Sonarr Prefer X265 <2025>

While x265 is highly efficient, its popularity has led to an influx of low-quality automated encodes on public and private trackers. Some release groups heavily compress files to absurdly small sizes (e.g., a 150MB 1080p episode), resulting in severe visual artifacts, color banding, and muddy dark scenes.

Find your newly created Prefer x265 format and assign it a positive score (e.g., up to +100 ).

Here is a major pitfall. Some uploaders take an x264 source and re-encode it to x265 at an extremely low bitrate to save space. The result is a blocky, artifact-ridden mess. sonarr prefer x265

Media consumers face a constant battle against shrinking disk space. High-definition 1080p and 4K video files can easily consume terabytes of storage within months. Fortunately, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, commonly known as x265, offers a solution. It delivers the same visual quality as older x264 files at roughly half the file size.

Custom Formats & Scores:

In Sonarr v3 and v4, Custom Formats are the modern and recommended way to weight preferences. They are far more powerful and flexible than the legacy Release Profiles.

Wait—what about AV1? It's newer but less compatible. To ensure x265 wins over x264 but loses to a better codec, set these scores: While x265 is highly efficient, its popularity has

In the field, leave it blank (forcing it will cause Sonarr to reject downloads if an x265 version doesn't exist).

In the Regular Expression (Regex) field, enter: \b(x265|hevc|h265)\b (This matches any release containing x265, HEVC, or h265). Click . Step 2: Assign Scores in Your Quality Profiles Navigate to Settings > Profiles . Here is a major pitfall

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