[Windows] NzbDrone - Automatic TV Downloader

[markus101]

Hello,

After many hours (I lost track a long time ago) NzbDrone is ready for public use, our development team (kay.one and myself) along with a few friends have been using it for sometime and we are confident that it is stable enough for public release.

NZBDrone is a PVR for newsgroup users written in .NET 4.0. It watches for new episodes of your favorite shows and when they are posted it downloads them, sorts and renames them. It retrieves show information from theTVDB.com.

The full version of .Net 4.0 is required, the Client Profile version is not sufficient

Features include:

• automatically detects new episodes
  can scan your existing library and then download any old seasons that are missing
  can watch for better versions and upgrade your existing episodes (to from TV DVD/BluRay for example)
  fully configurable episode renaming
  sends NZBs directly to SABnzbd, prioritizes and categorizes them properly
  can notify XBMC, when new episodes are downloaded
  specials and double episode support

Differences from Sickbeard:

• Weekly Automatic Updates (When available)
  Unit Test Coverage to catch the majority of issues before they hit the user
  Quality Profiles - Customize once and re-use for multiple shows
  Frequent updates from TheTVDB (12 hours)
  Faster when retrieving information from TheTVDB as well as scanning disk for episodes
  Full Windows service support
  Self-Monitoring - If it cannot reach the WebUI it is restarted automatically

It is Windows only (making it run under mono could be possible in the future, but there are no plans at this time)

See screenshots/download from: http://www.nzbdrone.com/
Please submit any bugs to: https://github.com/NzbDrone/NzbDrone/issues
Help, support, comments, feedback, etc, please use the NzbDrone Forums: http://forums.nzbdrone.com

Please ask your questions/provide feedback at http://forums.nzbdrone.com/

[rascalli]

Can you meaybe explain what the difference is between this app & sickbeard ?

Does it do more ? Less CPU / RAm ?

[markus101]

I have updated the first post with a number of differences, from our experience.

I also added a note that .Net 4.0 Full is required the Client Profile does not contain everything required for NzbDrone to run. A link to the full version is on our download page, here it is to save you a few clicks http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/de ... x?id=17851

[Eejit]

Although the screenshots look good, when you say windows only, does this mean it's not accessable by a web page, and therfore not accessable on a remote server?

[koonfused]

Although the screenshots look good, when you say windows only, does this mean it's not accessable by a web page, and therfore not accessable on a remote server?

It means the server can only run in a windows machine, it is accessable by any browser regardless of platform.

[vinister]

I like the look of the program, I'm just having trouble figuring out why it exists? Sickbeard is free and quite mature. Why reinvent the wheel? I'm not criticizing, just really curious why?

[koonfused]

I like the look of the program, I'm just having trouble figuring out why it exists? Sickbeard is free and quite mature. Why reinvent the wheel? I'm not criticizing, just really curious why?

I need to say that I used to be a sickbeard user and we definitely took a lot of queues from sickbeard in our app. We used things that we liked and improved on things that we didn't. And I no way I would want to undermine the time and effort that the sickbeard team has put into their project.

From my point of view there are three different answers to that question, (these are the reasons I worked on this project, markus might have his own completely different reasons)

First, I was looking for a personal project, something I would have ultimate freedom and control in how to do things (something I didn't have at my day job at the time) And I've learned a lot while working on this project.

Second, We think we can make a better app than sickbeard. specially in performance and reliability. Currently it takes nzbdrone just over 2 seconds to do a full disk scan/tvdb update of a single show and all of it's episode. same show took over 10 minutes in sickbeard and caused alot of timeouts and shows not being updated. From all the people that started using NzbDrone instead of SickBeard I haven't heard of a single person that has switched back to sickbeard, generally people have been very happy with the app.

Last but definitely not least. Why the fuck not

[markus101]

First, I was looking for a personal project, something I would have ultimate freedom and control in how to do things (something I didn't have at my day job at the time) And I've learned a lot while working on this project.

Mostly the same for me, except I'm a Network Administrator by day, and I love the complete change of thinking programming allows me, plus I'm constantly learning working on this application.

