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[GUIDE] Automated Media Server & XBMC Setup

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Leon:
*UPDATE 11/06/2012* - I've been out of the country for the past 6 months so have not been around to update the guide, I am currently working on it now however it may take some time. Not much has changed in the past year - new versions of software but settings are mostly the same so don't worry if your thinking this is 'out of date'.

Change Log
27/09/2011 - Few small changes, realised I started setting up XBMC without mentioning where to download from or to install it first.
03/06/2011 - Missing a couple images, updated.
03/06/2011 - XBMC install and some setup. TBC
17/05/2011 - Added Managing shows in Sick Beard
17/05/2011 - Updated 'Advanced Sickbeard' install as I seemed of missed a step (Git in Windows Command Line)
11/05/2011 - Just noticed I completely missed Metadata from Sick Beard Setup - Added.
11/05/2011 - Added Advanced Sick Beard install (Via GIT)
11/05/2011 - Added Couch Potato setup
11/05/2011 - Added Sick Beard setup & changed version from 485 to 487.
11/05/2011 - Added SABnzbd setup.
10/05/2011 - Started again within Windows 7 & re-wrote parts of this introduction post.

Software @ Time of Writing (10/05/2011)
OS - Windows 7 SP1
SABnzbd+ - 0.6.0
Sick Beard  - Alpha 487
Couch Potato - r31
XMBC - 10.1 & Aeon MQ2

I started off setting up the following all on a single box running Linux (Ubuntu) and while I didn't finish the guide completely I did put most of it into the PDF which is available here - I ran into a few problems within the Linux environment which meant switching back to Windows 7 instead - the need of logmein, accelerated flash support, post processing over network, uTorrent, and a few other things that while might be get working within Ubuntu I cba to faff that much.

*note* HUGE thanks to everyone who has posted guides and useful information on forum.xbmc.org, it's one hell of a community when it comes to anything open source HTPC / Media related.

I would also ask that if anyone wants to use the contents of this guide please either link directly to it or at least put a reference to it somewhere in the information you provide, this is hopefully going to be an ongoing project with continuing updates as I modify my own setup (plus image links may change etc). I did the following to try and gather all my information into one place, plus as a thanks to give something back to the community that helped me get this setup and to hopefully bring some much needed love to TekForums.net

What will the finished project look like?
You will have a computer that auto-downloads your TV shows (via Sick Beard) and Movies (via Couch Potato). Manages your existing shows by downloading Fan Art, Posters, Plot, Summary, Trailers, Actor info, and if setup to do so will re-download archived shows if found at a requested higher quality.

This computer will also be able to play 1080p content from XBMC which has been setup to look something like the following:



 
Which takes full advantage of the fan art & posters and looks damn good on a big TV!

Prerequisites

Knowledge
As this guide has switched to Windows over Ubuntu the required knowledge has reduced! Hurray! But you still need some basic know-how... Some understanding of some technical terms, how to extract files, and being able to keep note of the required API's and account details we will be using within our selected programs - I can't hold your hand for that, it's your personal data.

Media Collection
Unless you're starting your collection from scratch (great idea if you can!) you will need your current collection to be in some sort of sensible structure…


* Movies - These should be in correctly named folders. The files can be named anything what so ever but the folder name MUST be correct.
* TV Shows - There is some leeway on this but generally you want your series to be \TV Shows\<Show Name>\<Season 0x>\01x01 or S01E01 <insert random stuff>.<extension>
To those with the really messy collections let's see what we can do for you... For Movies I'm not sure myself (maybe someone can post their experiences) because I started my movie collection from scratch as I saw it as a good opportunity to go from the low quality rips I had up to 720p/1080p - Some googling will give you plenty of options for creating folders based on filenames but that's under the assumption that your filenames are anything close to the movie name.

I'm going to do a small section on some of the external media managers that are available however these use the same scrapers (the 'lookup' that checks online for what the movie/show is and downloads the meta data) as XBMC, Sick Beard and Couch Potato so if it's not found in one it's not going to be found in the others - the collection sorting has to come first!

