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automation:radarr

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.

Installation Overview

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.

Media Management

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

Naming Configuration

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

File Naming Convention

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

Folder Naming Convention

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

This structure ensures:

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

Quality Philosophy

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.

Quality Profile

Create ONE profile only. Remove all others.

Profile Name:

  • All Acceptable

Upgrades:

  • Enabled
  • Upgrade Until: Bluray-1080p

Enabled Qualities

Quality Enabled
Bluray-1080p Yes
WEB 1080p Yes
HDTV-1080p Yes
Bluray-720p Yes
WEB 720p Yes
HDTV-720p Yes

Disabled Qualities

Quality Enabled
Bluray-2160p Remux No
Bluray-2160p No
WEB 2160p No
HDTV-2160p No
Bluray-1080p Remux No
DVD No
SDTV No
Raw-HD No
Unknown No

Quality Size Limits

These limits are critical to enforcing efficiency.

Quality Max Size
720p HDTV / WEB 5.0 GiB
1080p HDTV / WEB 10.0 GiB
1080p Bluray 10.0 GiB

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

Custom Format Scoring

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

Release Profile

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.

Indexers

Radarr does not manage indexers directly.

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

Download Client

qBittorrent is recommended.

Completed Download Handling:

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

Operational Notes

  • 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.

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

automation/radarr.txt · Last modified: by privacyl0st