Introduction
Howdy! It’s finally time for my Couch Potato guide! Huzzah!
Anyway, I’m excited to get this guide out to you all as Couch Potato is a great program and is right up there with Sick Beard in terms of ease of use, flexibility, and robustness. I had originally planned to wait until Couch Potato’s Management section was implemented more fully, but I started testing the program as it was and found it already incredibly useful. Since then, the Management section still hasn’t been fully developed, but the program, in general, has seen continued updates and is well worth using as it currently stands.
But, before I get ahead of myself, and for those of you who are not really clear on what I’m talking about here, Couch Potato is an application that serves a role similar to a standalone Digital or Personal Video Recorder (DVR/PVR). However, where a DVR or PVR will monitor a cable or satellite television connection for movies that you might like to record and watch at a later date, Couch Potato monitors the Internet. Also, whereas a DVR/PVR is generally going to be a separate, standalone device, Couch Potato is an application that can be run on just about any Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other GNU/Linux based personal computer. As such, Couch Potato is far more flexible than a “traditional” DVR/PVR setup.
For those that are familiar, this is very similar to Sick Beard, but Sick Beard specifically monitors episodic content where as Couch Potato specifically monitors cinematic content. As such, each has its own similar but unique feature set that is tailored specifically to its own intended role.
When combined with SABnzbd+, Sick Beard, Headphones (soon), and XBMC Media Center this makes for an extremely automated, streamlined, robust, and easy to use setup that is second to none!
However, with that said, one draw back of this setup is that the artists, writers, and actors that have helped to create these movies that we enjoy are not being supported. To offset this, you may want to consider purchasing an Amazon.com Prime membership for their Ubuntu and Linux Mint compatible Instant Video Streaming services. Additionally, or instead of the subscription service, you could purchase digital copies of your favorite cinema.
Note: Digital content should help prevent the creation of unneeded waste in the form of DRM restricted Bluray and DVD optical discs and packaging (as well as the various shipping and other supporting resources that are consumed in transporting them around the world).
This is my second, brand-new, major guide of this year, and it will join the ranks of my other major guides (SABnzbd+, Sick Beard, XBMC Media Center, RAID 5/6) in being regularly maintained and updated (generally bi-annually).
This guide will be based around the latest versions of Ubuntu and Couch Potato with all updates installed. If you’re using Linux Mint, or an alternative desktop environment (Xfce, Gnome, LXDE, KDE, etc), there will be a bit of adaptation that will be needed. However, both Linux Mint’s mintMenu and Ubuntu’s Home button have search functions that make navigation much the same so it should be easy to use this for either. If you get stuck feel free to ask me a question below in the comments or to shoot me an email as I’d be happy to help get you unstuck if at all possible.
This guide is also considered a companion guide to my SABnzbd+ Install, Setup, & Configuration Guide for Ubuntu & Linux Mint! guide. This means it assumes you have a fully functional installation of SABnzbd+ on the same computer, and that it was installed in the same way as outlined in the SABnzbd+ guide. If you have not yet setup SABnzbd+ or are using it on a different system you will need to adjust accordingly, but such configurations are outside the scope of this guide (and if you don’t understand why let me know)!
On that note, my guides are written in a very specific manner. This method is explained in my Guide Guide that’s currently found on our About page. I recommend taking a moment to give this a read now as it will elaborate on how and why I do things as I do and likely help you get the most out of this guide (and any of my others!).
With that out of the way, let’s get to installing Couch Potato (next page)!
Awesome guide, thanks! You might want to check the image on page 7, it seems that is a duplicate.
Hey linuxnoob,
Thanks for catching that (I’ve fixed it now)!
Cheers!
Many thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (and the other guides).
Hey alphacat,
You’re very welcome, thanks for the comments!
Cheers!
I’m a little confused about the settings on the “Renaming” tab (page 7 of your guide).
In CP, under the “Download folder”, it says “Your SABnzbd movie download folder”.
In your example, you input “/home/daemox/Downloads/cinematic”. However, on page 10 of your guide for SABnzbd (http://www.ainer.org/sabnzbd-install-setup-configuration-guide-for-ubuntu-linux-mint/10), you have “cinematic” input as the Folder/Path for the cinematic category. Are these the same folders?