TV Shows you have a couple options... If your shows are still named the original release name (eg. House S07E21 720p HDTV X264 DIMENSION) you're in luck! Sick Beards post processing scripts should be able to figure it out, move into correct structure, rename, grab meta data and all that jazz! Similarly if your shows follow as basic structure like \House\S01\E01.mkv or \House\01x01.mkv or even \house\1\1.mkv Sick Beard should pick it up straight away without the need of post processing... but much more on that later - just giving you an idea of what to expect.

Hardware
There are plenty of useable options. If you are not planning to use this as a HTPC as well then you can basically use anything you can throw together with enough storage space for your needs, however if you want to run 1080p video  you need a bit of graphical power.

Personally I'm using one of the HP MicroServers with an extra 2GB Ram (3GB Total), 4x 2TB Hard drives, and a Zotec 512MB nVidia 210 GFX card.
You can find a good hardware setup guide for the MicroServer Here.

Here's is a sample system from picking the cheapest (brand) components from Scan:

The above thrown into any case will be more than enough (overkill actually) for what we are doing.

*note* There are plenty of hardware options out there like Zotec's prebuilt micro PC's designed for HTPC use (not so great for our server) and you would be surprised how little power you need to play 1080p. For a full range of options do a Google or check out the hardware section on forum.xbmc.org - For example I run a full version of XBMC with my 1080p library within Windows 7 on a HP-Mini 311c which is a single core ATOM (1.2Ghz), ION1 Lite GFX chipset and 2GB of Ram without any problems.

Services

Internet - Faster the better and you don't want a cap. While a lot of ISP's won't care unless you REALLY take the piss, at time of writing, the only ISP's that don't do fair usage is Virgin's largest package (XXXXXXXL or whatever it is) and surprisingly SKYBB's Unlimited. More information on these things can be found via Google.

NZB - Newsgroups used to be (and still are for some) confusing and seemly over the top for a lot of people when torrents seem to offer the same service for free but that's what this guide will hopefully help with. The server setup I go through below rely on you having a newsgroup subscription, they do have some limited torrent support but I've not tested it.

Plenty of people will have their own recommendations but I use AstraWeb for £7.60 a month (3 month DSL Unlimited package) which offers 900 retention & SSL.


* Pros: Max your connection for everything you download, SSL so ISP can't see what it is you're downloading, quick releases and general high quality of releases.
* Cons: Costs money, Confusing for first time users (I will hopefully solve this).
You will also need to become a premium member of either Newsbin or NZBMatrix (or both, more the merrier) - They are dirt cheap and are needed for Sick Beard & Couch Potato to search for items. I use NZBMatrix.

Leon:
SABnzb+
This is our NZB download software

Download: Offical Website
I recommend downloading the Alt: Windows Binaries, zipped as I will be basing the guide on this.

Once the file has download, right click and Extract All


Choose a location to extract to. I will be putting all of the programs into a single folder on the system drive, so typed in C:\HTPC\ so that it will create a new folder called HTPC and extract the SABnzb files into there.


Once extracted it will open up the new folder and show the extracted SABnzb-0.6.0 folder. To make things easier (and neater) I'm going to rename this folder to SABnzb so you end up with the following structure:


Great! Now run SABnzbd.exe and your web browser should automatically open to the SABnzbd+ quick-start wizard.

Choose your language:


Next step is to setup your NZB server details, these are the details from your newsgroup provider. As mentioned in the section above I use AstraWeb so have the following setting:

If your provider allows I recommend using SSL. I also recommend using 2 less connections than it officially allows, this saves our error log filling up when it tries to make a new connection before fully dropping the last.

Next: I change the setting to allow me to access SABnzb from any PC on the network... this allows me to view and manage my downloads from my other PC's or Phone. I don't bother setting a username and password.


This is the last step and requires details from either Newsbins or NZBMatrix (or both) - I recommend getting a premium account on either or both of these to save yourself some hassle down the line. I only use NZBMatrix at the moment.


SABnzbd will now reboot and then give you a page with some links on it. Choose one of these (I'm using http://localhost:8080/) and you will be taken to the SABnzb homepage! Congratulations.

Bookmark this page so you can access it later without having to remember the address!

We need to do a bit of configuration so click Config at the top of the screen. I'm not going to go through each setting as a lot of it is personal preferences but I will highlight certain things in each section.


