[bluesky2006]

Thought I'd pitch this in here before signing up to the Sickbeard forums.

I don't fully understand the Custom quality settings descriptors and how they relate to what I might actually want. Can any tell me what I should be putting in the Initial and Archive sections if I want good quality initial viewing (ie, not grainy 2003-era Kazaa downloads) and ultimately want to end up with a DVD rip where the size of a file for, say, a 1 hour episode of non-cartoon TV is around 1.5GB.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[el_cabong]

From what i understand (i think i asked something about this on their board one time but was still alittle confused after the responses) the Initial settings are obviously what are grabbed first. so if you have SD and HD set to "Initial", SB will download whichever comes up first.. usually the SD. Now if you have Archive set, what will happen is after a successful initial download, SB will look for releases in archive and try to find downloads until that quality is downloaded.

getting back to your specifications.. what i would do is set the Initial to SD AND HD720 and set archive to HD720. this should give you what you want. What i do, is set everything to HD720 (or HD1080 if i want it for that show) and if i dont get any downloads, i then add the SD option to Initial only to that show. That way my shows only get the HD720 version instead of grabbing the SD version, then re-downloading the HD version when that gets posted usually before the SD is done downloading.

hope that helps

[bluesky2006]

Thanks el_cabong. I think I get how the Initial and Archive sections differentiate - my main problem was with not knowing what exactly to expect out of an SD DVD or an HD TV quality video, and I don't want to end up with 200 SpongeBob SquarePants episodes at 4GB each because I incorrectly selected the HD 1080p quality settings.

So will an HD 720 setting give me episodes around the 1.5GB mark? I was going to set it to SD DVD because apparently that is DVD quality and that would be nice - but again, only if the file sizes aren't too huge.

Hmm, of course what I should really do is experiment by downloading some examples... Shame I'm at work right now!

[el_cabong]

HD will grab 720 or 1080, which ever it finds first and the HD720 will give you episodes ranging from ~800-2000mb depending on length, so I use that as my default. when a particular show is not grabbing, il adjust down as needed. i cant remember what year they switched to 720 standard, but episodes before that are only readily available in SD, and the DVD rips are usually at 720 size or below.

[bluesky2006]

Hmm ok, good to know, thanks. I'm not sure if I'm enough of a quality fiend to mind if I have to sacrifice a bit of quality for more economical file sizes. Bit worried about filling up my drives too quickly! Might just have to go through all of my shows one by one and decide on a per-show basis though. I notice you can get pretty good South Park rips for around 100-150MB for example, so no point grabbing those in Bluray!