TiVo replacement, Usenet automation

I recently helped a friend of mine set up his system at home the way mine is set up for downloading and watching TV shows (some specifics of his were a bit different, but the same stuff applies). This has made my life an incredible amount easier, so I thought I'd share with those that want to know.

Intro: (read if you want to know why I care about SABnzbd)

I have three kids, ages 7, 5 and 10 months. I also enjoy a minute amount of prime-time television, much of which is not kid-friendly. Also, TV's "prime-time" is my prime-time to spend with my family. I'm home from work, dinner's over, and I can finally be with my family. The last thing I want to do is spend this precious time staring at the TV.

Several years ago, as file-sharing became popular, I discovered a wonderful thing called Usenet. It's been around since before the internet (for academic discussions mostly) but has transformed in the last 10-15 years into a place where people share their binary files. Just as with all the file-sharing networks, they share music files, pictures, movies, programs, and (drumroll, please) TV shows!!!

Of course, you can also find much of the same content on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, like kazaa or bitTorrent, but the availability is questionable and I've never been happy with how much work it takes for my computer to retrieve the files from P2P networks.

On Usenet, you simply retrieve what you're there to get. There's a lot more technical explanation that could be given at this point, but it's not really relevant to the point of this post. Simply getting, though, is a benefit because you are not serving back what you've retrieved (potentially sidestepping legal issues), and you don't have to wait for other people to have what you want. If it's on your usenet server, you simply grab it. Also, you usually grab it as fast as your connection is capable of.

At this point I feel it necessary to make the following disclaimer: Usenet and P2P networks are absolutely loaded with unsavory material. Searching through either one, you are almost certain to see filenames for things that you shouldn't want to see. Be prepared.

Another disclaimer: A vast majority of the material one can obtain through P2P or usenet is copyright material. In most cases, it is not legal to download or use. There are gray areas, however. I push my use into a gray area by saying that what I'm downloading could not be purchased today, and is not something that I am going to keep. It's as if my friend recorded it and gave me a copy. Legal? I don't know, but that's how I justify it for myself. End of moral debate.

Through my many years of usenet downloading, I've used several different tools. When I started, I had newsgroups I would watch and get headers for. The first show I consistently downloaded was Smallville (in my defense, Smallville had a really good start. Really!). So I would download all the headers for alt.binaries.tv.smallville. Then I would look for the headers that indicated where the episode I wanted was. Next I would download all the parts (standard posting format is split rar files) for the file, verify their integrity (using either .par or .par2 parity files), repair them if necessary (again with parity files) and finally extract the file (tv show) I wanted to obtain.

This method was not too bad, and as a result, I was able to watch my favorite show on the night it aired, even though I couldn't see it when it aired.

As time passed, I found better and better tools for automating this process, and today I feel that I have the best set of tools yet for the job. That is the purpose of this post, though I suppose I was fairly prolific in getting to the point.

This brings us to SABnzbd. I'm sure it stands for something. I have no idea what that is. SABnzbd is a wonderful little program that runs in the background on your computer and can watch for what you want, download it, verify it's integrity, extract it and delete all but what you really want. And this is all in the background!

Speaking of background, I need to explain what an NZB file is. As I began looking for more obscure shows (SciFi's Taken comes to mind) I had to start looking in bigger and bigger groups. There is a group called alt.binaries.multimedia that most often contains well over 2,000,000 headers. If you want to find something in that group, you download all 2,000,000+ headers, then look through them for what you want. Well this is a rediculously long process. So someone came up with the idea of NZB files. An NZB file is simply an xml file that contains "pointers" to usenet postings. So if a new episode of The Office gets posted somewhere on usenet, rather than search everywhere for it, I might obtain an NZB file pointing to all I need to get that episode. So that's what an NZB file is. I'll explain later how to get them.

Back to SABnzbd. You might notice the NZB there in the middle of the name. This program only works with these files. You can't download headers with it.

Now, with all that said, it's finally time to set it up. First you'll need to download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sabnzbd/. When it's extracted, you'll have a series of folders along with some files. Before running it the first time, open up SABnzbd.ini. It's fairly well documented with comments, so I'd recommend taking a look at all that's there and changing whatever you need to or want to change. Note that in the folder config section it will refer to the current folder as . and use / to specify a subdirectory, rather than \.

Much of what's there can be configured from the web interface, but I prefer having most of it in place before I start the program. Now that that's done, go ahead and double click SABnzbd.exe. Most likely you'll see a DOS box pop up and go away fairly quickly. I thought this was rather strange the first time it happened to me, but it turns out that all the interface is in a local web page. This page can be addressed (if you've left all the defaults in the config file) at http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd.

So that about wraps it up for configuring SABnzbd. I hope to write one or two more blogs this weekend about this. I still need to discuss news servers and nzb file providers. I suppose this is kinda backwards, so I hope you'll forgive me!