XBMC Supplementary Programs

Nagin

With so many great addons and supplementary programs for xbmc Im just wondering what most people here use. Im asking as boards as Ill wager there's more Irish users.

The programs I couldn't live without (god im dramatic):
1) SickBeard - "The ultimate PVR application that searches for and manages your TV shows" . Long story short - Add a TV show to the program and it then searches for and downloads them from newsgroups at whatever quality you want.

Thanks not the best part though.
Ill tell it download Breaking Bad. It will search for HD versions of the episode. Rename it the way I want it ie "Breaking Bad S01E01 Pilot"

The way it renames files and folders is sick. If I go to Series on my server it had a folder called Breaking Bad, inside that folder are multiple season folders which display like "Season 01","Season 02". Also it will download Season Pics, thumbs, fanart, create nfo's etc.

Everything is neat and is read perfectly by XBMC
http://sickbeard.com/

2) Couch Potato V2- CouchPotato is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader.
You can keep a "want to watch"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these items every X hours. Once a correct release is found, matching the correct quality, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the .nzb or .torrent to a specified directory.

Basically type in a film, it will search and download it. But say I want all my films at 720p, there's a setting in which you can get it to download screeners, r5, dvd rip and then it will check every few hours or so for the 720p version. When it finds the 720p it downloads it and replaces the one there before. It also creates nfo and downloads thumbs for the film. Oh and of course it moves it into the final destination for your movies and updates xbmc

I now have all my movies (over 500) added to it. Alot are old so are SD, but couch potato scanned them in and now I can click on the film and get CP to download a better quality version for it.

Pretty cool.....pretty really cool
https://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotatoServer

3) SABnzbd - SABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python. It's totally free, incredibly easy to use, and works practically everywhere.
SABnzbd makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything we can. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.

The king of downloading Usenet. If used in conjunction with CP and SB you have IMO the ultimate media pvr.

Im not going to get into too much detail because to be honest it just WORKS. Nothing too fancy but does it job perfectly.

http://sabnzbd.org/


Sidenote:
Most popular US shows are on at around 2am-3am in Ireland. I come down in the morning and SB has found the episode, pushed it to SAB, SAB downloads it, its renamed, moved to the correct folder and is ready to watch. Same for movies.

Theres even addons for chrome and firefox. I can edit,rename and add shows to SickBeard from work now. Same for movies - I just add movies to my IMDB watchlist and the list it automatically updated in Couch Potato which adds it to the list to download. Very handy if you hear of something you want to see in work or on the move (IMDB mobile app) and by the time you get home its already there waiting for you in whatever quality you selected

If you download using torrents Id highly suggest switching to Usenet. Far more secure, ISP's cant see what your doing, I have never downloaded a virus/trojan/malware or anything similar by downloading usenets (thats not to say they dont exist but compared to torrents there minimal)

http://lifehacker.com/5905756/is-usenet-safer-than-bittorrent

It will also ALWAYS max out you internet downloads speed. IM on UPC 25mb and I get downloads of 3.2mb/sec

Ill come back to this when I have more time as this has gotten longwinded and in need of editing but ask away if you have any questions

Khannie

This post (while very nicely put together) crosses the line into "probably copyright infringement" so I have to close the thread...