Addendum
Supplemental Software
To get the most out of your brand spankin’ new Couch Potato install you may want to check out some of the following applications. These are applications that are either designed for Couch Potato, or that just simply go hand in hand with the time saving features of Couch Potato (philosophical cousins if you will).
These applications are provided in no particular order, and I’m only including applications that I currently recommend using (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list!).
Sick Beard
Sick Beard is a super handy program that has seen an unbelievable amount of developmental over the last year. Even a year ago it was already incredibly functional, and it has only grown in its robustness and in its rich feature-set since then.
For those of you that are not already familiar with Sick Beard, think of it as a program that fills a role similar to a Personal or Digital Video Recorder (PVR/DVR). You tell Sick Beard what shows you’re interested in, and it’ll keep track of them, search for them, and download them automatically for you, and organize them. Then, when you have time and an interest to watch them, you do so at your own leisure. However, instead of using a television connection (such as a PVR), Sick Beard utilizes the Internet. And, instead of using a stand-alone device, Sick Beard runs on your own Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other GNU/Linux based personal computer (PC).
When setup, and used in conjunction with SABnzbd+ and XBMC Media Center, Sick Beard offers an extremely streamlined, robust, and automated setup that is second to none for most uses. One drawback of the setup however, is that the artists, writers, and actors that have helped to create these shows 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 shows.
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).
XBMC
XBMC Media Center, also known simply as “X-B-M-C,” is a full featured, skin-able, and extensible, media front-end, library manager, and, who’d of thought, media player. It can play nearly any media you might throw at it. Video and music files, CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-rays, you name it! (Though anything with “DRM” requires some extra unnecessary work.)
With the right skin (Neon), XBMC Media Center provides a highly polished (second to none) front-end for any media playing computer along with oodles of art, posters, ratings, trailers, lyrics, plot summaries, TV guide like functionality, and so many more bits of supplemental information that I cannot feasibly cover them all here.
While it may not seem like an obvious supplemental application to SABnzbd+, at least when used in conjunction with Sick Beard, Couch Potato, and Headphones it definitely is.
XBMC provides a very polished and easy to use end point for any multimedia collection. That meticulously maintained collection will seem all the more amazing and accessible when it’s supported by the content and information that are pulled in courtesy of XBMC.
Headphones
Headphones is an up-and-coming PVR-like application that aims to fill a roll similar to Sick Beard and Couch Potato but for music content (instead of episodic or cinematic). It’s very much a new program, but if you’re brave and looking to be an early adopter it may be worth firing it up to take a look-see. If not, keep an eye out as I’ll undoubtedly be writing a guide for it in the near future!
SABnzbd+
SABnzbd+ is, simply put, a Usenet client. It allows access to Usenet in the same way as a Web Browser allows access to the World Wide Web, or as an Email client (be it Web based, or installed directly onto your computer) allows access to your Email servers.
Usenet is an old, old network that actually pre-dates the Web and allows for exchanging information over the Internet. Usenet however, uses a much less centralized method compared to the Web as most of the content on Usenet is distributive across many, many different servers whereas any one website will likely only be hosted by a single server (or a single cluster of servers). Any content that’s hosted on Usenet will propogate across all the servers that choose to provide access to it and can be accessed via the server of your choice (I suggest Supernews or Giganews).
SABnzbd+ itself is focused on accessing binary content on Usenet (versus non-binary content such as text based messages) courtesy of NZB files. SABnzbd+ is a highly robust and mature program and works wonderfully as the basis for an automated setup featuring Sick Beard, Couch Potato, Headphones, and XBMC Media Center.
If you’re wondering how to read “SABnzbd+” as you’re going along, “SAB-nzb-daemon-plus” is probably pretty close to accurate. I personally use “SAB” as it’s a bit easier to spit out repeatedly.
Trouble-shooting
Revision History
8/5/11 — Guide created.
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.