So, recently I've been thinking about what to do with an old white Macbook I had lying around. Then I thought, what could I automate in my life that I'm doing manually now, and it struck me, I watch a lot of series. So, I started looking around for a good PVR and stumpled upon Sickbeard, but the thing is, I'm not so super happy about paying for a Usenet membership (especially since I was just playing around atm). I succeeded in finding a fork/branch that supported using torrents instead of NZB.
Following this forum post, since I had all the prerequisits I only needed to clone down the repo and set it up for use with Transmission (my torrent program). If you wanna autostart Sickbeard on launch and you're on OS X like me you can follow these instructions to make an AppleScript that you can add to startup items. I've copied the script in here for the sake of completeness:
# Save this script as an Application and add it to your Login Items. #Change the following line to the path to your SickBeard folder set pathToSickBeard to "~/Development/Sick-Beard" #You probably don't want to change anything below here do shell script "python " & pathToSickBeard & "/SickBeard.py > /dev/null 2>&1 &"
Here's a litte picture of what Sickbeard might look like after adding a couple of series:
Now, after following the instructions of setting it up you should go into Post-Processing and set up how you'd like Sickbeard to handle the show/episode upon a successfull download.
So, now I've got automatic 'fetching' of TV-Series up and running, what else could I do. I also happen to have an jailbroken Apple TV which I use with XBMC, but seeing as XBMC had performed rather unstable, I thought that there might be a neater solution to this setup, so I looked around, and found Plex (which came from the same roots as XBMC).
I set up a Plex Server on my Macbook, and then installed the Plex Clients on my Apple TV and other devices I had lying around. The Plex server then transcodes the media to the Plex clients in their requested format (like 720p for my Apple TV since it can't do higher). I tried testing a bit with how much strain I could put on my Macbook, and to my surprise, I could have my Apple TV running with 720p, a browser session watching a movie and 2 other devices watching, and I couldn't even feel a thing. Quite amazing to be honest.
So, to roundup, my stack is:
- Sickbeard + Transmission to fetch content
- Plex Server to serve the content.
Quite the neat setup if I must say so myself, and the best part is, it's all automatic...