This is a limited overview of features that will be developed for future versions.
The team has committed to these features, but we cannot give a time frame for all subjects.
Unicode
Currently SABnzbd's code is an uncomfortable mix of 8bit ASCII (codepages!) and Unicode.
This makes SABnzbd limited to handling texts in the Latin-1 character set (West European).
A number of active users have translated SABnzbd into Serbian, Russian, Polish1 and Chinese2.
but sadly we cannot handle these languages now. A full Unicode program can do this.
Converting SABnzbd to full Unicode is not difficult, however it is a time-consuming task.
The software has to be inspected from top to bottom to replace all 8bit ASCII handling
with Unicode handling. It probably takes a few hundred (small) changes which for the most
part must be done manually and another few dozen larger changes.
After that comes a lot of testing.
Also it's something can only be done with limited parallel development.
Status:
Implementation has begun, this will land in release 0.8.0.
The translators are testing a prototype.
7Zip support
Slowly the number of 7z posts is growing on Usenet, so it's time SABnzbd starts supporting it.
Single 7z and multi-volume (7z.001, 7z.002 etc.) are supported.
Binaries for Windows and OSX will be included.
Other systems will need to have the "7za" tool available in the $PATH environment variable.
Recommended version: 9.20 or higher
Status:
Code is nearly complete and will go into the 0.8.0 release.
Apple Bonjour
SABnzbd will support Apple's Bonjour protocol to some extent.
Bonjour shows available network services without you having mess around with IP addresses and port numbers.
All Apple devices support it and will therefore be able to find your SABnzbd server easily.
The protocol is also known as ZeroConfig or Avahi on other platforms.
More info: Bonjour support
Status:
Code is complete and will go into the 0.8.0 release.
Server priorities
Currently SABnzbd works with primary and backup servers.
The "primary" group and the "backup" group have internally no priorities.
The plan is to drop the primary/backup system and use server priorities instead.
This means that SABnzbd will first ask the highest priority server (0) and when that
server doesn't have an article, the next lower priority server (1) will be asked.
This continues until all (enabled) servers have been tried.
The implementation of this goes into the heart of the SABnzbd downloader software
and requires substantial changes to the way the download queue is handled.
Therefore this feature will have a long lead time and will be developed in parallel.
Optimal repair
SABnzbd first verifies a job using just the smallest par2 file.
If that fails, it will download more par2 files and will try to repair the files.
On slower systems that are faster at downloading than repairing, this is not optimal.
par2-based repair is a very CPU intensive process and running a verify/repair cycle
twice instead of once makes the whole process ever slower.
So for people who have (1) a system and provider that allow rather fast downloading and
(2) are not restricted by download caps, we will make an option to download ALL par2 files.
If you have QuickCheck enabled a first (fast) verification will be done and if that fails
all available par2 files will be downloaded.
Without QuickCheck all par2 files will be downloaded even if not needed at all.
This allows you to chose the optimal situation, which will not be the same for everyone.
AutoSplit
Sometimes people have an NZB containing a whole season of shows and then miss the Sort capabilities.
The (optional) AutoSplit will split such an NZB into separate jobs.
This has two advantages: the first episode is completed sooner and the episodes are individually treated by Sort.
Caveats:
- Detecting season/episode material is based on the naming of the sub-posts, so activation of Sort depends on these names and not on the NZB name as is normally the case.
- When multiple episodes share a single set of par2 files, AutoSplit will not activate.
