Filtering
A filter decides which items in your library are worth searching for an upgrade. It’s a set of rules about items in your library, like whether:
- It’s assigned to the 1080p Quality profile.
- Its file comes from a banned release group.
- It was added more than a year ago.
Rules
Every rule has three parts: a field, an operator, and a value, like Monitored is True.
The field you pick decides which operators you get:
| Field holds | Operators | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Boolean | is, is not | Cutoff Met is False |
| Number | =, ≠, >, ≥, <, ≤ | Runtime > 150 |
| Text | contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, equals, does not equal | Studio contains Pixar |
| List | includes, does not include, is only, has any, has none | Genres has Horror |
| Date | is before, is after, in the last, not in the last | Date Added not in last 365 days |
| Status | is exactly, is not, has reached, hasn't passed, is past, is before | Status has reached Released |
The rule row shortens some operators once they’re picked, like has for includes. Text fields that offer a dropdown of values, like Quality Profile and Release Group, only have is and is not.
Groups
A group is a rule that holds other rules. Every filter starts with a top group, and all your rules go inside it.
Like any rule, a group either matches an item or it doesn’t. Its Match setting decides how:
- With All (AND), every rule inside has to match. Monitored is True and Size on Disk < 5 together only match monitored movies under 5 GB.
- With Any (OR), one is enough. Original Language is Japanese and Original Language is Korean together match movies made in either language.
Because a group is just another rule, you can put one group inside another group!
Building a Filter
Rules and groups make a lot more sense once you see them in action, so let’s play around with a filter!
You’ve decided that you want to upgrade the most popular movies in your library. Crappy encodes shall be no more! But what does this actually mean? What is “popular”? Well, let’s try to map these to some upgrade fields.
Popularity seems like the obvious place to start, and a high rating probably counts too. So a first guess might look like this, with the group on Any (OR) so either one is enough:
- Popularity ≥ 30
- TMDb Rating ≥ 7
Open the preview, and near the top is… The Shawshank Redemption? Sure, it just got a 4K remaster, so everyone’s watching it again, and it’s rated through the roof. By your two rules, it’s as popular as it gets. But it’s a 1994 prison drama, and that’s not what anyone on your server is asking for. So let’s only count recent movies. Add Year ≥ 2020 and check again.
Shawshank hasn’t budged. And now the list is longer: every movie from 2020 onwards has shown up too.
That’s because our group is set to Any (OR), so a movie only needs to match one rule. That’s what we want for popularity and rating, since either one is good enough. But it also means a movie only needs to be recent to match, which isn’t what we wanted at all. Year isn’t another kind of popular, it’s a base requirement.
So lets shuffle them around:
- Popularity and rating move into a new group, still on Any (OR).
- Year, as well as a new rule: Monitored is True stay in the top group, which switches to All (AND).
A movie now has to be recent, and monitored, and popular in at least one way.
Now only four movies match: The Menu, Oppenheimer, Dune: Part Two, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Shawshank and the other older movies are out.