Specials are rarely downloaded - e.g Doctor Who

Help & Support
1

Specials are rarely download. For example, I am monitoring the latest Doctor Who special. In Sonarr it is listed as "Doctor Who (2005) - 0x154 - Twice Upon A Time ".

However, doing a manual search, the found episodes are named differently, e.g.“Doctor.Who.2005.S11E00.Twice.Upon.A.Time.Christmas.Special.1080p.HDTV.H264-MTB[rartv]”

Next to the found episodes there is an exclamation mark with the message “Unable to parse episodes from release name” It is also not possible to manually download the episode.

  1. Why is this (and other) specials named differently from the actual releases?
  2. It would be helpful if Sonarr would let me manually download episodes found by the manual search, in spite of the error message.

Sonarr version (exact version): = 2.0.0.5085

1 Like
2

SickBeard never downloaded specials either. If you look, you’ll see that naming conventions are all over the place for these special episodes (S00E154 v S11E00 v “Christmas Special” v who knows what), so most of the downloaders just don’t even try.

I’d agree 100% that it would be nice if it would let us download the episode of our choice once it’s found some potential candidates.

3

What I have found is that I need to for specials, especially for British shows:

  1. get the NZB from an indexer
  2. import it into NZBget or whatever you use.
  3. move and rename the file to S00Exx with xx depending on how Sonarr lists it in the specials to the series folder.
  4. do a scan and sonarr will pick it right up.
  5. Use organize to have Sonarr move the file to it’s liking.
  6. remove the extra flies in the series folder, such as the files/folders you moved there prior to the organize.

Once organize is done it moves them into the proper folders and you can cleanup the series folders.

*****An important note, always do an organize BEFORE deleting any files/folders in a series folder. A scan will only find the files but WILL NOT move them, only organize will. Learned that one the hard way.

4

Agree with FreeMan in that I can use Sonarr to do a manual search for special and it will find them … BUT … Sonarr wil NOT let me download the file. It whines that the files that it found are “Unknown Series” … BUT it found the files!!!
Very irritating. I then have to go through the whole procedure noted by user psimoon

5

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