I created a guide which goes to all the steps how to get started with XBian and setup a fully automated solution to follow your favourite TV Shows and movies. This is a guide for beginners, it's extensively written but the steps are short and easy.
This uses
http://trakt.tv and Flexget and is a good and very lightweight alternative for Sickbeard/Couchpotato.
Enjoy!
Simple GUIDE: *Fully* Automated TV/Movie downloads for XBMC
Nice and good tutorial. Some remarks on the tutorial:
You forgot (or I missed?) the step were transmission is installed, or does transmissionrpc also include the tranmission client itself? If yes, is there a way the xbian-package of transmission could be used? Since this one is patched for XBian and compiled specially (lightweight) for the RPi.
At step C, the folders /home/xbian/downloads etc are create when the download package (of on of its includes) is installed. So won't be there for default (they will be when xbian-package-transmission is installed).
At the extra: If you enable portforwarding it's recommended to change the password for transmission also. It is also not recommended to enable port forwarding for port 22, because you will get several brute force attacks per day on that port. If you want remote ssh access from everywhere best is to change the ssh port number (google for more info on this).
Flexget also offers support for newsservers, so you might want to add that to your tutorial.
Some remarks on the claims you made in the beginning. The claims to more relate to torrents vs newsservers then FlexGet vs SickBeard/CouchPotato.
CouchPotato perfectly supports torrents, so no need for a newsserver.
SickBeard offers limited support for torrents, but there is also a fork with full support (which is also offered as an XBian package). So again, no need for a newsserver.
The parring and extracting is related to using newsservers.
The last claim about prioritising feature included in >XBian beta 1 so can be applied for any package, also for SickBeard and CouchPotato (which it also is). So these can also run simultanious with XBMC.
The way I see it:
Flexget:
pro:
Lightweight.
One solution for both tvshows and movies.
con:
More advanced to install and configure.
CouchPotato/SickBeard:
pro:
Easier to install and configure.
Full and fancy GUI.
con:
Not so lightweight.
Totally agree with you, I updated and trimmed down the guide, must have deleted the Transmission part. When I started with this, torrent support in Sickbeard was broken and when I reported it there was limited response so I thought torrents were no longer a priority. I didn't know about the fork, very interesting! I will update the guide this wkend, thanks for your feedback, much appreciated!
edit: just updated the guide, re-added Transmission installation, updated cons/pros.
transmissionrpc is a seperate 'tool', which helps to connect to the JSON-RPC service of Transmission. It is not part of Transmission and does not contain transmission. I don't know the details just that it is necessary and a very small tool.
I did not create Flexget the package anymore... I'm still discussing this with the Flexget devs. But they are a bit against the idea of custom packages..
Just for the experience, I might create a ddclient package.
BTW about the nice UI: with the Flexget setup from the guide you will be able to use the very fancy glamourous trakt.tv website to add/remove TV Shows and movies
If all has been set correctly, you don't need to edit the flexget config file anymore..
Flexget is developing a webui and an experimental version is available though. But I never tried it.
I followed the tutorial but nothing seems to dowload. I have 4 movies or so on my watchlist and 1 episode on my watchlist and two customs lists. One with two series. Am I missing something?