I’m getting a tad frustrated with the movies that get downloaded by my radarr setup. Mostly its the letterboxing being encoded in the file which on an ultrawide results in a full black border. Also just shoddy quality even on huge files.
With anime there is seadex and some reviewers here and there that give opinions on the best release to grab, but is there something like that for movies or is there only trash guides? One of the things that I’ve seen in anime reviews is that sometimes the bluray is plain old worse quality compared to the streaming platforms. Does anyone know of places where that gets noted?
Should I just download the largest file and get hardware encode and decode supporting gpu? Will I have encryption problems if I self encode from disk rips instead of using media player ready files?
It sounds like you just need some good release groups to focus on. Ditch automation and sort out what exactly you want, then phase back in radarr.
This is kinda what I’m currently doing. Everything manually and several times 20-60gb later the file is junk for one reason or another. It would be handy if there was some kind of release group ranking but I haven’t seen it if it exists, and the odd comment with peoples favourites are mostly names I’ve only seen once or twice if at all. Then many of the groups I’ve picked out of the hat have inconsistent quality.
I guess I’ll just have to keep going until I have my own ranking list.
The group tiers you’re talking about exist and are called trash guides. If you’re only on public trackers the groups might not be as prevalent, but e.g. TorrentLeech is more likely to have them.
The letterboxing with ultra wide monitors might be possible to solve locally with your video player. For MPV there’s the dynamic-crop.lua script, which is not perfect but works quite well.
I’m using mpv with Jellyfin on my PC through jellyfin-mpv-shim.
Edit: For Windows you might want to check out MPC-BE. I’ve found some mentions of “View -> Video Frame -> Touch Window From Outside” but I never tried it.
It sounds like you just need better sources for downloads. Radarr has quality settings but they’re not especially accurate. I’ve mostly left those settings alone and added some good torrent and usenet sources.
I use Trash Guides + experience with past downloaded releases to decide what is worth it. Trash Guides sorts them in different tiers. This way you can decide what is worth it.
Downloading bluray rips will give you the best quality. Any DRM should be removed when it’s ripped. Movies are usually 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 and will be letterboxed since that’s wider than a normal 16:9 TV. You can either crop it out, which will require re-encoding or just zoom in while watching it. A hardware video encoder will make the files larger. I would recommend using software encoding if you have the time.
