i have xbmc live 10.0 running on an Acer Revo, and i use Transmission as a BT client through a WebUI, and it works great, i love the whole setup.
I've been reading some fancy people have their boxes automatically find new episodes of TV Shows for example, and have their boxes download them (and even rename the files and move them to the correct directories). i've spent hours reading about SickBeard, Flexget, TED, RSS feeds and SABnzdb, and it's the most confusing thing i've tried to do with this box.
Is there a complete noob's guide on what the hell is the best/easiest way to do it? where to register, what commands to run, what to install etc, i can't work it out (and i wouldn't say i'm a complete noob).
anyway as i said i run transmission but dont mind changing to another torrent app with a WebUI.
any help, from anyone, would be great.
Pay the $25 and get a 180GB chunk of Astraweb. Torrents were tacked on as an afterthought to most tools it seems.
I use sickbeard, along with sabnzbd and Astrawebs unlimited DSL package (about £7 a month IIRC).
Got sickbeard setup so that it checks various RSS feeds for my TV shows every 30 mins. If it finds them it adds them to the sabnzbd queue, sabnzbd then repairs and extracts and finally sickbeard jumps back in and renames + moves the files to the correct directories and also scrapes the data required to make xbmc pretty!
No need for a tutorial, just download it and play around! Thats how I got it setup!
To be honest with you, I spent a long time trying to set up a perfect automated system based around torrents and it never was even close to perfect. I had to constantly tweak/check/manually update. Usenet was a confusing concept at the time, and I refused to pay for a subscription.
Two months ago I bit the bullet and signed up for astraweb ($11/month) and a VIP account at nzbmatrix ($10 for 10 years). I could not be happier. Required very little time and effort to set up, and needs very very little maintenance (very rare rename errors due to windows' paranoia with disk access) It is extremely close to perfect and has high WAF
I strongly recommend it
Usenet is a far better alternative for what your looking for. Since XBMC can play media files inside a RAR and most News programs can rename on-the-fly, it's extremely easy to setup an automated system that categorizes and organizes everything for you.
I also highly recommend AstraWeb. Their 11.00 per month unlimited plan is brilliant. I download way over 180GB per month so their other plans are not really practical for my use.
Personally, I use a free news reader called AltBinz and simply use the free engines. I have never not been able to find something on the freely available NZB search sites.
I setup a network share on my Windows PC to the drive on my HTPC using XBMC-Live. My Usenet downloads coming from AltBinz go directly to my HTPC box through the network share.
All automated -- I never have to do anything. Episodes, Movies, etc just continually go to my theater hour by hour. They are then automatically categorized by episode, genre, actor, etc, etc. I'm sure it's possible to get this setup with Torrents, but it would not be as optimal. Torrents are also generally much slower than Usenet. Usenet is always at max speed no matter the age or popularity.
You need LOOOOTS of space for such a system though -- because it is very easy to end up with lots of stuff coming in when you only need to just add an RSS for whatever you want.
In my experience, downloads from Usenet are a lot more prone to corruption than using torrents or fileshare sites. I haven't downloaded a whole lot from Usenet, but from what I have, I'd say 1 in 4 downloads ended up corrupt. The original uploads were missing a few KB, and the parity files were either insufficient or non-existent.
Plus I don't think I've ever seen any m720p releases on Usenet. Your choice is usually either a dvdrip or an entire 6GB bd-rip. Anything in between is usually amateur and dodgy.
i refuse to pay the wrong people. i don't understand usenet, as in, why people use it. why would you pay to steal? it doesn't make sense. if you're gonna steal, then steal. who ever heard of breaking into a shop, taking things then leaving money on the counter? if i'm gonna pay, i'd rather it go to the people who write and produce the shows, not to some joker who has set up a slightly easier way to steal it.
that's my two cents anyway, and i'm sure people will disagree. until i find a nice tutorial on how to set up TED with torrents without a GUI (ie using xbmc live), i'll just manually add them into transmission.
Most 0day private trackers offer either an IRC #announce channel that lists the latest uploads to the site or a similar RSS feed. The ones with an IRC channel often have a forum thread where a user has created an IRC auto-download script for various different IRC clients. These auto-download the .torrent file and place it in a watch folder for your client.
Alternatively, use an RSS addon (or built-in feature) in a torrent program. As you say you're using XBMC Live, look into rTorrent with the web frontend, ruTorrent. rTorrent has the watch directories feature, and ruTorrent supports RSS feeds with regex filtering to find the name and quality you want.
I actually saved money by switching to usenet. I have accounts on 5 private trackers and in order to keep up a good ratio I paid extra for faster internet service. Since I am not worried about uploading, I lowered my internet speed and got astraweb for $11 ($14 cheaper then speed upgrade).
I struggled with alot of programs and stuff and never got it to work perfect so decided to make my own script and use cron to run it every 15 minute.
My setup is a Freenas (the script runs here) my htpc asrock 330 freenas is setup with transmission for downloading torrent and a plugin to transmission to support RSS (
http://code.google.com/p/freenas-rss-extension/) my script is very simple "mv sample.tvshow.name some.where" I make one of these for every tv show I have, Everytime xbmc is started I have set it to scrape new stuff.
Works great! only time I have to do something is when I add a brand new show to my RSS feed.
Best of all its completely free and I dont have to download all the (crap)shows my gf
want to see cause its automated by the RSS feed, script and indexed by Xbmc!
are you interested in making a tutorial for other users? including examples of what to search for as well, would be pretty tight.
