Radarr – General Configuration Guide

Purpose: Radarr manages automated movie acquisition and lifecycle management in this environment. Much like Sonarr, the focus is not on cinephile-grade archival content, but on efficient, high-quality, highly usable media that scales cleanly and plays reliably across devices.

This environment prioritizes:

• Reasonable file sizes
• Broad playback compatibility
• Predictable automation behavior
• Minimal ongoing maintenance

High quality is important — excess is not.

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Radarr is installed natively on the Automation / Acquisition VM.

• Installed from official Radarr repositories
• Runs as a dedicated service user
• Integrated with Prowlarr for indexers
• Integrated with qBittorrent for downloads

As with the rest of the stack, containerization is intentionally avoided to keep filesystem paths simple and transparent.

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Enable:

• Rename Movies
• Replace Illegal Characters
• Analyse Video Files
• Use Hardlinks Instead of Copy
• Propers and Repacks: Prefer and Upgrade
• Rescan Movie Folder After Refresh: Always

Disable:

• Create Empty Movie Folders
• Delete Empty Folders
• Import Extra Files
• Skip Free Space Check

Minimum Free Space:

• 100 MB

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All naming formats are intentionally simple, readable, and Plex-safe.

Movie Naming: {Movie Title} ({Release Year}) {Quality Full}

Movie Folder: {Movie Title} ({Release Year})

This structure ensures:

• Plex compatibility
• Easy human readability
• Safe upgrades and replacements
• Clean coexistence with Unmanic post-processing

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This environment explicitly avoids:

• Remuxes
• Disc images
• Full UHD pipelines
• Excessively large encodes with marginal gains

A clean 1080p WEB or Bluray encode represents the best balance point between quality, size, and playback compatibility.

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Create ONE profile only. Remove all others.

Profile Name:

• All Acceptable

Upgrades:

• Enabled
• Upgrade Until: Bluray-1080p

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These limits are critical to enforcing efficiency.

All 4K and Remux qualities are effectively blocked through both quality disablement and custom format penalties.

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Scoring is based on information from TRaSH Guides, but intentionally adjusted to avoid archive-grade bloat.

Positive Scores:

• WEB Tier 01: 1500
• WEB Tier 02: 1000
• WEB Tier 03: 750
• WEB Scene: 400
• Repack v3: 100
• Repack v2: 75
• Repack / Proper: 50

Negative / Blocked Scores:

• LQ: -100
• LQ (Release Title): -100
• BR-DISK: -10000
• Extras: -10000
• Upscaled: -10000

Minimum Custom Format Score:

• 500

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Single hard-block release profile:

• Name: Hard Block
• Enabled: Yes
• Must Not Contain: MeGusta
• Indexer: Any

This serves as a final guardrail against consistently poor encodes.

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Radarr does not manage indexers directly.

• All indexers are supplied via Prowlarr
• Jackett supplements unsupported edge cases
• Radarr remains intentionally minimal in indexer logic

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qBittorrent is recommended.

Completed Download Handling:

• Enable: Yes
• Redownload Failed: Yes
• Redownload Failed (Interactive): Yes

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• Unmanic is responsible for post-download optimization.
• File size and scoring constraints are deliberate.
• This configuration is designed to operate unattended.

If Radarr requires frequent manual correction, the issue is almost always upstream.

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This page documents a real-world, production Radarr configuration, aligned with the same philosophy as Sonarr.