Quality presets

Quality configuration is the deepest rabbit hole in this ecosystem. The community guides are excellent and run to dozens of pages of custom formats, scoring, release groups and repack handling. Doing it properly by hand takes an evening and real domain knowledge.

Your actual question is simpler: how good should this look, and how much disk am I willing to spend? Everything else is implementation.

The four presets

Preset	Means	Resolution	Roughly	Playback
space-saving	Good enough on a laptop or tablet	720p–1080p, smaller encodes	about 0.5–1 GB per hour	plays directly on virtually any device
balanced	Looks right on a TV, at sensible file sizes	1080p, good encodes	about 2–3 GB per hour	plays directly on most devices
high-quality	The best 1080p available; size is secondary	1080p, high-bitrate	about 4–6 GB per hour	plays directly on most devices; a weak client may transcode
maximum	4K where it exists, with HDR preserved	2160p, HDR preserved	about 10–25 GB per hour	4K HDR often needs transcoding on a device that cannot play it directly, which is CPU-bound without hardware support

balanced is the default, and it is the right answer far more often than people expect.

Seeing where you stand

$ lemonfiber quality show

That reports the choice in force and what each preset means and costs, so you can compare before changing anything.

Choosing

$ lemonfiber quality set balanced

Different media types can differ. Maximum for film and balanced for television is a common and sensible split, because a series is many times the volume of a film:

$ lemonfiber quality set maximum --for movies
$ lemonfiber quality set balanced --for tv

The media type is tv or movies.

The transcoding warning

If you choose a preset this machine would have to transcode in software, lemonfiber says so before applying it and waits for you to confirm:

$ lemonfiber quality set maximum --confirm

This is not a formality. Choosing maximum on a machine that cannot hardware transcode means every household member watching on a device that cannot play 4K HDR directly hits CPU-bound transcoding — which on Docker for macOS or Windows does not work well. lemonfiber knows your platform and how Jellyfin is running, so it can tell you before the choice rather than after the complaints.

Changing a preset only affects what comes next

This is the expectation people most often have backwards. A preset change applies to future acquisitions. It does not go back through your library and re-download what is already there.

If that is genuinely what you want, it is a separate, explicit action, because it is large and expensive in bandwidth:

$ lemonfiber quality upgrade
$ lemonfiber quality upgrade --confirm

The first run states the cost and does nothing. The second triggers the re-search, having let you see what you are asking for.

Your own tuning is safe

Presets are a starting point, not a ceiling. Under the surface they map onto the community-maintained quality profiles that Recyclarr syncs, rather than a parallel scoring system of lemonfiber’s own — so when release-group scoring shifts upstream, your profiles follow it instead of rotting.

If you hand-edit those profiles, lemonfiber notices and reports the configuration as customised. It does not overwrite your work. Applying a preset over hand edits takes explicit consent:

$ lemonfiber quality reapply

That re-asserts the recorded preset over a Recyclarr configuration you have edited. An ordinary run keeps your edits; this is the command that lets the preset win instead. The same protection covers the rest of the stack — see Adopt and reset.

When the upstream guides are unreachable

Your existing profiles stay exactly as they are, and lemonfiber reports that the sync is stale. It never falls back to unconfigured, because a quiet return to defaults is the kind of change nobody notices until the wrong releases start arriving.

Books and audiobooks

Resolution is not a meaningful axis for a book, so those media types are presented with format preferences instead of a picture-quality preset.

When nothing matches

A preset that no available release satisfies is reported as exactly that — distinct from an indexer that is failing. The two look identical from outside (nothing arrives) and have completely different remedies: relax the preset, or fix the indexer.

If you are not sure which is happening, Where is my show? will tell you whether releases were found and rejected, or never found at all.

Related

• Words we use — quality profile, custom format, bitrate, transcode
• D2 Quality presets in plain language — the requirements behind this page