I guess I could write a little guide about my setup, im not very good in scripting or linux but with the help of this forum and google I got it working pretty sweet.
First of you need a plugin for your transmission as I stated in my post I use freenas and there is a plugin for RSS and transmission for it
http://code.google.com/p/freenas-rss-extension/ when you install it it auto setup crontab for scheduling.
Transmision is set to download to /mnt/Mount/Downloads/Incomplete/ and the move the completed file to /mnt/Mount/Downloads/
Second I have an account on a torrent site and here I can build a RSS feed for auto donwloads of my favorite shows, for this you could use TED or anything else that autodownload the stuff you want.
Third I wrote a script save this as show.pl
The script is watching my downloads folder for new files if it finds any it moves them to the correct tv show folder.
start script
-----------------------
#!/bin/bash
# Tv shows auto sorting script
#########################################
#
# Written by Bjorn 2011-04-11
# Add a new series by copy the first one and change the
# needed stuff.
#########################################
mv /mnt/Mount/Downloads/*Bones.* /mnt/Mount/TV-Serier/BONES/
mv /mnt/Mount/Downloads/*Criminal.Minds* /mnt/Mount/TV-Serier/CRIMINAL MINDS/
mv /mnt/Mount/Downloads/*the.big.bang.theory.* /mnt/Mount/TV-Serier/THE BIG BANG THEORY/
Done
-----------------------
end script
I understand that this script is very basic but it works great for me! so shut up
Forth I setup cron to run this script two times every day so my show gets the seeding it needs! U can use webmin or go into the crontab file to change it manually, google is your friend.
Fifth I set XBMC to scrape everytime it startup, this is done in the GUI, if you need help look in the wiki or something
Hope this helps
I can help moore if needed.
I Recently changed to Flexget (
http://flexget.com/) it took a while to get right for me, but now I wouldnt change it for the world. One you have it working, use this config as a base for downloading torrents:
Code:
presets:
global:
download: F:\Downloads\torrents
tv:
series_premiere: yes
quality:
min: sdtv
max: 720p
content_filter:
require:
- '*.avi'
- '*.mkv'
exists_series: 'e:\'
series:
settings:
720p:
propers: no
quality: 720p
HDTV:
propers: no
quality: hdtv
HDTV:
- Blue Bloods
- Breaking Bad
- Fringe
- How I Met Your Mother
- Man V Food
- No Ordinary Family
- Raising Hope
- Rookie Blue
- The Big Bang Theory
- The Middle
- True Blood
- V 2009
- Criminal Minds:
exact: yes
- Criminal Minds Suspect Behavior:
exact: yes
- Hawaii Five-0
- Bored to Death
- Top Gear US
- The IT Crowd
- Spooks
- Family Guy
- Entourage
- Eureka
- Caprica
- Boardwalk Empire
- American Dad
- South Park
- Sanctuary
- The Mentalist
- Stargate Universe
- The Simpsons
- Americas Next Top Model
- The Event
- The Chicago Code
- CSI:
exact: yes
- CSI Miami
720p:
- Dexter
- Mythbusters
- Battlestar Galactica Blood & Chrome
- The Walking Dead
- Game of Thrones
movies:
imdb:
min_score: 6.1
min_votes: 4500
min_year: 2010
reject_genres:
- news
- documentary
- Biography
- Reality-Tv
- horror
quality:
max: 1080p
min: 720p
content_size:
max: 6500
min: 700
imdb_required: yes
seen_movies: strict
feeds:
ExtraDIVX:
rss: http://extratorrent.com/rss.xml?type=hot&cat=H264+X264
preset: movies
Extra264:
rss: http://extratorrent.com/rss.xml?type=hot&cat=H264+X264
preset: movies
MoviesDVDRip:
rlslog: http://www.rlslog.net/category/movies/dvdrip/
preset: movies
MoviesDVDSCR:
rlslog: http://www.rlslog.net/category/movies/dvdscr/
preset: movies
MoviesSCR:
rlslog: http://www.rlslog.net/category/movies/scr/
preset: movies
RSLogTV:
rlslog: http://www.rlslog.net/category/tv-shows/
preset: tv
RSLogTVRSS:
rss: http://www.rlslog.net/category/tv-shows/feed/
preset: tv
EZrss TV:
rss: http://www.ezrss.it/feed/
preset: tv
BTChat:
rss: http://rss.bt-chat.com/?cat=9
preset: tv
Extra TV:
rss: http://extratorrent.com/rss.xml?type=hot&cat=Television
preset: tv
Extra TV Latest:
rss: http://extratorrent.com/rss.xml?type=popular&cid=8
preset: tv
PirateBayHD:
rss: http://rss.thepiratebay.org/208
preset: tv
This is my config in full, you can edit the shows, the qualities and what kind of movies you want (and lower rating if you choose). The reason I like flexget is it will do both movies and TV shows in 1 solution. This config will also download any TV show it sees as the 1st in the series, its nice to check stuff out you maybe wouldn't know about normally. I do use Sickbeard for show sorting.
Hope this helps
Flexget with deluge is great for me. Sending the files through to deluge is a great thing to do, and it automatically sort the files
With flexget I can also scan for all movies above IMDB 7.5 score, released during the last three years in the feed,or whatever I want.
It is mighty powerful. Now I just need a "add subtitles to all files not presently having one" with xbmc subtitle downloader.... Sublight doesnt do it for me..