56 Common Problems
Donald Webster edited this page 4 years ago

Movie Added, But Not Searched

  • Neither Radarr nor Sonarr actively search for missing movies automatically. Instead, a periodic query of new posts is made to all indexers configured for RSS. When a wanted or cutoff unmet movie shows up in that list, it gets downloaded. This means that until a movie is posted (or reposted), it won't get downloaded.
  • If you're adding a movie that you want now, the best option is to click the "Add and Search for movie" button, it looks like a magnifying glass. You can also go to the page for a movie you've added and click the magnifying glass "Search" button or use the Wanted view to search for Missing or Cutoff Unmet movies.

Add and Search for movie Wanted Missing Cutoff Unmet

Jackett shows more results than Radarr when manually searching

This is usually due to Radarr searching Jackett differently than you do. Radarr searches Jackett by imdbid. Now sometimes indexers might not tag releases with an imdbid or an incorrect one, so those releases will not be visible when Radarr searches. To fix that, you can enable Search by Title in the settings of the Jackett indexer.

Additionally, if the Jackett indexer does not support searching by imdbid, Radarr uses the following search string to search by release title instead: {movie title lowercase} {year}. (Examples: "prometheus 2 2018", "la même chose 2020") This can cause two problems:

  1. Some releases on your indexer do not have the year in the release name or a different year
  2. Releases on your indexer do not have the special characters or your indexer does replacing of those characters differently than we do. (Not so common)

To fix the first issue, you can enable Remove year from search string in the settings of the Jackett indexer. The second issue is more difficult to fix and we haven't found a satisfying solution yet. If you encounter the second one often, please leave a comment on this issue with example movie names, search results in Radarr, search results in Jackett, debug logs and the string used to search in Jackett.

Why can't Radarr see my files on a remote server?

This can be for various reasons, but the most common is, Radarr is running as a service, which causes one of two things:

  1. Radarr runs under the SYSTEM account by default which doesn't have access to protected remote file shares.

    Solutions:

  2. You're using a mapped network drive (not a UNC path)

    Solutions:

    • Change your paths to UNC paths (\\server\share)
    • Run Radarr.exe via the Startup Folder

Weird UI Issues

  • If you experience any weird UI issues like the Movies page not listing anything or a certain view/sort not working, try viewing in a Chrome Incognito Window or Firefox Private Window. If it works fine there, clear your browser cache and cookies for your specific ip/domain. For more information, see the Clear Cache Cookies and Local Storage wiki article.

Wanted -> Cutoff Unmet Doesn't Load

  • You probably used bulk import without setting a quality profile, either because you missed it or you did a bulk import before that option was available. Use Movies -> Movie Editor to quickly add a quality profile to every movie. You might see something like the below in your log file.
[v0.2.0.497] System.ArgumentException: Instance property 'downloadedQuality' is not defined for type 'NzbDrone.Core.Tv.Movie'

Mapped Network Drives vs UNC Paths

  • Using mapped network drives generally doesn't work very well, especially when Radarr is configured to run as a service. The better way to set shares up is using UNC paths. So instead of X:\Movies use \\Server\Movies\.
  • A key point to remember is that Radarr (and Sonarr) get path information from the downloader, so you'll also need to setup NZBGet, SABNzbd or any other downloader to use UNC paths too.

Web Interface Only Loads at localhost on Windows

Permissions

  • Radarr will need to move files away from where the downloader puts them into the final location, so this means that Radarr will need to read/write to both the source and the destination directory and files.
  • On Linux, where best practices have services running as their own user, this will probably mean using a shared group and setting folder permissions to 775 and files to 664 both in your downloader and Radarr. In umask notation, that would be 002.

