Quality profiles

A quality profile is the rulebook kino uses to decide which release of a film or episode to grab when several are available. It defines:

• Allowed tiers — which resolution/source combinations are acceptable at all (Bluray 1080p yes, CAM no)
• Cutoff — the tier at which kino stops looking for upgrades
• Accepted languages — audio languages the release must carry to be considered

Every film and series in your library is assigned to a profile. You can have one global profile, or different profiles per content type (e.g. higher cutoff for films, lower for TV).

The default profile

Kino ships with a single profile called Default. It’s set as the default for new content, allows everything from Bluray 480p upward, and sets the cutoff at Bluray 1080p. Accepted languages are ["en"].

If that suits you, you don’t need to do anything else — every film and series you add picks up this profile automatically.

How tiers work

Kino’s tier ladder is fixed (you don’t define new tiers), but each profile picks which tiers are allowed and which are not. Higher rank wins on a tie.

Rank	Tier ID	Display name
18	remux_2160p	Remux 2160p
17	bluray_2160p	Bluray 2160p
16	web_2160p	WEB 2160p
15	hdtv_2160p	HDTV 2160p
14	remux_1080p	Remux 1080p
13	bluray_1080p	Bluray 1080p
12	web_1080p	WEB 1080p
11	hdtv_1080p	HDTV 1080p
10	bluray_720p	Bluray 720p
9	web_720p	WEB 720p
8	hdtv_720p	HDTV 720p
7	bluray_480p	Bluray 480p
6	web_480p	WEB 480p
5	dvd	DVD
4	sdtv	SDTV
3	telecine	Telecine
2	telesync	Telesync
1	cam	CAM

Tier IDs combine source (where the file came from) and resolution. Remux means a lossless container rip, Bluray is a re-encode from disc, WEB is a streaming-service rip, HDTV is a broadcast capture, CAM/Telesync/Telecine are camcorder-quality leaks (disabled by default).

Editing a profile

1. Open Settings → Quality.

2. Click the profile name to open its editor.

3. Allowed tiers: tick or untick each row. Unticked tiers are rejected outright — no release at that tier will ever be grabbed regardless of how many seeders it has.

4. Cutoff: pick the tier at which kino considers the file “good enough” and stops looking for upgrades. Pick a tier you actually have ticked — the cutoff falls back to the highest allowed tier if the picked one is disabled.

5. Upgrade allowed: when on, kino will replace existing files with higher-tier ones it finds later (within the cutoff). When off, the first acceptable grab wins forever.

6. Accepted languages: comma-separated ISO 639-1 codes (en, fr, de, …). Empty list = filter disabled, every release passes regardless of language.

7. Save.

Changes apply on save. Existing files are not touched — the profile only affects what kino grabs from now on. If you want to re-evaluate existing content, trigger a manual search from the detail page.

How scoring works

For every release a search returns, kino computes a score:

base = tier rank × 1000
bonuses:
  +100  if the release is a "PROPER" (re-release fixing the original)
  +100  if the release is a "REPACK" (re-release with corrections)
  +50   if the release is flagged "internal" by the indexer
  +10×log10(seeders)   small tiebreaker for healthy swarms

The highest-scoring release that passes the allowed-tier filter wins. Tier rank dominates by a wide margin — a 1080p release will always beat a 720p one regardless of seeder count or flags.

When kino is checking whether to upgrade an existing file, the new release has to either:

• be on a strictly higher tier than the existing file, or
• be on the same tier with a score at least 200 points higher.

The 200-point gap stops kino re-downloading at the same tier just because a new release with one extra seeder appeared.

Language filtering

The accepted_languages list is a hard filter applied before scoring:

• Empty list — filter disabled, every release passes (escape hatch for users who want maximum compatibility).
• Untagged release — accepted. The widespread convention is that releases without a language tag are English; rejecting them would kill the vast majority of grabs on an English profile.
• MULTI release — accepted. Multi-language packs carry the target language alongside others.
• Tagged with at least one language in your list — accepted.
• Tagged only with languages outside your list — rejected, logged at debug level.

