TV management for the elite!
Due to popular demand, I’ve decided to write a quick post to show y’all how to setup a pretty awesome and fairly automated way to pull media from the internets and watch it/listen to it anywhere in your home OR on the road.
There are many levels of involvement to this setup from the cheapest and simplest, all the way to the more expensive and elaborate. The complexity, however, only lies in the initial setup and once it’s all up and running.. sit back and watch some TV.
Simple setup
This section represents the core functionality of how I get my media downloaded. These items are also required if you want to move into the more complex setup like external storage management, etc. With this setup you’ll be able to setup automatic downloading of your favourite shows and watch them on your computer anytime you want.
Items required
- a personal computer (Mac, PC, ubuntu, whatever)
- an internet connection with a decent bandwidth cap (show episodes are generally 350 MB for an hour of standard definition TV and can be 1.4 GB for HD so you do the math)
- a newsgroup account. This is different than your regular web service that you get from your ISP. Servers that store data and serve it up at blazingly fast speeds. Things you want to look for in your NG service: long retention days (999+), multiple connections (8+) and SSL. The one I use is usenetserver.com Prices can range but average between $10-$15 a month (cheaper than paying for TV!). You can even try their trials to see if you want to do it.
- a newsgroup search account. Though the newsgroup account above gives you access to download files, there is another site and account that is used to search these millions of files that are online. sign up for nzbmatrix.com and/or newzbin2.es With the former you should sign up for VIP ($10 for 10 years, lol) and you get more than 10 searches in 24 hrs.
Setup steps
- With your newsgroup service/search setup, you’ll need to download a couple of pieces of software to perform the searching and downloading. The first one is something called SABnzbd. This guy does the heavy lifting and performs the downloading through your NG service. It’s open source too (read: free!). Download this for your platform and run the installation.
- The installation wizard is really straight forward: screenshots. I chose the classic theme. On step 2, choose viewable on my PC only. Step 3, enter your newsgroup SSL server info (for me this is secure.usenetserver.com port 563 with username and password and I have 10 connections). Step 4 enter the search service you setup from 4 above. Click ‘Go to SABnzbd’
- You should be able to see the console for SABnzbd. If not, you can check out their FAQ
- Within the console for SABnzbd, go to Config > Folders and update the temporary download folder and the completed download folder to something more appropriate. something like c:\media\sabnzbd\complete & c:\media\sabnzbd\incomplete
- Under Config > Categories add a category called ‘TV’ with a path something like c:\media\tv (remember where this is for later) and click save at the end of the row
- Under Config > Sorting check the box that says ‘enable TV sorting’. Enter ‘%sn/Season %s/S%0sE%0e – %en.%ext’ in the sort string and scroll to the bottom and hit save
- The next thing to download is a program called SickBeard. Installation instructions here: instructions.
- Once complete you should be able to access it through http://localhost:8081 on your computer. Now you need to get all the pieces of software talking to each other.
- With sickbeard console opened, go to Config > Search Settings and update the information similar to below
Replace the data with your own.
The server you’ll use will be http://localhost:8080 with a blank username, password and API key.
- Under Config > Search Providers, check off whatever search providers you signed up for in the ‘Items Required’ #4 above and configure them in the ‘Configure built-in providers’ section (by adding the username and passwords/API key found at the site under account settings)
- Now that everything is up and running and wired together, you’re ready to start adding shows to SickBeard. Click Home > Add Shows. Here you’ll want to click ‘Add New Show’ and search for a show you want to add. Say ‘Misfits’ (great show, consider adding this one). Here, sickbeard will check for matches against this and show you potential hits. Choose the show based on the name and the series start date and hit ‘Next’
- Choose where the files for this show are going to be saved by sabnzbd. This should be the same folder from step 5. Hit Next
- Select if you want to skip any episodes that have aired so far or if you want to download them now (skipped vs wanted), check Season Folders and choose your preferred quality (SD for lower size and quality, HD for much larger size but better quality). Hit ‘Add Show’
- After some time you should see the TV show added to the list of shows. You can select the show and see the status of each episode whether it’s aired, downloaded, skipped, etc. If you open SABnzbd in your browser, you should see stuff start to download after a while. Once SABnzbd has completed each download, it should place the file in the folder that you specified.
- Watch and Enjoy.
In another post, I’ll write again on some extra peripherals you can setup to take the load off your computer (so you don’t have to leave it running all the time to manage the downloads), increase your storage and centralise the media so you can start watching on any of your TVs instead of your computer. Let me know if you have any questions (I’m sure I’ve missed something)
