Guide
Searching and grabbing
On this page
StreamZH finds releases on your indexers, decides which one fits each movie or episode, and grabs it: the release is handed to a download client. Every decision follows the item's quality profile and the release rules of Settings → Indexers.
How releases are found#
| Way | When | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| RSS sync | Every 60 minutes by default, StreamZH reads the newest releases of every indexer with RSS on and grabs what monitored items need | Settings → Indexers → RSS sync interval |
| Search when adding | Right after you add a movie or series with Start search for missing | Default in Settings → Indexers (Advanced) |
| Automatic search | The Search button on a movie, series, season or episode; Search all on Wanted | |
| Search for missing | A scheduled search for all missing items, on top of RSS (costs many API hits) | Settings → Indexers (Advanced), off by default, 6 to 720 hours |
| Interactive search | Manual search on a detail page: you pick the release | |
| Import lists | New items from lists are added and searched | Import lists |
An item that is already in the download queue (with the blackhole folder: grabbed in the last 12 hours) is not searched again; use Manual search to grab another release.
Interactive search#
Manual search on a movie, season or episode asks all indexers with interactive search on (this can take up to a minute when an indexer is slow) and lists the releases, best first. Sort by best match, seeders, grabs, format score or preferred score. Each row shows quality, languages, size, age, indexer, custom formats with their score and, for torrents, seeders and peers.
Show rejected also lists releases StreamZH would not grab, each with the reason (wrong quality, too big, too young, blocklisted, below the minimum format score, …). Grab anyway takes such a release after a confirmation.
Indexers → Search searches all indexers for any text without adding anything to the library, by type, category and indexer. Grabs from there go to the download queue but are not linked to a movie or series (import them with Import… in Activity).
How StreamZH picks a release#
- Releases that break a rule are rejected: quality not allowed in the profile, wrong language, outside the size limits (Settings → Quality), older than your Usenet retention or bigger than Maximum size, too young (Minimum age), hardcoded subtitles, a release profile's must (not) contain, blocklisted, fewer seeders than the indexer's Minimum seeders, below the profile's minimum custom format score, not an upgrade of the file you have.
- The rest are ranked, the first difference wins: quality (qualities of one group rank equally), PROPER/REPACK, custom format score, dual language (when the profile prefers it), the release profiles' preferred score, the preferred protocol, indexer priority, seeders and peers (torrents), size closest to the preferred size, and the newest upload.
- The best one is grabbed.
Tools → Release test shows this for any release name: paste it, optionally pick a movie or series, and StreamZH explains how it reads the name (title, year, season and episode, quality, languages, group, custom formats) and whether it would grab it, and why not.
Usenet or torrent: preference and delays#
Settings → Indexers → Usenet and torrents:
- Preferred protocol (Usenet, Torrent, No preference): which one wins when quality and score are equal.
- Usenet delay / Torrent delay (Advanced): a new release waits this long before it may be grabbed, giving a better release (or one of the preferred protocol) time to show up. Waiting releases are pending; the task Process pending releases grabs them when their time is up.
- Skip delay for the best quality (Advanced): a release with the highest quality the profile allows is grabbed at once.
Wanted#
Wanted (sidebar) has two lists:
- Missing: monitored movies and episodes without a file that are released (movies by their minimum availability, episodes by their air date). Show not yet available and Show unmonitored widen the list.
- Cutoff unmet: files below the cutoff of their profile, in the wrong language, without the dual language the profile prefers, or below the profile's Upgrade until score.
Search all missing / Search all cutoff unmet search everything on the list in the background. Select rows to search or unmonitor only those.
Failed downloads and the blocklist#
When a download fails (missing articles par2 cannot repair, a broken archive, a password StreamZH does not know) or its import fails:
- with Redownload failed on (Settings → Media Management, default), the release goes on the blocklist and StreamZH searches for another one at once;
- Remove failed downloads (Advanced) removes them from Activity and deletes their incomplete files.
Activity → Blocklist lists the blocked releases with the reason. Remove one to allow it again, or Clear all. Blocklisted releases are never grabbed by automatic searches; Manual search shows them as rejected.
Side-by-side mode#
While you migrate from Radarr and Sonarr, the side-by-side mode (Settings → Migration) stops StreamZH from grabbing anything by itself: no RSS sync, no automatic or scheduled searches, no searches after failures or from import lists. Searching and grabbing by hand still work. See Migration.