Sonarr can’t find Anime? This worked for me.

Kai Brooks
3 min readJan 7, 2021

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I couldn’t find a solution that worked for me anywhere, but I eventually solved it. This method uses Usenet, NZBGet, and NZBHydra, technically on a NAS/Docker setup but should work for any system.

Sonarr logo

Anime shows on Usenet/Newznab have different category numbers than “standard” TV. This categorization creates an issue where NZBGet finds the names of releases when searching manually, but Sonarr can’t find anything, even though the rest of Sonarr works just fine. Here’s how to fix it.

Check NZBHydra

In NZBHydra, click Categories. NZBHydra should have the Newznab categories set to 5070. If you don’t see this category, keep reading.

5070 is the TV/Anime category, according to the Newznab documentation:

Why read documentation for 30 seconds when you can spend an hour scouring outdated links?

NZBHydra can automatically populate these categories for most indexers. Click Config, then Indexers, and the name of the specific indexer. Scroll to the bottom and click the Check Capabilities button:

Check capabilities if you don’t see the Anime category in the image above.

After NZBHydra finishes checking the indexer’s capabilities, re-check the category in the first picture.

Check Sonarr

Indexers search from the selected categories. Click Settings, then Indexers, and select the Newznab indexer:

Click this, or whatever you titled the Newznab indexer.

In the indexer, there’s a section for Categories, and also Anime Categories. In Anime Categories, make sure to select 5070.

Anime category 5070 in Newznab

Setting Anime Categories to 5070 ensures Sonarr searches for files under the TV/Anime category. You can check other categories to allow Sonarr, but if your indexer doesn’t label properly

Check the series’ settings

Click a series in your list, and click the edit button (up top in Sonarr v3). Set Series Type to Anime:

Changing this setting both alters the episode numbering scheme Sonarr uses, and also causes it to search the categories we just set in the Newznab settings above.

In summary

  1. Set anime category 5070 in NZBHydra
  2. Check 5070 in Anime Categories in the Sonarr’s indexer settings
  3. Set the Series Type to Anime of the series in Sonarr.

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