The Ultimate media Experience (not finished)

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To get all of this awesomeness working, we will be installing several pieces of software and configuring them so they all play nicely together. Using Windows as the base OS, we will be using the following software:

• Plex: This is the main brains of the operation. It watches over our media folders, finds and loads metadata, and handles all the streaming to the clients.
• Sonarr: Formally known as NzbDrone. This is the PVR software for our TV shows. This monitors NZB and torrent feeds and automatically finds shows when they are ready to download. It is also what handles all the renaming and organizing so that Plex can find the files.
• CouchPotato: Like Sonarr, but for movies. This program keeps and eye out for movies and snatches them when they are available.
• Headphones: You can probably guess. This is like Sonarr and CouchPotato, but for music.
• SABnzbd: When the above applications find media posted on newsgroups, they use SABnzbd to do the actual downloading.
• rutorrent: If the media is available via torrents, rutorrent is how it gets downloaded.

NZB indexing sites
As I mentioned earlier, NZBs are small files that tell a download client where to find content. There are many sites out there dedicated to indexing these NZB files to make it easy to search for and download content. The media managers make use of these sites to function, so you will need to sign up for a few or else you'll have a server that can't find anything to download. Unfortunately, most have gone invite-only to avoid too much exposure, but there are still a few that anyone is welcome to sign up for.

The three that we will be making use of in this guide are 6box, usenet-crawler, and NZBKING. Take a minute and sign up for all three and validate your email address if required.


We won't be using these sites directly, instead we will be interfacing with their API. Once you are logged into each site, navigate to their Profile page (usually by clicking your username). Somewhere on this profile page, you will find something labelled API Key, or RSS Key. It will be a long string of characters, consisting of hexadecimal digits. We will need these keys often, so copy it and paste it in a notepad text file for easy access. Make sure you mark which site each key belongs to.

Installing SABnzbd

First Step

CLICK INSTALL SABNZB

 

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This is how you add your NZB file the manual way.

Go to the Switches section and make the following changes:

• Check Abort jobs that cannot be completed
• Change Action when encrypted RAR is downloaded to Abort
• (Optional) Change Action when unwanted extension detected to Abort
• (Optional) Set Unwanted extensions to exe, com
• Change Ignore Samples to Do not download
• If your ISP has data caps, you can add values to the Quota section.
• Click Save Changes

Go to the Categories section.

• In the blank row, type in sonarr for the Category. Type in ..\Incomplete\sonarr for the Folder/Path. Click Add.
• In the new blank row, type in couchpotato for the Category. Type in ..\Incomplete\couchpotato for Folder/Path. Click Add.
• Once more, in the blank row type in headphones for Category. Type in ..\Incomplete\headphones for the Folder/Path. Click Add.

This will make more sense later, but in a nutshell, this is how our managers know where to find completed downloads.

We are now all set with SABnzbd, but we will need to come back to it later, so leave it open in a tab. Move on to the next part and we will get our torrent downloader installed and configured!

This is just where your files nzb files are , when they are downloaded manually.

 

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Setting up Sonarr

Here is where the rubber hits the road. This part is where we will finally start seeing results. Sonarr is a tv series management tool which will allow us to not only download shows, but maintain them after the fact. For instance, we could have a show of ours download in SD quality right after it airs, then upgrade to HD a few hours after, and ultimately to Bluray quality a few months later. You will see how powerful this software is once we start using it, so lets get going.

The first thing we need to do is switch to the development branch of the software to get torrent support. Click the General tab and set the Advanced Settings slider to Shown. Scroll to the bottom and change Branch from master to develop. While we're on this page, let's change our Port Number to -----------, Switch Authentication to basic popup , and enter a username and password. username and password given to you in your clients area.