Movie File and Folder Naming

  • Currently, Radarr requires that each movie be in a folder with the format Movie Title (Year)/, optionally _ or . are valid separators. To facilitate correct quality and resolution identification during import, a file name like Movie Title (Year) [Quality-Resolution].ext is best, again _ or . are valid separators too.
  • A useful tool for making these changes to your collection is filebot which has paid version in both the Apple and Windows stores, but can be found for free on their SourceForge site. It has both a GUI and CLI, so you can use whatever you're comfortable with. For the above example, {ny} expands to Name (Year) and {vf} gives the resolution like 1080p. There is nothing to infer quality, so you can fake it using {ny}/{ny} [{dim[0] >= 1280 ? 'Bluray' : 'DVD'}-{vf}] which will name anything lower than 720p to [DVD-572p] and greater or equal to 720p like [Bluray-1080p]. See Create a Folder for Each Movie for more details.
  • This limitation is a known source of concern, a feature request exists to enable the option to not use a folder for each movie and the developers have this in mind for the future.
  • The Create a Folder for Each Movie is a great source for making sure your file and folder structure will work great.

Movie Folders Named Incorrectly

  • Even if your movies are in folders already, the folders may not be named correctly. The folder name should be Movie Title (Year), having the title and year in the folder's name is critical right now.
  • Examples that will work well:
    • /mnt/Movies/A Clockwork Orange (1971)/A Clockwork Orange (1971) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    • /mnt/Kid Movies/Frozen (2013)/Frozen (2013) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
  • Examples that will work, but will require manual management:
    • By letters: /mnt/Movies/A-D/A Clockwork Orange (1971)/A Clockwork Orange (1971) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    • By rating: /mnt/Movies/R/A Clockwork Orange (1971)/A Clockwork Orange (1971) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    • By genre: /mnt/Movies/Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi/A Clockwork Orange (1971)/A Clockwork Orange (1971) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    • These examples will require manual management when the movie is added. Each of the examples will have many root directories, like A-D and E-G in the first letter example, R and PG-13 in the rating example and you can guess at the variety of genre folders. When adding a new movie, the correct base folder will need to be selected for this format to work.
  • Examples that won't work:
    • Single folder: /mnt/Kid Movies/Frozen (2013) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
    • At this time, movies simply have to be in a folder named after the movie. There is no way around this until development work is done to add this feature.
  • The Create a Folder for Each Movie is a great source for making sure your file and folder structure will work great.

System -> Logs loads forever

Your ad blocker is probably causing this, see this comment on this reddit thread for details.

Finding Cookies

Some sites cannot be logged into automatically and require you to login manually then give the cookies to Radarr to work. This page describes how you do that.

  • Chrome Chrome cookies

  • Firefox Firefox cookies

Unpack Torrents

Most torrent clients doesn't come with the automatic handling of compressed archives like their usenet counterparts. To solve this one could use a set of scripts. For this example I'll use Deluge, however aslong as the torrent client can execute an script you should be fine (you'd need to alter the extract script accordingly).

NOTE: This guide applies only to Linux systems.

Beforehand you should make sure that packages unrar and unzip is installed on your system.

To setup Deluge you'd need the execute plugin which you can enable under Settings->Plugins (look for Execute). Once enabled you'll find Execute to the left in the Categories pane. In execute add an event like so:

Deluge Execute plugin

The /config/extract script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
formats=(zip rar)
commands=([zip]="unzip -u" [rar]="unrar -r -o- e")
extraction_subdir='deluge_extracted'

torrentid=$1
torrentname=$2
torrentpath=$3

log()
{
    logger -t deluge-extractarchives "$@"
}

log "Torrent complete: $@"
cd "${torrentpath}"
for format in "${formats[@]}"; do
    while read file; do
        log "Extracting \"$file\""
        cd "$(dirname "$file")"
        file=$(basename "$file")
        # if extraction_subdir is not empty, extract to subdirectory
        if [[ ! -z "$extraction_subdir" ]] ; then
            mkdir "$extraction_subdir"
            cd "$extraction_subdir"
            file="../$file"
        fi
        ${commands[$format]} "$file"
    done < <(find "$torrentpath/$torrentname" -iname "*.${format}" )
done

The script can be found at the Deluge wiki pages. Make sure you set execution rights on the script (chmod +x /config/extract).

