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this sounds like a fantastic project. i'm just in the beginning stages of setting up a new htpc for my living room. i have a few questions.
what, if any, are the disadvantages of using a virtualbox as your main operating system. the portability option sounds fantastic. the idea that i'd only have to set this up once (for the most part) is very seductive. however, i eventually would want to port my virtualbox setup to an actual standard windows 7 setup for the new machine. is this at all possible? i've heard that windows 7 is somewhat hardware agnostic, but i'm completely inexperienced. my rudimentary understanding is that it's possible to create an image of the contents of your hard drive, and somehow transfer that image to a completely different machine.
is there any need to do this whatsoever? or do you recommend holding on to the 'box within a box' setup when building a dedicated machine?
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Not really any disadvantages. The only things that gave me a headache were related to it's networking. Just need to make sure the networking is set to bridged in Virtualbox so that you can use a normal ip in your network. You also need to install the virtualbox add-ons on the virtual machine after the windows install and map your other local storage drives as network drives since you vm will not be able to see any other drives besides the one drive that is allocated to it.
Once you set up Win7 in the vm you can copy or move the vm to any other computer without a problem. Virtualbox is emulating a simple pc via software so it does not matter what machine is running virtualbox. Your only issue with moving the vm to another computer will be the mapped network drives that you originally set up. You would just have to map the new drives and change the paths in all of the apps for the automation unless drive letters and paths are the same on the new pc.
With this setup you wouldn't really need to image the host pc that runs virtualbox. You can export the virtual machine from the host pc and then import that virtual machine on the new pc with virtualbox installed on it.
If you plan on having only one dedicated pc to be the server and htpc you definitely want to run a virtual machine on it to do all of the downloading and automation.
1. Never interferes with the HTPC (like taking window priority from xbmc when automated apps run)
2. Is portable (you can wipe the htpc without ever worrying about the setup again)
3. You can remote into the vm via iphone, laptop, ipad, etc and mess with things while still watching a movie or tv show in xbmc
4. Stays hidden from friends and family members trying to use the htpc
I love it! Been working perfect for over a month now. My new favorite thing is getting emails when a new show downloads. I can't get enough of it.
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2010-04-23, 18:57
(This post was last modified: 2010-04-23, 19:01 by aptalca.)
I don't mean to advertise or anything but I have been very happy with my utorrent/ezrss setup. It is very simple to set up. No renaming, unrar'ing or moving needed. I believe a similar setup is possible with rTorrent as well, or any other torrent client that supports RSS feeds. The only disadvantage is that you are relying on ezrss service. But during the last 12 months, they were only down for longer than a few hours once, which was for about a week. Other than that, their service has been excellent.
The advantages of ezrss are:
1) Nothing is rar'ed. (I absolutely hate rars. They might be good for ftp but I don't think they have any advantage in p2p. Since torrents are downloaded in small bits and pieces anyway and each piece is hash checked. No need to further split up files.)(Not to mention, many times, I downloaded a torrent with rars, only to find a 4.4gb exe file inside)
2) Torrents don't have folders, just the file, so you can easily set the destination folder for the whole show and all files for the show will be in one folder. (Although you can set it up differently, so different seasons can be in different folders)
3) They are usually up within hours of airing
4) Naming always matches xbmc scraper style
5) They have search based rss feed (Meaning you can have different rss feeds for different shows, different seasons or different qualities, that way you don't have to deal with filtering through utorrent.)
6)They also include VTV releases, so between the two of them, they cover most popular TV shows out there (The only thing I wish they had is Burn Notice in 720p, but they only have SD)
How to set it up:
a) What I do is, first create a search based rss on ezrss.it for a specific show including the quality (you can select only 720p files in the feed) (Just click on shows at the top, select your show, type 720p in the quality field if that's what you want, don't check "exact" for quality, click search, if it looks like what you want, click "Search-based RSS Feed" and copy the address from the address bar"
b) Import that feed to utorrent (select add rss feed under "File" paste the address), give it a short custom alias such as "lost" and select "do not automatically download all items".
c) Go to RSS downloader under options. Under "Favorites" tab, click Add and enter the show name as "lost" (can be whatever)
d) Check "Don't start downloads automatically" for now, we'll change that later (Because utorrent doesn't give you a "save" or "apply" option for these, whatever change you make is instantly applied, you don't want utorrent to automatically start download everything in the feed without any filters)
e) Put a "*" without the quotes in the filter section, otherwise nothing will be downloaded (It took me a long time to figure that out)
f) Select the tv show folder such as C:\TVshows\Lost (Make sure you select the specific folder for the specific show, because the episode files will be downloaded directly into that folder, and xbmc will use that folder name to scrape the show)
g) Select the feed "lost", select quality "ALL" if you already selected the quality when creating the rss feed
h) You can select episode filter if you like (If you want to have different seasons in different folders you can do that by creating different "Favorites" items in RSS downloader, with different "save in" folders with episode filter set to such as 3x01-3x99)(If you are setting the episode filter, you should probably also add 0x01-0x99 as well, because for double episodes such as S04E01E02, ezrss' naming convention shows up as season 0 in utorrent)
i) Turn smart ep. filter on
j) Uncheck "Don't start downloads automatically" and you're good to go
Just make sure you select c:\TVshows folder (or whatever parent folder you selected) for scraping in xbmc and also make sure utorrent saves incomplete files with extension .ut so that files won't be added to xbmc library while they are still downloading
Hope it helps,
I currently have about ten shows set up this way. I don't have to do anything, utorrent is on 24x7, updating rss feeds every 30 min. I just update my xbmc library and new episodes pop up.