General

You can change the skin in here, each time you will need to restart the client for it to take effect - try a few and see what you like. For the moment I'll be staying with the default skin.

This is also where you will find your SABnzbd API key which we will need later.

The only options I would recommend changing here are:
Download Speed Limit - Setting this to 90-95% of your max download speed with stop SABnzbd raping your connection to the point where even websites won't load.
Article Cache Limit - If you have at least 2GB of RAM set this to 128M


Folders
*note* - Replace %username% with your login name. If you are un-sure what your username is it’s the name of your profile folder in C:\Users\<name!>

These set the locations where SAB will download & watch from. You can leave most as default if you wish but by default they don't follow the new folder structure in windows 7 (they by default create files in C:\users\%username%\documents\downloads\ instead of C:\users\%username%\downloads)

Temporary Download Folder & Completed Download Folder are pretty self-explanatory... these are the locations SAB will use when downloading a file and then move it once extracted. Realistically both these locations are tempoary as Sick Beard and Couch Potato will move the files from the completed folder once they have been extracted.

Watched Folder is where SAB will look for .nzb files to add to the download queue. I set this as my browsers default download folder so if I manually download anything from NZBMatrix SAB will pick up the file and add it automatically.

Post-Processing Scripts Folder is used for Sick Beard, we will come back to this later on!


Switches

Only thing I bother changing here is Ignore Samples set to Delete after Download. I don't use samples and so I don't want them. I've had issues with the 'do no download' option with it not downloading files that the actual movie/show requires.


Categories
We will be coming back to this during the Sick Beard install

Sorting
Awesome tools if you are only using SAB and not Sick Beard / Couch Potato but as we are using them make sure everything is DISABLED otherwise it breaks things.

Finished!

Leon:
Sick Beard
Manages and Downloads TV Shows

(click to show/hide)If you want you can install & compile from source using the method below. It allows you to use some of the other branches (different variations) of Sick Beard which the community is working on. I personally use this method because I use the Anime branch of Sick Beard that adds an option to mark a series as Anime, give it absolute episode numbers and also adds an extra NZBsearch provider that caters for 'Asian Media'

Step 1: Download and install Python 2.7.1 - Just doing the default next next next finish install is good enough for us.
Step 2: Add the Python folder (C:\Python27) to Windows Environment Variables

* Start > Run > systempropertiesadvanced.exe
* Environment Variables
* Find Path and hit Edit
* Add ;C:\Python27 to the end
* REBOOTStep 3: Download Cheetah and Extract into a folder - I use C:\Cheetah\

* Open up CMD (Start > Run > CMD)
* Navigate to your Cheetah folder (type CD C:\Cheetah then hit Enter)
* Type python setup.py install then hit Enter
* Once you get Completed message you can close CMD and delete the Cheetah folderStep 4: Download & Install GIT - Mostly standard install but select GIT from Windows Command when you get the option.
Step 5: Open up CMD again (Start > Run > CMD)

* Navigate to the HTPC folder (type CD C:\HTPC\ and hit Enter)
* Type git clone git://github.com/lad1337/Sick-Beard.git and hit Enter... This is the anime branch download, you can view all the Sick Beard branches and download any you wish from HERE if you want to download the normal Sick Beard release via GIT use this: git://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard.git
* This will create a folder in C:\HTPC\ called Sick-Beard - Navigate to it by typing CD Sick-Beard and hit Enter
* If using the anime branch above type git checkout -b myAnime origin/myAnime otherwise just got to next step
* Type python sickbeard.py and hit Enter - Lots of text and a bit of time later Sick Beard should run in your browser.
* Back in Windows Explorer navigate into C:\HTPC\Sick-Beard\autoProcessTV\ and rename autoProcessTV.cfg.sample to autoProcessTV.cfg
If you installed the normal install of Sick Beard via GIT then you can update using the internal update option (it will prompt you when new versions are released) however if you are running a custom branch you have to shutdown Sick Beard, go into CMD and type Git Pull

Simple - Download: Official Site

Again download the binaries in a zipped folder and Extract:

See I also have my SAB download folders in my downloads now!