After the file is downloaded, kino also checks the audio tracks via ffprobe. If none of the actual audio languages match your profile, the file is still imported (you may want it anyway) but flagged with a warning badge so you can choose to re-grab.

Multilingual libraries

If you have content in multiple languages, set accepted_languages to all of them (en, fr, de) rather than disabling the filter entirely — that way you still reject unwanted single-language tracks.

Multiple profiles

Common reasons to create a second profile:

• Films vs TV: films can take a 2160p remux; TV episodes rarely need more than 1080p WEB-DL. A Movies — 4K profile with a bluray_2160p cutoff and a TV — 1080p profile with a web_1080p cutoff lets each content kind size correctly.
• Big vs small: a tighter web_720p profile for content you watch once and delete; a generous bluray_2160p profile for the keepers.
• Per-language: a profile with accepted_languages = ["es"] for Spanish-language content alongside your default English profile.

To add one, Settings → Quality → New profile — clone an existing one, tweak, save. Then set the new profile on a film or series via its detail page (Edit → Quality profile).

You can also bulk-reassign from the Library view by selecting multiple items and using the bulk-edit menu.

Sizing limits

Beyond tier filtering, kino sanity-checks each release against an expected size for the content’s runtime:

• A 90-minute film at web_1080p should be roughly 2–4 GB. A 500 MB result is almost certainly low-bitrate junk; a 30 GB result is almost certainly mislabeled.
• Implausibly small or implausibly large releases are filtered out before scoring.

The bounds are derived from runtime × quality-appropriate bitrate and are not user-configurable in the current release. Most users never notice this filter; if you do find a legitimate release being rejected on size, it surfaces in the per-search debug log with the rejection reason.

Cutoff behaviour

The cutoff is the tier at which kino stops searching for upgrades. With Upgrade allowed on:

• New film added → kino grabs the best release it can find at or below the cutoff.
• Later, a higher-tier release appears → kino grabs the upgrade (only if strictly above the existing file’s tier).
• The new file lands at the higher tier → upgrades stop. No more searches for this content.

If the original grab was already at the cutoff, no upgrade searches happen at all.

With Upgrade allowed off, the first acceptable grab wins permanently — useful for libraries where you want stable file counts and don’t want kino chewing bandwidth on incremental quality bumps.

Hardware decoding constraints

If you stream to clients that can’t decode H.265 (HEVC) or AV1 in hardware, you may want to lean toward H.264 releases — a 2160p HEVC remux that won’t decode on the client device gets software-transcoded by kino’s FFmpeg, which is CPU-expensive.

Codec preference isn’t a first-class field in the current quality profile (tiers are source × resolution, not codec). If codec matters to you for a particular library subset, the practical workaround is to disable the higher tiers on the profile assigned to clients with weaker decoders.

Troubleshooting

Nothing is being grabbed — check the profile’s accepted languages. An empty audio-language list on the release combined with a strict accepted_languages list is a common cause; if you’ve narrowed the list to ["en"] and the indexer never returns language-tagged English releases, almost everything slips through, but if you’ve set ["fr"] and your indexers are predominantly English, you’ll filter out almost everything.

Kino keeps re-downloading the same film — check that Upgrade allowed is on. If it is and kino is genuinely swapping files repeatedly, two indexers may be returning the same release with slightly different scores; the 200-point gap should prevent this, so file an issue with the search debug log.

Cutoff doesn’t seem to be respected — the cutoff applies to upgrades, not to the initial grab. If your highest allowed tier is bluray_2160p and you’ve set the cutoff to bluray_1080p, kino will still grab a 2160p release if that’s the best available — it just won’t upgrade beyond 1080p later.

Editing a profile breaks an existing library item — the profile assigned to existing items doesn’t change when you edit the profile rules, but a film whose existing tier is no longer in the allowed list will start showing as “wanted upgrade” until a new search finds a release in the new allowed set. To fix, either re-add the original tier to the profile or accept that kino will re-grab.

For broader configuration help, see the rest of Setup and the Troubleshooting FAQ.