availability

Availability monitoring

Ether observes recent releases and reuses successful resolver health checks. It never removes catalogue/search results because evidence is missing. Movie dates and episode air dates still use the catalogue's existing release eligibility; quality, CAM acceptance, identities, blocklists and episode targeting use the resolver's existing policies rather than a second rules engine.

Owner controls

Sources → Availability provides monitoring, selective validation, participating feeds, debrid participation, preference for checked recommendations and optional newly available shelves. Monitoring and validation start disabled. Presentation preferences start enabled and can benefit from ordinary playback observations.

Default daily background allowances (UTC, shared across nodes):

• 100 feed API requests, and 100 validation API requests.
• 20 candidate checks and 20 descriptor grabs (NZB or torrent).
• 512 MiB of conservative data reservations. NNTP BODY reservations use the provider's maximum article size, so actual transferred bytes can be much lower.
• Preserve 80% of each indexer's configured daily cap for foreground work.

An allowance of zero disables that work. Foreground requests still have their normal account limits. Every feed page, provider API request and source read goes through admission before network work. Ordinary playback does not use the background allowance. Shared worker contexts retain the admission hook.

Discovery and evidence

Newznab/Torznab recent-release pages use an empty t=search request, following the incremental model documented by Radarr. One page describes up to 100 releases. Polling defaults to 30 minutes. The first sync starts at the head; later syncs look for overlap with the previous head, with at most three pages. Failed requests do not advance the cursor. Missing overlap records a visible coverage gap rather than triggering unlimited catch-up. Search remains the fallback for older and missed releases. Built-in sites without a recent-feed contract remain available for ordinary search.

Matching scans local title identities and resolves episodes locally; it does not call TMDB for every feed item. Conflicting identifiers and ambiguous title matches are rejected. A season pack only contributes known, already-aired episodes, and its health check is targeted to the chosen episode using the existing resolver.

The queue prioritizes popular titles, checks one candidate per title per pass, and defers extra candidates when the title already has fresh successful evidence. It never searches the entire catalogue in the background. Playback attempts can reuse discovered descriptors before normal search, with a five-second shortlist budget. Viewer/device policy is always reapplied on that path.

Debrid cache lookups are batched and capability-dependent. Background validation can inspect existing account items and validate a bounded HTTPS range; it never starts an uncached download or adds torrents. Unsupported cache APIs leave availability unknown. A debrid account by itself is not a global discovery feed; recent torrent discovery requires a configured Torznab source. Usenet, debrid, both, and no playback provider are supported configurations.

Successful evidence is source-, title-, policy- and configuration-specific. It expires after six hours. Configuration changes invalidate old positives. A source failure never creates a title-wide negative. Timeout, exhausted allowance and unsupported checks remain unknown. Normal resolver health-cache hits do not renew evidence timestamps. Sampled health is useful evidence, not a guarantee of all bytes or all clients.

Only fresh checked movies move ahead within popular/trending/recommendation shelves; no items are removed. Explicit chronology and Continue Watching retain their order. Newly available shelves mean first successfully checked by this server, not necessarily a film's worldwide premiere.

Operations

The existing cluster leader runs one scheduler; cursors, observations and atomic usage counters are durable in the shared database. Hot settings are respected by admission. Checks pause while local playback is active. Each cycle is bounded, cancellation propagates, transient outcomes back off, and descriptors expire after 30 days with a hard retention cap of 30,000 observations. Signed release locators are sealed using the config store; owner status never exposes them.

Tests use fake feeds/providers and local HTTP fixtures. They cover admission, account reserve, midnight reset, restart/overlap/gaps, identity conflicts, source/policy invalidation, stale evidence, disabled-provider behavior, diverse candidate selection, resolver reuse, and budget propagation across shared workers.