Again I'm going to extract to C:\HTPC\


And rename the folder to SickBeard


Go into the autoProcessTV folder and rename autoProcessTV.cfg.sample to autoProcessTV.cfg


Then simply run SickBeard.exe and again your web browser will run and open to the Sick Beard homepage


Now we need to do some configuration so click Config


General

Nothing to change here!

Search Settings

Usenet Retention - This number depends on your newsgroup account. AstraWeb give 900 days so that’s what I changed it to.


NZB Method: - SABnzbd
SABnzbd URL - http://localhost:8080/
SABnzbd API Key - You need to get this from SABnzdb+ > Config > General Settings


Search Providers
Put a tick next to any providers you have an account with (Womble's Index & Sick Beard Index don't require one) and then scroll down and put your account details in the box below.


Post Processing

Keep Original Files & Move Associated Files should be disabled to limit the amount of duplicate / random files cluttering our drives.

Rename Episodes should be enabled to keep everything neat and tidy.

Scan and Process need to be DISABLED due to using processing scripts in SAB.



Metadata
This is all the show information & pretty pictures... you will want this!

Select XBMC from the drop down and then tick all the boxes. I prefer posters so don't select 'use banners'


Episode Naming is purely down to personal preferences. I would recommend disabling Air-By-Date forum as XBMC doesn't seem to like it too much, also if the database entry isn't very up to date you end up missing information. Enabling Quality will save you some hassle if you ever need to import your collection back into another program or if you need to re-add to Sick Beards database.


Notifications
We will come back to this later once we have setup XBMC

Last steps... Go back into your SABnzbd+ > Config > Folders page and add C:\HTPC\SickBeard\autoProcessTV to the Post Processing Scripts


and go into Categories and set up like the following:


Making sure that tv is setup to run sabToSickBeard.exe

Leon:
Depending on your collection size and state of organisation this can either be a lengthy mainly automated process for a really lengthy manual process! Let's cross our fingers shall we...

First please make sure that your TV shows are AT LEAST put into folders with the correct TV Show name, you don't have to use Season Folders but it helps a great deal.

Existing Shows

Ok so you have Sick Beard up and running. Go to Home > Add Shows then click Add Existing Shows


Click the Manage Directories tab at the top and add the root folder of your TV shows:


Click Customize - I'm working under the assumption that you want to set the same standards for all shows - So select what you want in this menu...


* Season Folders - Recommended, I'm not sure if you have to disable this if you are not currently storing in season folders, it would have to be tested, however if you tick this any new episodes that are downloaded will be put into season folders.
* Initial status of missing episodes - I like to set this to skipped and then manually choose which episodes/seasons I want, feel free to change it to wanted or something else.
* Anime - I have this option because I'm running a custom branch of Sick Beard with Anime support (see Advanced install) - Most won't have this so can be ignored however if you are running with this branch be warned that most existing shows have to be added as Anime & and then switched over after being scanned.
* Quality - Switch it over to CUSTOM and then you will be able to set it as you want.
* Inital quality is where you set the minimal quality for SB to download... It will always attempt to download the highest quality option but sometimes these just don't exist.
* Archive is basically the quality it will continuously try and find during its weekly backlog checks until it has itI find the below works well for me. Most shows are downloaded as HDTV or 720 WEB-DL as they are shown but it has SD DVD in there for the older shows (BBC stuff comes to mind) and 720 BluRay for the stuff over the last couple of years... but end of the day I want my whole collection to be 720p BluRay so that’s my Archive choice. Hope that makes sense?

Click Save Defaults


Ok once you have done the above scroll down a bit and you will, hopefully, see a list of the folders SB has found in your TV root we added before. Stick a tick next to the shows you want to add and then hit submit:


Unless you already have metadata for the shows (tvshows.nfo to be exact) in the folders it will prompt you to confirm the show - If the show is the correct one simply hit Add Show and it will add with the defaults we set up before, if the show is incorrect simply type a new name in the box and search again.


Congratulations you have added your collection to Sick Beard, it will now take an age to scan, process, identify and download metadata for all your episodes... go grab a coffee, there is still things to do!

Managing Shows
So your shows have been added, SB has scanned your collection and tried to piece together what episode is what. If you’re lucky (or well organised) it’s found all the episodes correctly.


Click on a show name and you will see what it’s found and how its identified it.


