Sickchill: Clarity on "Allowed" vs "Preferred" options - and re-downloads

[zatricky]

Background

I'm new at SickRage (though I used SickBeard for quite a while in the past). If this is a noob question I apologise.

I've found plenty of topics online about this same issue - mostly on the "other" SR. There are also a couple of issues that have been created asking for the old "Archive on first match" option to be brought back for similar reasons. Based on the resolutions of those issues, that is not going to happen. But it does highlight the fact that there is at least some confusion about how this stuff is supposed to be done.

Apparent/Current behaviour

Currently, as https://github.com/SickRage/SickRage/wiki/Qualities-Changes explains, there are "allowed" qualities and "preferred" qualities. If a quality is in allowed but not preferred, it will be accepted. But an automatic backlog search will eventually try to replace the "allowed" with a "preferred" quality. Some users (myself included) don't want this behaviour.

Example

I have a show I've been keeping up to date on, watching as the episodes come out. The first few seasons were SD and I prefer that the new seasons be HD. I have NO desire to waste bandwidth/diskspace/etc pointlessly re-downloading the first couple of seasons. I have the preferred option set because it is the quality I want for _new_ episodes.

Old episodes are however in the "backlog" because they're merely "Allowed" but not "Preferred". Some of us _really_ don't care about that.

Apparent ways forward

Based on the wiki content, I have a few choices:

• Set SD as a "preferred" quality (stupid)
• Mark older episodes as "Skipped" or "Archived" (also stupid)
• Manually keep tabs on the download queue and manually remove them (stupid _and_ broken. SR is supposed to automate things to save time, not waste it)

What now?

How do I go about simply telling SickRage not to bother with this foolish/needless quest to use up all my diskspace/bandwidth while still preferring new downloads to use the custom quality?

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[miigotu]

There is a plan to implement a replacement for the "archive on first match" in a different, more sane way.

[rmbleeker]

I just want to leave my 2 cents here, because I disagree with one of your points.

Mark older episodes as "Skipped" or "Archived" (also stupid)

I don't think this is stupid at all and actually the intended use of the archive feature. You've watched those episodes, apparently you don't care _that_ much about diskspace so you keep them on there, but what else is the function of marking episodes as archived if not this? It's also easily and quickly done since SickRage allows you to select entire seasons and set their status all at once.

I agree that the behaviour of the allowed and preferred qualities is confusing now and should be made easier and more intuitive, but by your reasoning we might as well remove the "Archived" status for episodes since there's no other use case for it as far as I know.

From the wiki:

Archived ([Quality])

• Generally used to mark a episode as downloaded and watched
• ...
• this is a manual setting for keeping track of physical episodes (ie. on a disc you own) when using SickRage as a collection manager

[zatricky]

I'm not the only one who watches the episodes (and I'm sure this applies to other people as well). In my case each viewer has their own library management app and has read-only access to the content.

The main reason it is stupid is because it shouldn't be necessary. Perhaps I should have said that instead. ;)

Elsewhere (can't find a link now) I've read that the Archive option is intended to say that the episode has been moved away from the storage SickRage is managing.

Another workaround I found now is to mark an SD download as being HD. Even doing a "re-scan" doesn't change it back.

At least I can use the "Episode Status Management" feature to change them all relatively quickly.

[rmbleeker]

I'm not the only one who watches the episodes (and I'm sure this applies to other people as well). In my case each viewer has their own library management app and has read-only access to the content.

I have the exact same situation. But because all the other users of the content have their own way of managing their libraries, the status in SickRage is irrelevant to them.

The main reason it is stupid is because it shouldn't be necessary. Perhaps I should have said that instead. ;)

To that I agree

Elsewhere (can't find a link now) I've read that the Archive option is intended to say that the episode has been moved away from the storage SickRage is managing.

I've read that somewhere too, but since that's supposedly done automatically by SickRage it's not really relevant to this issue.

Another workaround I found now is to mark an SD download as being HD. Even doing a "re-scan" doesn't change it back.

If you consider marking episodes as archived a work-around, doing this is an even uglier work-around in my opinion. You can easily switch back and forth between "Downloaded" and "Archived" status with the same quality description. However it's difficult to sort your SD content that's mislabelled as HD content from the actual HD content, since SickRage won't do this for you. And coming back to your first point: an accurate quality description _does_ matter to the other viewers of the content SickRage has downloaded in my household. So I still think marking those older episodes that you don't want to update with higher quality files as "Archived" is the way to go for now.

[zatricky]

I've marked all my older content as Archived so long.
@miigotu, since there is a plan in place, is there an issue for it already that this should be duped against?

[neoatomic]

Going to close this for now, as we are already looking to see if we can bring back an similar "archive on first match" function.

Feel free to update the issue with idea's etc.

[BWMuller]

Not sure if this has been addressed yet or if I am understanding it incorrectly, but is it not possible to just have a check box in the settings screen for "Don't replace allowed with preferred episodes", thus disallowing the replacement of allowed episodes over the entire system. That way if a series does become available in 720p HDTV or such non of the older SD quality will be replaced because they are still allowed.

[ngodber]

I just got bitten by this oddity in behavior. Has there been any further movement on this issue or s it still standing as is. I came across this because I wanted to set the order of quality that was preferred to minimise download/diskusage. Came back to find sickrage attempting to re-download half my library!

[Windza]

I'm another user bitten by this behaviour... set up SR before going to bed and woke up to find ~350 episodes queued in SAB and more being added!
As far as I can tell, it's really just a poor choice of language that misleads the user when setting these options... in fact, I'm not sure why this language was changed from Sickbeard which uses the words "Initial" (vs. Allowed) and "Archive" (vs. Preferred) which makes sooo much more sense...

In my mind, the ideal behaviour would be to have it replicate the Sickbeard options (i.e. "Initial" and "Archive" listings) but add a "Preference/Priority" number that can be set against each option in the listing.
The intent here would be that SR would look first at the "Initial" listing and search for qualities in order of preference until it made a hit and then grab that result. Archive would work identically.
See mock option screen for a visual of what I'm suggesting.

[voor]

For anybody stumbling upon this old topic from google searches. My use case was I expanded storage, and wanted to increase quality from 720p to 1080p, this caused my backlog searches to go ballistic since everything was 720p. So I did the following:

Go into Manage > Episode Status Management

1. Search for everything that has a lower quality _for example: Downloaded (720p HDTV)_
2. Make them all as _Archived (720p HDTV)_ and repeat this for the other qualities.

[syco]

Hi, any update on this?
is it in the pipeline for a (not too far) future release?