Media Rover

[funtek]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I have a mixture of x264 based series and xvid/divx based series.

I know the purpose of the program is to automate the system, but I think it would be nice to have the ability to specify which series we want in x264 and which we want in xvid/divx/etc...

Sure I could use MyTvNZB RSS to generate two specific RSS feeds, but this doesn't work for older shows that have been cancelled (MyTvNZB doesn't carry cancelled/ended shows).

I currently use HellaVCR because it supports this. It works a bit differently (you basically configure which shows you want, tell it which episode you've last downloaded and it goes and grabs the rest, or it can grab an entire series). It doesn't have an intelligent checker however that will redownload an episode if it wasn't downloaded correctly, but I'm willling to live with this.

Any thoughts?

I'm pretty sure Kierse has said that he will be trying to implement that functionality. From the last time I msg'd him, he was working on a UI for the whole project, and one of the first features with the new UI would be a 'quality' setting which would hopefully be set on a per-show basis.

The problem with starting to deal with quality is that there are many ways to do it, and almost any implementation would have to make pretty educated guesses on what to download and when. For instance, many shows get xvid/divx postings almost immediately after airing, while the 720p/h264 rips get posted a little later. In those circumstances, what should MediaRover do? Should it download the xvid version because it was posted first? Should it skip the xvid version and wait for a h264 version? If it does wait, how long should it wait for the better quality rip before failing back and downloading the xvid version instead? Or, should it download the xvid version now, and then replace it with the h264 version later? Just because a show is usually posted in hi-def, doesn't mean there aren't occasional episodes that never get posted correctly. The whole point of MediaRover is to set it an forget it, so anything solution that required a lot of monitoring would pretty much defeat the purpose.

As an interim solution, what I do is to create 2 separate newzbin feeds, one with just 720/1080p tv content, and one with low-def content. In the config on MediaRover, I put them in a separate sources and put the hi-def feed first. What that ends up doing is if a show is posted in low and hidef, MediaRover will queue just the hi-def episode (because when it finds the episode also in the low-def feed, it will see that the hi-def one is already in the queue). I'm pretty sure you could rig up something similar with nzbs.org too if you don't have a newzbin account.

[jayman]

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I have a mixture of x264 based series and xvid/divx based series.

I know the purpose of the program is to automate the system, but I think it would be nice to have the ability to specify which series we want in x264 and which we want in xvid/divx/etc...

Sure I could use MyTvNZB RSS to generate two specific RSS feeds, but this doesn't work for older shows that have been cancelled (MyTvNZB doesn't carry cancelled/ended shows).

I currently use HellaVCR because it supports this. It works a bit differently (you basically configure which shows you want, tell it which episode you've last downloaded and it goes and grabs the rest, or it can grab an entire series). It doesn't have an intelligent checker however that will redownload an episode if it wasn't downloaded correctly, but I'm willling to live with this.

Any thoughts?

I'm pretty sure Kierse has said that he will be trying to implement that functionality. From the last time I msg'd him, he was working on a UI for the whole project, and one of the first features with the new UI would be a 'quality' setting which would hopefully be set on a per-show basis.

The problem with starting to deal with quality is that there are many ways to do it, and almost any implementation would have to make pretty educated guesses on what to download and when. For instance, many shows get xvid/divx postings almost immediately after airing, while the 720p/h264 rips get posted a little later. In those circumstances, what should MediaRover do? Should it download the xvid version because it was posted first? Should it skip the xvid version and wait for a h264 version? If it does wait, how long should it wait for the better quality rip before failing back and downloading the xvid version instead? Or, should it download the xvid version now, and then replace it with the h264 version later? Just because a show is usually posted in hi-def, doesn't mean there aren't occasional episodes that never get posted correctly. The whole point of MediaRover is to set it an forget it, so anything solution that required a lot of monitoring would pretty much defeat the purpose.

As an interim solution, what I do is to create 2 separate newzbin feeds, one with just 720/1080p tv content, and one with low-def content. In the config on MediaRover, I put them in a separate sources and put the hi-def feed first. What that ends up doing is if a show is posted in low and hidef, MediaRover will queue just the hi-def episode (because when it finds the episode also in the low-def feed, it will see that the hi-def one is already in the queue). I'm pretty sure you could rig up something similar with nzbs.org too if you don't have a newzbin account.

The problem with that method is that it seems almost all shows that are posted in both xvid and 720p are posted as xvid first.  Therefore, just about everytime you will get the xvid downloaded first.  I have all my rss feeds as 720p.  The one's where I want an xvid I have a separate feed in newzbin (like you said) for that particular show.  Alternatively, if you don't have newzbin, just set up your rss feeds as nzb.org all high def.  Then, for any particular show you want as xvid get the rss feed for mytvnzb for each show and just set them each up as xvid. 

[jayman]

For some reason without me making any changes Media Rover stopped downloading things and I keep getting this error in the log:

2009-08-12 06:42 INFO - found 14 episodes on disk - filesystem.py:200
2009-08-12 06:42 ERROR - episode 'The Show - 2009-08-11' does not exist on disk - error.py:45
2009-08-12 06:42 INFO - adding 'The Show - 2009-08-11 - Austan Goolsbee' to download list - __init__.py:432
2009-08-12 06:42 ERROR - 'NewzbinItem' object has no attribute '_NewzbinItem__download' - __init__.py:98
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 96, in main
    _process(config, options, args)
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 324, in _process
    episode = item.download()
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\sources\newzbin\item.py", line 35, in download
    return self.__download
AttributeError: 'NewzbinItem' object has no attribute '_NewzbinItem__download'

[SteveMc]

Massively interested in this, just looks like way too much time is required to configure it at the moment!