(click to show/hide)There isn't that much you can do, its obvious it doesn't like your structure / naming scheme and that will have to be changed. I had to do this for my whole collection and it took days... My recommendation is do some googling for TV Show renamer or something along those lines and check out the software; I never had much luck with them and ended up setting Show Names & Season Folders up manually and then using a generic bulk file renamer to rename the shows 01x01 01x02 etc etc etc
Unless you had the quality in the name SB will assume all .MKV's are HD TV and all .AVI's are SD TV. You can change the status of episodes using the drop down menu at the top of the season listing:



* Wanted - Setting an episode to wanted will set SB to look for and download that episode(s) using the quality standards we set when we added the show.
* Skipped - If set to skipped SB won't download it but it will still show as a missing episode.
* Ignored - SB will ignore it, not marking it as missing but not search for it either.
* Archived - Not sure actually, can only assume it assumes you have it somewhere that SB can't scan - I never use this.
* Quality - If it has identified the quality of the episode incorrectly you can change it using these options.
Once you have confirmed that SB has identified your episodes correctly and you have set them to the correct quality you can hit 'Rename Episodes' at the top of the page to rename all your episodes to the naming scheme we setup in the general config.

WARNING - I have messed up whole seasons of shows by hitting rename BEFORE I had fully confirmed that SB was looking at the correct files for each episode!

So there we have it, you have your shows added, you know how to set missing episodes to wanted and change the listed quality. Any show that is still on-going will now automatically update when the episodes are released (you don't have to manually set unaired episodes to wanted).

This part of the guide is a bit rushed but you will hopefully get the jist until I get time to rewrite it.

Leon:
Couch Potato
For all your Movie download needs!

Download: Offical site

You should be getting good at this by now... Once again download the zip file and extract it!


This time CP doesn't extract to its own folder so we need to extract to C:\HTPC\CouchPotato


and then run CouchPotato.exe in the new folder - eventually (it takes longer than the other 2 programs) it will open your web browser to the CP homepage.


We also need to do some configuration so click the cog at the top of the page... again I'll do this section by section only high-lighting the important things.


General
Nothing to change here.

NZBs / Torrents
I haven't used torrent support so I cannot comment on it. We will be setting it up to use NZB's and SAB.

Retention - Whatever your newsgroup provides. AstraWeb is 900 days.
Download to - Sabnzbd
Host - localhost:8080
Apikey - API key found in your SABnzbd+ Config > General > API Key (not NZB key)
Category - movies



Providers
Again fill in the details of the accounts you have. I only have NZBMatrix so thats all I did.

Quality
It's worth setting up a personal quality profile. Simply give it a name and add the qualities you will accept and arrange them in the order you want.

Personally I only want to download 1080p or 720p films and I'm happy with either so I have the following:


But if you just want it to grab any quality available but keep looking out for a better one all the way up to 1080p you could do the following:


If you want your profile to be the default one to download all movies you have to save your settings after creating your profile and then it will appear in the drop down to the right:


Renaming
I enable this so that movies are downloaded, renamed and moved onto my archive drives automatically!

Download folder - Where SAB is downloading to, for me that’s C:\users\leon\downloads\complete\movies
Movie Destination - Where all your movies are kept, for me that’s D:\movies
Folder Naming - I leave this as default.
File Naming - I don't like the <cd> part of the scheme so I remove it.
Cleanup - Enabled, I don't want all the random files and folders remaining after download.



Extras
I don't use downloaded trailers, instead I stream inside XBMC (more on that later) but I do like having the subtitle files if at all possible so that’s enabled.

Metadata is the only thing in here I would recommend everyone enable. I know XMBC scraps the data itself but it doesn't create the files within the movie folder.



Notifications
We will come back to this after XBMC is setup.

Userscript
If you are using Chrome or Firefox you can install this Extension/Addon so that you can get 'add to couch potato' button at the bottom of IMDB.org pages making it that much easier to quickly add movies to your wanted list.

Done! You can now search for movies from the search bar in the top right, or if you added the userscript go browse around the IMDB website!

As long as you setup the movie categories in SAB like i said at the end of the Sick Beard install everything should be automated, just note that it can take a bit of time before CP kicks in and moves the movie file after its downloaded.

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