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2010-04-23, 20:26
(This post was last modified: 2010-04-23, 20:37 by twotone8.)
i'm a bit confused. how can you still futz with virtualmachine settings while you're watching something without your futzing interfering with xbmc. isn't xbmc displaying verything through the virtual machine's display? is xbmc running on a normal operating system while VM works in the background? and if so, which applications in your tutorial are running from the physical operating system, and which from the VM. i assume you can't boot a machine from a virtual drive, so something must be on the standard setup.
and if your htpc is running a native operating system, how can you tell the VM's version of eventghost to update the XBMC library from 'another' machine?
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2010-04-23, 20:41
(This post was last modified: 2010-04-23, 20:46 by Flook.)
Ahh I see what you are talking about.
The Win7 x86 vm is running on a normal Windows 7 x64 host pc. The only things that need to run on the host would be:
1. Virtualbox
2. XBMC
3. Server apps to stream the media to XBOX 360, PS3, iphone, etc... like orb, ps3mediaserver...
XBMC is running on the host box, not the vm, so I can log into the vm and do what I want.
Apps on the VM:
1. eventghost
2. utorrent
3. belvedere
4. embermediamanager
5. therenamer
6. jaduvnc - iphone remote server
7. dyndns ip update - updates your dyndns server with your current internet ip so that you can just use your dns to remote in and never have to worry about an ip address.
8. Remote app of your choice for laptop or other desktop....Win7 built in or ultravnc
The virtual machine is not able to take full advantage of a pc's resources and you would not want to run an app like XBMC on it.
There is another XBMC plugin in the eventghost forums that allows you to use specific ip address so that you can send the command to the ip of the host box. I'm actually not using an update library function at the moment since XBMC is usually not running all the time. It just updates when I open it. There are also other ways to update the library by sending the update command via ip address.
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GameEx looks pretty cool. Not sure how you would pause the vm. Between autoit and eventghost there has to be a couple ways but I don't know. Depending on your hardware I don't think you will need to pause or close it.
Once the vm is running you can close the virtualbox window and leave the vm running. At the moment in the host task manager it says VirtualBox.exe is using 32megs and the VBoxSVC is using 5.7megs. I'm not sure if it's related to any other processes in the task manager. It can use more if it needs to and I'll try and check what it's using when the automated stuff it going. I've run plenty of games and have had no issue with resources although I do have 8gigs of ram to use. Virtualbox is not multicore so I'm also thinking it can only use up to one core of the processor. CPU usage seams very very low. Let me know how the setup goes.
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Yeah I didn't even see 720p versions of all episodes of castle on major torrent sites. They only have some of them. I don't know if they are all available in the scene. Maybe you might look into newsgroups for that.
I do follow "how I met your mother" though. For that one I am just getting the sd versions and they look very decent on a 46"
Probably because in most of the scenes they use a stationary camera, very little fast moving images.
Also for big bang theory, you can try adding the rss feed of the user "TvTeam" on piratebay. He seems to upload almost all 720p episodes of that show lately. You would have to set up filters in utorrent, because he also uploads a ton of other stuff. To get his rss feed, click on his username, then click on the little rss icon in the top right corner.
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2010-05-01, 07:17
(This post was last modified: 2010-05-01, 12:00 by twotone8.)
attempting to follow your guide, but i'm having trouble connecting to my virtual machine through remote desktop. any hints or advice?
edit: fixed the problem.
had changed the listening port for my virtual machine from 3389 to 3390. the remote desktop exception checkbox in windows firewall ONLY refers to 3389. had to add an exception to port 3390. now all is well.
any idea how to scrape info for shows like 'the daily show'? neither 'therenamer' nor xbmc seems to know what to do with my rss downloads of either this or 'the colbert report'. i think it has something to do with the files being labeled by date as opposed to episode number. also, i've noticed that belvedere continues to attempt to delete my files even though the second parameter i set for that rule is not to delete it until it's x days old (which it currently isn't). not sure what the deal is, but as far as i can tell it doesn't like you using more than one parameter in telling it how to decide what to do. name=x is just fine, but name=x plus date added=y is a no go. they 'test' just fine, but the functionality is completely broken.
i've rigged a temporary fix by pointing belvedere to the individual folder for each show, thereby getting rid of the need for the name=x parameter.
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still working on this. any way to automatically shutdown the virtualbox when i shut down the host machine? haven't found any way to do this yet.
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2010-05-12, 22:34
(This post was last modified: 2010-05-13, 01:21 by Flook.)
What the hell. Didn't get an email notification of any new posts in here otherwise I would have replied. Need to be able to follow these threads in a google wave.
Glad you got the remote desktop stuff working. One way I bet you could do the shutdown is with an autoit script on the host machine that goes to the machine's menu and tells it to shutdown and then tells the host to shutdown. Not sure the details but I think I also read that in the virtualbox forums at one point.
For the 720p stuff the others mentioned you just need to find a dedicated private tv tracker. I can't help you with that but a little work on the net and you can get into one. They always give rss feeds and everything in 720p as well.
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there are apparently several forum posts about how to automatically shutdown virtual machines, but they're all in reference to linux hosts. i'm not exactly sure what would be different with xp or "7" as the host.