Alternative script that only does unrar:

#!/bin/bash

torrent_id="$1"
torrent_name="$2"
torrent_path="$3"
torrent_path_full="$torrent_path/$torrent_name"

LOG="/config/finished-torrents.log"

echo "$(date '+%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S') - $torrent_id - $torrent_path - $torrent_name" >> $LOG

if [[ $(find "$torrent_path_full" -type f -iname "*.rar" -print) ]]; then
    mkdir "$torrent_path/_UNPACK_$torrent_name"
    find "$torrent_path_full" -type f -iname "*.rar" -exec unrar x {} "$torrent_path/_UNPACK_$torrent_name" \;
    find "$torrent_path/_UNPACK_$torrent_name" -type f -exec touch {} \;
    mv "$torrent_path/_UNPACK_$torrent_name" "$torrent_path_full/EXTRACTED"
fi

Now Radarr will via it's automatic download handling find and move/copy or link the movie to it's destination for you. However this leaves us with unnecessary files laying around in our download folder. To mitigate this we'll make Radarr execute an cleanup script once it's done importing the movie. The cleanup script only deletes the folder deluge_extracted which is created by our extract script.

First of create our script somewhere Radarr can find it. In my example: /config/cleanup

The content of our cleanup script is

#!/bin/bash

if [ -d "$radarr_moviefile_sourcefolder" ] && [ "$(basename "$radarr_moviefile_sourcefolder")" = "deluge_extracted" ] ; then
    /bin/rm -rf "$radarr_moviefile_sourcefolder"
fi

If you used the second unrar-only example script, ensure you rename "deluge_extracted" to "EXTRACTED" in the second condition of the if statement.

Make sure you set execution rights on the script (chmod +x /config/cleanup).

In Radarr head over to Settings->Connect and add a new Connection->Custom Script. Add it like so:

Custom script in Radarr

Voila! You're now all set to automatically handle compressed releases.

Root path for movies imported from lists becomes "C:\Windows\System32" or other weird paths

Sometimes you can get a problem that movies that are imported from your lists, gets imported with the root path set to "C:\Windows\System32" or other weird paths.

This is a known issue for when the root path is either not setup during the creation of the list, or if the root path has been deleted after the list was created. Note that this problem can still occur even if the list is edited and the correct root path is set.

Workaround: Edit each existing list and change the root folder to something else, save and then go back and edit it again to the right folder and save again.

Or create a new list, where you make sure the correct root path is set before saving the list. You can now delete your old list, as the new one will work like it is supposed to.

On the latest develop version, this does not occur anymore, when using Safari or Edge as your browser.

It is fixed for all browsers on the nightly version.

Use the Movie Editor to fix paths of existing movies.

Movie Imported, But Source File And Torrent Not Deleted

  • Check if you have Completed Download Handling - Remove turned on. (This does not work if you are using rtorrent.)

Settings

  • If you are using deluge make sure auto-managed is turned on. And that torrents get paused when they reach specified seeding quota.

Radarr is not picking up completed downloads / "Check For Finished Download" task hangs forever

On Linux (primarily Debian-based) systems, hardlinking files requires ownership permissions by default. If you are running your download client as a daemon under a separate user from Radarr (best practice), Radarr will not be the owner of the downloaded files by default and therefore will be unable to make a hardlink into your Movies folder.

To fix this, you can either make Radarr the owner of the downloaded files or you can disable the hardlink protection in Linux.

Option 1: Making Radarr the owner of the files

This is probably better than disabling hardlink protection, but in my experience I was unable to get group ownership (adding the same primary group to both the radarr and download daemon user) to work. Your alternative is to run radarr and your download client under the same user.

  1. Find the service file for your Radarr and download client by running sudo service <service> status and looking at the output as shown:

  1. Open up the service file and make your modifications to the daemon user. Either set both users the same, or both groups the same. (Or all the same)

  1. Now reload your daemon or reboot the server. With systemctl, you want to run sudo systemctl daemon-reload and restart the services as well.

To avoid the mess with users and group permissions, you can disable the hardlink protection feature that causes the issue in the first place.

  1. Open up /etc/sysctl.conf in your favorite text editor
  2. Uncomment/change/append this in the file: fs.protected_hardlinks = 0
  3. Run sysctl -p to apply your changes.

Source for hardlink protection