A python script allows you to enter the name of the show, scrubs it from a tv guide website and adds the release date of each episode into a scheduler. Then, the scheduler fires off and searches for each episode on a torrent aggregator (like torrentz or something) and downloads it from the best seed/leech ratio result. All without your intervention since torrent RSS is not very reliable in the public tracker scenario.
What would be the legality of distributing that script? (depending on legality, I may or may not write or have already written such a script)
+1 for a Sickbeard setup. Been using it for a while with SABnzbd and it's great; I've got all the shows I want waiting whenever they air, or if I decide to download a full series.
Yeah, if you subscribe to HBO Go you get everything on HBO streaming. It's a good service from what I've used. Also comes bundled with the channel if you subscribe with cable.
Just a note to others checking out Sickbeard. It does not download the actual video clip. It only downloads a torrent (or in my case an nzb file) which needs to be further piped.
Sickbeard + SABnzbd has been my go-to combination for months now. Sickbeard is regularly updated, and the integration between the two requires a small amount of initial configuration. From there, just make sure the 2 daemons are running and that's it.
Agreed. I originally clicked on it because I thought it might be a way to get Netflix working on my raspberrypi. I'm pretty sure I physically wilted in my chair when I saw it was nothing of the sort.
As others are saying, it's still a good hack though. And while just installing a custom distro meant for XBMC on your rpi might be easier, putting something like this together by hand is a much better experience.
When I read it I thought they were building a customized version of Google TV, which was strange because I don't remember Google announcing that they've open-sourced Google TV (btw, is Google even allowed to do that?)
Please let us know how you get on. (I've subscribed to your blog.) I'm looking to do something similar and I'd be interested in how OpenELEC+XBMC compares to the setup you've described.
RPI has a very mature version of XBMC working on it, so you are much better off with that for your home media center.
BUT god this is a nice hacking project and i would love to see this being the start of an XBMC alternative open source project that is built upon web technology! Awesome!
My mistake. I had been poking around the raspbmc site and saw that he was at King's College - theres also a Kings College in London Canada and I jumped to conclusions.
Looking up his blog made that pretty apparent .co.uk :P
Fun seeing what people do with their PIs. Really appreciate the time people put into documenting their projects.
I've been running a custom mp3 media server[1] built around a similar stack (node,socket.io,express) and I was surprised how capable the pi is for this kind of thing. The only real slowdown I saw in my project was inserting/reading thousands of records from a sqlite3 db (displaying all tracks for example) and even that was solved pretty easily with some caching. My project is all running headless though, with presentation handled on the client (phone/desktop browser); I'd be curious how the chromium render speeds are for this. In my testing any kind of web browsing on the pi was pretty painful.
This really could be the start of something great. FWIW, here is what I think a media center should do, which no current solution achieves:
Have a DVR-like interface, where all content is combined. This means downloaded torrents (by new and/or watched), with meta info. Also include new streams from HuluFlix based on when they were made available. New shows recorded from antenna and maybe QAM. New movies from Crackle, etc. The point is, I should be able to tell the application that I want all new episodes of "The Simpsons" and it will use all available configured sources to find what I want. It will present this to me in one comprehensive list. The source is irrelevant and I don't want to start various apps to find what I want. Google TV sort of tried to do this and failed. As cool as XBMC and their ilk are, they suffer from not passing the "wife test" and feature bloat. This thing, in my mind, should be dead simple to use.
See, here's the thing about Roku and competitors (like the WD box, etc): they all require you to start different "apps" to browse different sources of content. I don't care where the content comes from, I just want to watch it. So, when I say "DVR", what I mean is a DVR-like interface to combine all content from various sources.
Roku supports a unified search now, though unified search doesnt support all apps/channels. It does support Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, and Crackle though.
Also, most (all?) Roku's support local storage, but it isn't ideal. Usually, I need to throw some content on a thumbdrive and stick it into the Roku. Not horrible, but I wish I could use the Roku to download content to use it to stream via DLNA.
The search part is good, but I want to then put that search to good use to allow me to subscribe to "seasons" of shows so that when I turn on the TV, I see a date-descending list of shows (and their watched status). A la DVR. If the Roku had that I'd be all over it. But it still sticks to the silo app model at the end of the day. Just not my cup of tea.
