuff.
I am open to troubleshooting, is there a guide for that? I haven’t looked at the logs yet, but my impression is there is no error but yet Sonarr just thinks the episode has not been posted yet. But I guess it would have been some failure of RSS. I will check it out!
If we can figure this out, I will donate a whole bunch of money!! I appreciate quality products and I am willing to pay.
Not at all, Sonarr deals with imperfect indexers in a couple ways:
- It doesn’t constantly connect to indexers when they are failing (or rejecting connections due to too many API calls)
- If the indexer supports it, it will page back through RSS releases to find releases it would have otherwise missed (and logs if it is unable to do so).
Then there are failed downloads, if Sonarr tries all the releases it sees and they all fail it’s not going to be able to do anything about that, if you manually grabbed one of those releases and it succeeded then that generally tells us that it failed early likely due to propagation and it worked later when it was propagated.
No guide, it’s going to vary case by case, but we absolutely need ((debug logs)) of RSS syncs when you expected a release to be grabbed, not of a search after the fact, because we need to see what Sonarr saw at the time, not what it sees now. You can also check the history for an episode Sonarr didn’t grab and see if something was grabbed and whether it failed. We’ll also need to know whether you’re using usenet or torrents, and whether you’re relying on paid or free indexers or public or private trackers.
As well as:
Sonarr version (exact version):
Mono version (if Sonarr is not running on Windows):
OS:
A release being rejected is not logged as an error as your logs would be full of errors with rejections, when Sonarr sees possibly hundreds of releases each RSS sync and rejects all but a few of them for various reasons.
OK, I looked into the debug log. Using the example of the Last week tonight episode, I see the RSS sync that grabbed the episode, and then it was submitted to SABnzbd and then the trail goes dark. There is no record in SABnzbd history of the episode downloading whether successfully unpacked or not. I do recall seeing downloading episodes go into the history in SABnzbd and then disappear, when I happened to be looking at the web interface, but I can’t be sure what happened here.
I did see that SABnzbd was way out of date, so I updated to 2.1.0 version. Sonarr is latest version 2.0.0.4949.
Perhaps it is the SABnzbd integration that was a problem, I’ll keep an eye on it and see if the update helps.
So this does illustrate my point. Sonarr sent the download to SABnzbd, something happened and it never got the notification back the download unpacked or whatever happens under the covers. The Sonarr web interface shows the episode as “missing” so clearly the software knows programmatically the show is missing. But there is no “cleanup” or handling of it, it just stays in the missing state until I manually search and pick the episode. Here is where the Sickbeard logic would go back and try these missing episodes again periodically. Just a difference in philosophy I guess. I am a big fan of accounting for “unknowns” because you can never code for every possible scenario, so why wouldn’t there be a cleanup type of process. S*** happens and will always happen, so why not plan for it.
I hope the SABnzbd update might help that situation at any rate.
Or, go back to Sickbeard, which is clearly superior.
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So either it was successfully imported and the history was removed because you have Completed Download Handling: Remove enabled in Sonarr or it failed, Sonarr removed it (if Failed Download Handling: Remove is enabled) and would have searched for a new release if Failed Download Handling: Redownload is enabled.
These are the defaults:
What does Sonarr’s history show, better yet, look at the history for that particular episode (click to open the episode details modal wherever that episode is listed, calendar, series details, etc) and post a screenshot of the history tab.
Since you’re using SAB I know you’re using usenet, but you haven’t provided any of the other information I asked about. If you want to get things working, give us the information we’re asking for, but at this point I feel you’re more focused on the differences between SB and Sonarr and aren’t focused on solving the issue.
Given the limited information I do have, my guess is what I commented before, grabs failing due to propagation and working later when found via manual search, because they are now propagated, but an automatic search would still fail due to them being blacklisted already.
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