Thanks for your time.
Hey kurtster,
Yep, you are exactly right, these are the same folder! We have to configure SABnzbd+ to deal with the downloads exactly how we want (category, and Folder/Path) and then we have to tell Couch Potato where SABnzbd+ will be saving the downloads it has been sent (Download folder). Once they are downloaded, Couch Potato will use “Download folder” to find them again, rename them, and then move them to the “Movie destination” folder.
Hope this answers your question, let me know if not!
Thanks for clarifying that.
My SABnzbd download folder path is “/c/.sabnzbd/Downloads/complete/cinematic”, which includes a symlink. Initially the renaming function in CP wasn’t working for me, and I *think* it’s because I input the absolute path to “cinematic”, not the one above. Not sure, but anyway it’s working like a charm now.
hiya. I did something wrong and I can’t figure out where. When I search for a movie, it repopulates the search bar with the name and year in parentheses, but when I hit Add the circle just spins indefinitely without ever changing.
I can’t figure out where I went wrong, but I’m sure I did. Is this just a stupid mistake or should I scratch the whole thing and start from the beginning?
Hey Jim,
Unfortunately, I’ve not ran into something like that and since there’s so little detail there it’s hard for me to speculate as to what might be going on behind the scenes. If you can check your logs, and then you may just want to take them straight to Couch Potato’s forums in this case as it may end up being a bug in the software which would be outside my ability to help.
https://couchpotato.tenderapp.com/
Either way, feel free to keep in touch or ask me more questions!
Hey betrayer,
You may need to email me on this if you’re still having the issue. Have you ran Couch Potato or the script with sudo? Have you added your username to the script?
If you’re still stuck shoot me some more details via email and we’ll see what we can figure out.
Best of luck!
I’m getting the same problem now too. I didn’t change anything. It just stopped working suddenly after a reboot. I never ran the script as root.
Hi Legoman666,
I don’t have a solution for this as it’s working fine for me. At this point I recommend that anyone that’s having the problem revert to the default Couch Potato auto-start script (/home/$USER/.couchpotato/initd and edit it accordingly). If the problem persist submit a bug report to Couch Potato directly and launch it manually (python /home/$USER/.couchpotato/CouchPotato.py).
These scripts have actually been replaced by Upstart scripts, so it may just be that the init scripts are showing their age a bit here. Unfortunately I’m not a programmer so apart from hacking them together a bit and a bit a basic trouble-shooting they quickly get outside my skill set.
In the future sedux may be able to provide an Upstart based script to completely replace this, but currently we don’t have one available.
Best of luck!
Sorry, I was able to fix it shortly after I made the post here. It turns out that some other package that I had installed put itself on port 8083 (package name was “mdadm” for those wondering). I removed it, rebooted, and Couch Potato is working fine now.
Thanks for the great guide/script!
Thanks for following up Legoman666,
Just for your reference mdadm is for managing multi-disk arrays (such as RAID) in case you did in fact need that, or need it in the future.
Thanks for the guide daemox. I keep running into a problem though. If I uninstall everything and start from scratch, everything works fine. As soon as I update though I can’t connect to the web interface. If I run “python .couchpotato/CouchPotato.py -q” in a terminal I can suddenly connect to the web interface, but I can’t ctrl-c to leave it running and as soon as I close the terminal I loose the web interface. Any ideas?
Hi Bob,
It’s beginning to look like something may have changed in Couch Potato to cause issues with the startup script. I’m about to start updating the guide so you can try your hand at the startup script Couch Potato includes by default, or if you’d like, wait until I get my guide updated and I’ll take a look at what’s going on.
In the meantime, you can try the -d instead of the -q flag, or once you have Couch Potato up try restarting it via the web interface, that should release the terminal window without killing Couch Potato.
Shoot me an email if you’d like and I’ll let you know when my guide gets updated.
Cheers!
I used the original script and so far so good. I noticed the original script includes the lines “APP_PATH=/usr/local/sbin/couchpotato” and “DAEMON=/usr/bin/python”. I changed the app path to “APP_PATH=/home/bob/.couchpotato” and it seems to be working. I don’t know if there were any other changes to the script, but thought that might help. I’ll post back if it starts acting up again.