arr-quality-profiles

Arr Quality Profiles

A quality profile answers two questions: what may this app grab, and when may it stop looking. Most "the arr is behaving insanely" reports are one of those two answers being wrong in a way the UI does not make obvious.

Assumes arr-connect for the API pattern. Read the whole profile object, modify, PUT it back, read it again.

The model, briefly

A profile has an allowed quality list (an ordered ladder, with optional groups), a cutoff (the rung at which "good enough" is reached), a set of custom format scores, and a cutoffFormatScore (the format score at which format-driven upgrading stops).

Two independent stop conditions, and both must be reachable:

• Quality cutoff reached, and
• Format score at or above cutoffFormatScore.

If either is unreachable by any release that actually exists, the app never considers the item done and keeps searching forever.

curl -sf -H "X-Api-Key: $ARR_KEY" "$ARR_URL/api/v3/qualityprofile" \
  | jq '.[] | {id, name, cutoff, cutoffFormatScore, upgradeAllowed,
               allowed: [.items[] | select(.allowed) | (.quality.name // .name)]}'

Run that first, every time. Profile ids are per-instance. Any document that tells you "use profile 6" is describing someone else's install.

Trap: cutoffFormatScore left at 10000 causes endless upgrade storms

This is the highest-value item in this skill.

Several popular profile templates ship cutoffFormatScore: 10000 as a placeholder meaning "effectively never stop upgrading on format". If no release in existence can score 10000 under your custom format set, the app treats every item as permanently cutoff-unmet. It re-searches nightly, re-grabs marginally different releases, churns your download client, and rewrites files that were already fine.

The symptom people report is "it keeps downloading the same movie over and over" or "my seedbox is constantly busy and nothing changes".

Diagnose:

curl -sf -H "X-Api-Key: $ARR_KEY" "$ARR_URL/api/v3/qualityprofile" \
  | jq '.[] | select(.cutoffFormatScore >= 1000) | {id,name,cutoffFormatScore}'