Quality presets in plain language

Status: Accepted · Audience: Operator · Area: D — Content & household

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Purpose

Let someone choose what quality they want without learning what a custom format is.

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

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

Behaviour

The question is asked in the operator’s terms

Preset	Means	Roughly
Space-saving	Good enough on a laptop or tablet	720p–1080p, smaller encodes
Balanced (default)	Looks right on a TV, sensible file sizes	1080p, good encodes
High quality	Best 1080p available, size secondary	1080p, high-bitrate
Maximum	4K where it exists, HDR preserved	2160p, very large files

Each preset states its practical consequence — approximate size per hour and whether a typical client will need to transcode — because that’s what the choice actually costs.

Presets map to community-maintained profiles

Presets are a friendly surface over Recyclarr’s TRaSH-guide profiles, not a parallel quality system. The community maintains the hard part; lemonfiber translates the question.

This matters for durability: when release-group scoring shifts, the upstream guides update and Recyclarr syncs it. A bespoke scoring system would rot.

Transcoding consequences are stated up front

Choosing Maximum on a machine that cannot hardware-transcode means every household member watching on a device that can’t direct-play 4K HDR will hit CPU-bound transcoding — which on Docker for macOS or Windows means it will not work well.

lemonfiber knows the platform and the Jellyfin mode (ADR-0007), so it can say this before the choice rather than after the complaints.

Per-type overrides, without leaving plain language

Different presets per media type are supported — Maximum for film, Balanced for television is a common and sensible split, since a series is many times the volume of a film.

The full depth remains reachable

Presets are a starting point, not a ceiling. An operator who wants to hand-tune custom formats does so directly in the *arr, and C9 protects that work from being reverted.

Changes are forward-looking

Changing a preset affects future acquisitions. It does not retroactively upgrade an existing library unless the operator explicitly asks for that — which is a large, bandwidth-expensive operation and must never be a side effect.

States

State	Meaning
unset	No preset chosen; *arr defaults in force
applied	Preset synced and active
overridden	Per-type presets differ from the global choice
customised	Operator has hand-edited profiles; preset no longer authoritative
sync-failed	Preset could not be applied

Edge cases

Situation	Behaviour
Maximum chosen without hardware transcoding	State the consequence for household playback before confirming.
Preset chosen with limited disk	Project storage need against free space and warn if implausible.
Operator hand-edited profiles	Report customised; do not overwrite. Applying a preset then requires explicit consent.
Upstream guides changed	Sync on schedule; report meaningful changes rather than applying silently.
Upstream unreachable	Keep the current profiles; report that sync is stale. Never fall back to unconfigured.
Preset lowered after building a library	Affects future grabs only. State this explicitly — the expectation is often the opposite.
Operator wants existing content upgraded	Supported as an explicit, separate action with its bandwidth and time cost stated.
Media type has no meaningful preset	Books and audiobooks have different quality axes; present format preferences instead of resolution.
Preset conflicts with an indexer’s available releases	Report that few or no releases match, distinguishing it from an indexer failure.
Two presets produce identical profiles for a type	Collapse them rather than presenting a distinction without a difference.

Acceptance criteria

ID	Requirement
D2-R1	Quality MUST be selectable in plain language without reference to custom formats or scoring.
D2-R2	Each preset MUST state its practical consequence — approximate size and transcoding implications.
D2-R3	Presets MUST map to community-maintained profiles rather than a bespoke scoring system.
D2-R4	Where the platform cannot hardware-transcode, selecting a preset requiring transcoding MUST warn before confirmation.
D2-R5	Per-media-type presets MUST be supported.
D2-R6	Changing a preset MUST state that it affects future acquisitions only.
D2-R7	Upgrading existing content MUST be a separate explicit action with its cost stated.
D2-R8	Hand-edited profiles MUST be detected and MUST NOT be overwritten without explicit consent.
D2-R9	An unreachable upstream guide source MUST leave existing profiles intact and MUST report staleness.
D2-R10	Projected storage requirement MUST be compared against available space, with a warning where implausible.
D2-R11	Media types without a resolution axis MUST present appropriate alternative options.
D2-R12	A preset yielding no matching releases MUST be reported distinctly from an indexer failure.

Related

• D1 Service auto-wiring — Recyclarr wiring
• C9 Drift detection — protecting hand-tuned profiles
• D5 Disk space — the storage consequence
• ADR-0007 Dual-mode Jellyfin
• G2 Plain-language layer