As soon as the GUI is ready I'm in! Using Media Browser with Media Center at the moment (if you aren't, you really should!) and am looking for a way to automate my TV downloads. Currently using Episode Butler, which works great, but I haven't figured out a way to get it to put things in the folders I want it too (not sure you can with that).

This looks just the thing.

[stubez]

First of all, thanks for a great program. I just downloaded the latest version and started to receive the following error:

Code: Select all

2009-08-21 19:25 ERROR - 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x99 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128) - __init__.py:106
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 104, in main
    _process(config, options, args)
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 386, in _process
    if queue.processed(item):
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\queues\sabnzbd\queue.py", line 131, in processed
    if nzb.startswith(file):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x99 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)

I dug around a bit and it appears to be choking because one of the backup NZBs has the TM symbol in the filename. It's been in there since June so it appears the previous version didn't have a problem with it.

Hopefully that will be enough information but give me a shout if you need any extra.

[geebee]

Anyone tell me how I set MR to run and check for new shows hourly?

Im running it on a QNAP nas...

[kierse]

Anyone tell me how I set MR to run and check for new shows hourly?

Im running it on a QNAP nas...

Hi geebee, you'll need to create a cronjob.  It'll probably look something like the following:

0 * * * * python /path/to/mediarover.py > /dev/null

Note: check out http://www.robertplank.com/cron/ for useful cron builder

Unfortunately I don't have any experience working with QNAP so I won't be much help installing it.  I did a quick google search and came across the following blog post: http://technologytreason.blogspot.com/2 ... html.  It looks like it might be what you're looking for.

Good luck,
Kierse

[kierse]

First of all, thanks for a great program. I just downloaded the latest version and started to receive the following error:

Code: Select all

2009-08-21 19:25 ERROR - 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x99 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128) - __init__.py:106
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 104, in main
    _process(config, options, args)
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 386, in _process
    if queue.processed(item):
  File "D:\News\Media Rover\mediarover\queues\sabnzbd\queue.py", line 131, in processed
    if nzb.startswith(file):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x99 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)

I dug around a bit and it appears to be choking because one of the backup NZBs has the TM symbol in the filename. It's been in there since June so it appears the previous version didn't have a problem with it.

Hopefully that will be enough information but give me a shout if you need any extra.

Hi Stubez,

Very weird, I haven't run into this one before!  Can you send me the problematic nzb (or the series name and indexing service you got it from), I'll need to try and reproduce this one before I can figure out whats going on.

Kierse

[kierse]

For some reason without me making any changes Media Rover stopped downloading things and I keep getting this error in the log:

2009-08-12 06:42 INFO - found 14 episodes on disk - filesystem.py:200
2009-08-12 06:42 ERROR - episode 'The Show - 2009-08-11' does not exist on disk - error.py:45
2009-08-12 06:42 INFO - adding 'The Show - 2009-08-11 - Austan Goolsbee' to download list - __init__.py:432
2009-08-12 06:42 ERROR - 'NewzbinItem' object has no attribute '_NewzbinItem__download' - __init__.py:98
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 96, in main
    _process(config, options, args)
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\__init__.py", line 324, in _process
    episode = item.download()
  File "C:\Users\jay\Downloads\Mediarover\Mediarover\mediarover\sources\newzbin\item.py", line 35, in download
    return self.__download
AttributeError: 'NewzbinItem' object has no attribute '_NewzbinItem__download'

Hi Jayman,

Are you still experiencing this error.  I'm not sure what's going on here but I can try and help you figure it out if you'd like

Kierse

[SmilinJoe]

I have an interesting one (well at least for me).  I am just getting this up and running, and figured I would test it out on a TV series I don't watch.  I created a directory under tv_root and ran the script.  It finds the episodes I need (all of them) and says it has added them to the queue:

2009-08-26 17:12 INFO - item 'show.xxxx.S04E24.blah.DVDRip.XviD-SAiNTS' successfully queued for download - queue.py:91

The gueue in SABnzbd shows that the files are trying to be fetch, but eventually they disappear.  The url in the SABnxbd log is valid, as far as I can tell.  I am trying this against nzbs.org.

Anyone have any ideas?  I guess this could be a SABnzbd problem, but I can manually add items to the queue just fine.

Joe...

update:  I got it working... it was the &dl=1 at the end of the URL.  Guess I should read all of the instructions the first time 

[stanpete]

Hey there,
I'm not a Linux pro, so I was hoping that that someone here could help me get mediarover running
via cron. I tried some things but I don't know why it isn't working...
I'm running Ubuntu Jaunty and I tried adding mediarover to crontab:

Code: Select all

0-59/10 * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/stan/mediarover/mediarover.py
...
17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly

...no effect

Then I made a shellscript "mediarover" in cron.hourly:

Code: Select all

#! /bin/sh
/usr/bin/python /home/stan/mediarover/mediarover.py

(-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 110 2009-08-27 00:29 mediarover)

I can start the script manually but cron doesn't trigger it.

Would someone please show my mistake ?

thanks,
stan

[jcfp]

Code: Select all

0-59/10 * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/stan/mediarover/mediarover.py
...
17 *    * * *   root    cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly

Would someone please show my mistake ?

System crontab requires user names.

[stanpete]

Thank you!
Adding my user name didn't show much of an improvement (so it seemed)
but then I added my line with "crontab -e" and now it works.

[daniel_owen_uk]

Just a quick thanks, for this application. 

Not sure why people are saying they want a way to specify x264 or xvid?  Surely the fact that you control the RSS feeds allows you to do this anyway?

Have mine setup perfectly now, just need to schedule mediarover and I will be 100% pleased, newzbin will looked at for movies only

[SmilinJoe]

Now if there was something like this for music... that would truly cool.  It just watches your artists and downloads an album if you don't have it. 

Joe...