Hi,
I’m not sure how does Sonarr handles season packs? On my favourite tracker (which will hopefully get support within short time) the principle is that after a season ends (the last episode of the season is aired) a full season pack is uploaded and the individual series are removed. This is becoming more frequent at other trackers too. They have season packs for HDTV 720p, 1080p, and SD (hdtv rips and BR-rips once available), and sometimes even web-dl packs. The season packs have many seeders and even many years old packs are available with lot of seeders.
Can Sonarr’s indexer handle these season packs, if yes, in which way?
if I want an older season in full, will Sonarr locate and download the full season pack?
if I just want few episodes, will Sonarr be able to download just certain episodes from a season pack?
I am thinking about automating my TV downloads myself, and season pack support for TV shows would be great!
Idealy we could specify the quality of the pack (720p, 1080p etc…), but it would also be great if there was an option to only download internal releases for the specific sites.
If season packs are included in RSS feeds or the search results contain season packs (not always the case) then Sonarr will process them like any other release. If they are suitable for all the episodes in the season Sonarr will grab them.
Quality would follow the quality profile you setup in Sonarr, internal only would depend on the release name and release restrictions (setup in Sonarr).
Thanks markus! Well, season packs will be in the RSS feed but only for the just finished seasons, and for ongoing releases it is not a problem.
The question is for older series, which are no longer available in the RSS feed. But it is good to hear that Sonarr will process the season packs from the search results!
You say it is not always the case: could you specify what does it depends on if it is processed or not? The season packs are following the scene release naming, obviously only listing season number and no episode (for example S02, quality, groupname). Inside of the pack all the episodes follow proper scene naming too.
I don’t get it now regarding single or just a selected few episodes from the pack: Sonarr is able to locate the season pack and download only the episodes I selected from the pack without downloading the whole pack?
Some indexers don’t return season packs in the results for full seasons, just the individual episodes, if the indexer doesn’t return them, Sonarr won’t see them.
Not automatically, but you could manually grab it (outside of Sonarr) and Sonarr would automatically handle importing the missing episodes.
Thanks, this clears things up!
Since the tracker I use will be added soon using Jackett, I’m not able to test atm, but will check out this for sure.
Once I have some results, I will report back here!
I’m having some challenges with managing seasons as well. So far in my experience monitoring or not-monitoring seems to make no difference.
I have 3 x NZB Indexers and 1 x Torrent Indexer configured. All 4 are set with RSS and Search enabled. If I monitor the entire season (say a recently pass season not current). It seems that never does it download anything on it’s own. (Note: the show is also checked off as monitored). In the history / other areas, there’s no indicate it’s not downloading for something like quality etc.
If I do a search for a particular episode in a season my Torrent index will return full season packs however, Sonarr immediately just starts nabbing individual episodes via the NZB indexers instead of preferring the season pack.
The only way I’ve found around this is to disable “Search” on the NZB Indexers and then do the search for a single episode and click the season. The problem here is that Sonarr then downloads the season pack but, only imports the single episode.
If I remove the NZB Indexes from Search and do an automatic search on the whole season (or the show) it just ignores the torrent season pack like it’s not even there.
You could make sure the completed season ends up in your drone factory folder. It would process all the episodes that way. This isn’t ideal of course, and doesn’t solve the base issue.
Definite band-aid option but, would rather not even have that Drone directory in use. I believe the system is meant to use the Index profiles and I like clean set ups - band-aids can hurt when you rip them off… aka: say I redo my VM, the less ‘band-aids’ I have to remember the better
Well, thank you for bringing that feature even to my attention! That said, no way! haha - my priority is to utilize Usenet; seeding and all that crap is a PITA. I don’t mind for Season packs or as a last option if something can’t be found on Usenet but, that’s as far as it goes.
As a supplement to this… when I do a manual search of an individual episode on a Season I have fully monitored without any downloaded files… it shows the season pack Torrent, specifically saying it’s rejected because it’s a Season Pack.
I’m experimenting with this, as the private tracker I use prefers season packs once a season is finished. The single episodes are removed and season packs are created. Which is actually good.
They follow scene naming, for example:
Torrent name: Supernatural.S10.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION
Files named inside torrent:
Supernatural.S10E01.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION.mkv, etc
If this is the case, Sonarr should be able to grab the season pack if I select the whole season as monitored?
However, if I select only episode 01, then Sonarr will probably grab the season pack, but download the whole season and import only the first part, correct?
No, it shouldn’t grab it at all as its not wanted for the other episodes. Importing doesn’t check if its monitored, so if you dropped a full season pack there all episodes would be imported (assuming they are upgrades).
Sorry, I guess I’m not using the terms correctly. I didn’t wanted to say importing, but when using Sonarr’s rss or search indexer -> what happens when only a season pack is available on the private tracker:
a) if I just one a single or few episodes from the season pack
b) if I monitor the whole season and I want the whole downloaded
@markus101 do you have any additional guidance on this. I still can not get my installation to snag an SP when I’m trying to backfill past seasons. They definitely show up in the search and I’m using the two ‘top’ private TV trackers. It just passes by, snags each individual episode from Usenet (which typically don’t work out, especially for anything 3 or 4 seasons back) and then stops.
My process e.g.: a 5 season show.
Show is monitored, all season are monitored, all episodes are monitored.
Click either a. Search Show button or b. Search Season button
= no Season Pack download
I’m sure I can’t be the only one experiencing this challenge - has anyone else overcome it?
Do you see Sonarr processing them when ((debug logs)) are enabled? It only matters that they are returned through the API, if the site shows them for their search then I’d hope that they would be returned via an API search, but it probably depends on the site. Check ((debug logs)), its the only way to currently see what search results were returned and why they were rejected (for season searches).
If a single episode fails it won’t look for a full season, if multiple single episode downloads fail it still won’t look for a season because there is no knowledge shared between the different failures.