I tried to get it setup once, but it doesn't work for my situation (for instance, my laptop is usually in hibernation when I'm at home. I have a connected disk that supports DLNA and I wish I could stream from that.) With this considered, just plugging in USB storage is fine. Not ideal, but fine.
Also, when I last tried to use Plex (though, this was more than a year ago), it was extremely clunky. Maybe things are different now, or maybe I was expecting it to behave differently, but I didnt like it.
when you have hundreds of albums and all your DVDs ripped, it's actually preferable to have your sources separated as it makes searching easier. Furthermore, I don't think it's hard to switch between music and videos on XBMC (since you mentioned the "wife test", my non-technical wife manages XBMC fine).
In fact the very reason I switched away from Boxee and Moovida back to vanilla XBMC was because I wanted a media player that separated my music and videos and respected my file system hierarchy.
However looking at the screenshots for this project, it looks like it separates music and video in the same way XBMC does. So I'm not really sure I understand your point.
Music is another beast; I'm focusing on video in my rant. Right now on (e.g.) a Roku, the process of finding a specific show to watch consists of opening several apps: check Netflix... Not there? Check Hulu... Not there? check YouTube. Not there? check NBC.com. Not there? check other stations' content sites. Not there? Check local storage. Not there? Check NAS. All I want is something to organize this into one DVR-like list. It can start the various necessary apps for viewing (not ideal, but I understand their commercial interest to keep their properties siloed). I am just sick of having to dig through every individual source to watch what I want. Furthermore, a good application would keep tabs on release date and watched status for me, like you'd expect from a DVR.
What you're describing isn't really a feature I personally want (just having random YouTube results mixed in with offline content would annoy me), however I can totally understand why it would be preferable for many other people.
> Furthermore, a good application would keep tabs on release date and watched status for me, like you'd expect from a DVR.
To nitpick: on the Roku, all you have to do to search across all your installed channels is just use the search app. Also there's no official Youtube channel, as far as I know. But I get what you're getting at.
Great! I'm about to start on a freelance project writing web stuff for set-top boxes, nice to see what's out there in the open source world. Thanks for posting. :)
There are a million Chinese companies making little ARM devices running Android 4 and selling them for about $50. Basically everybody's waiting for Google and bigger manufacturers to sit up and take notice and start supporting the platform (poor wake-on-USB behavior is a huge problem).
Dell is supposedly going to be the first one on the scene with a real brand-named "mini-PC" device.
Somebody please pack this all together and sell it for $50. This is how Apple do business. Sell hardware and software together.
It's a very cool project for the technically savvy, but if you sell it to consumers, you'd have to provide support, something that could be time consuming. Or make it foolproof (Apple's strength).
I have a Raspbmc setup, and I get a fair amount of interest from visitors who are impressed, and want their own cheap media centers. I dissuade them, unless I am sure they can troubleshoot computer issues, SSH/SFTP, image an SD card, and know basic SQL.
That's true, but with some serious development things can be possible, after all you need a community to cover your back to compete with the big names, and our community is RaspberryPi, Linux, and the open Web...
I remember (maybe a year ago) people complaining about XMBC on RaspberryPI. Things like the menus being sluggish / having slight delays, maybe some issues with 1080p videos streaming over a network, etc. Have those been resolved?
I can play FullHD DTS movies (rips of my own blurays kept at best quality possible) over Wifi without any hickup at all. That's fine.
The UI sometimes could be faster/smoother, but it's good enough. Moving between menu items sometimes drops a frame or two. So that's in FullHD, maybe that's better at a lower resolution.
What i learned from my previous media center (a Boxee, so basically a commercial XBMC fork): To stream FullHD over Wifi use NFS, not SMB, it is a difference. Atleast in my setup movies wouldn't play without buffering every few seconds over SMB.
Edit: also, from my experience openelec seems to be a little bit faster. Maybe because it's not booting the whole Debian userspace but only a minimal Linux.
Also: You can overclock your rPi without losing warranty (within limits). I overclocked mine to the maximum (700MHz -> 1000MHz) and it's still running without any cooling! :)
woah, this is really cool. How does this compare to XBMC on the raspmc distro? I am really tempted to try this out on my rpi because a lot of the software stack used could be hacked on easily.
What would be the legality of distributing that script? (depending on legality, I may or may not write or have already written such a script)