Second, We think we can make a better app than sickbeard. specially in performance and reliability. Currently it takes nzbdrone just over 2 seconds to do a full disk scan/tvdb update of a single show and all of it's episode. same show took over 10 minutes in sickbeard and caused alot of timeouts and shows not being updated. From all the people that started using NzbDrone instead of SickBeard I haven't heard of a single person that has switched back to sickbeard, generally people have been very happy with the app.

I wholeheartedly agree, I realize the odds are stacked against us (in user adoption), because Sickbeard has a huge following and if it ain't broke don't fix it, but I think NzbDrone has a lot to offer already and will only get better with time, so if you have some time to kill give it a shot, let us know whats good, bad or ugly for you.

Last but definitely not least. Why the fuck not

Makes sense to me

[kiljaden]

Second, We think we can make a better app than sickbeard. specially in performance and reliability. Currently it takes nzbdrone just over 2 seconds to do a full disk scan/tvdb update of a single show and all of it's episode. same show took over 10 minutes in sickbeard and caused alot of timeouts and shows not being updated. From all the people that started using NzbDrone instead of SickBeard I haven't heard of a single person that has switched back to sickbeard, generally people have been very happy with the app.

I could not agree with you more . Sickbeard is fine but when the number of shows beeing watched is larger than 10 it's quite a pain (slow) update all the shows .

One little suggestion . At the moment the feed search interval it's set to 15 minutes which can't be manually configured (or I can't seem to find it) , but this is considered by sites like nzbmatrix.com hammering . You should not update their feeds sooner than 25 minutes because that's the interval they update http://rss.nzbmatrix.com/. So either lower the search interval or make it user configurable .

[koonfused]

Second, We think we can make a better app than sickbeard. specially in performance and reliability. Currently it takes nzbdrone just over 2 seconds to do a full disk scan/tvdb update of a single show and all of it's episode. same show took over 10 minutes in sickbeard and caused alot of timeouts and shows not being updated. From all the people that started using NzbDrone instead of SickBeard I haven't heard of a single person that has switched back to sickbeard, generally people have been very happy with the app.

I could not agree with you more . Sickbeard is fine but when the number of shows beeing watched is larger than 10 it's quite a pain (slow) update all the shows .

One little suggestion . At the moment the feed search interval it's set to 15 minutes which can't be manually configured (or I can't seem to find it) , but this is considered by sites like nzbmatrix.com hammering . You should not update their feeds sooner than 25 minutes because that's the interval they update http://rss.nzbmatrix.com/. So either lower the search interval or make it user configurable .

Thanks, one thing we have tried to do was to make the app less confusing by not exposing unnecessary settings to the user. I'll update the RSS sync interval to 25 minutes.

[Infraded]

Absolutely wonderful program guys. It's super fast and has a nice clean interface. I have had a couple issues w/ a fresh setup of SAB and NzbDrone though.

- Settings > SABnzbd config fails if no custom categories defined in SABnzbd
This was a bit odd as the fresh install of SAB had no categories defined and I hadn't realized it. Only took a couple minutes to figure it out, but may want to provide better feedback to the user as the error was very generic.

- Missing .ogm as a media extension
Please add?

- No options to customize indexer queries
I use Newzbin exclusively as my indexer and looking at the queries in the code it's pretty straight forward, but I would like to see the option to customize this. Use case is mainly about tweaking queries to improve the quality of results NzbDrone finds. I realize you don't want to expose too many options to the user, but something like this, and the above media configs would be great types of things to read out of files instead of hard-coded. That way the option is there if it needs to be changed, but not thrown in the users face as to overwhelm them.

- Series > Add Series > Add Series Already on Disk - Folder names w/ periods are not parsed properly - "The Venture Bros. (2004)" turns into " (2004)"
Should be an easy enough tweak

Looking forward to seeing what else may develop from this, thanks for a great program!

[afly]

First of all, big congrats on getting this out the door. It seems to be remarkably stable

Secondly, thanks for making it open source. As a .net web dev, I have been looking for the best way to run a web demon in a .net environment and this project will undoubtably be a useful reference for that.

The app seems very intuitive to set up and use. My only confusion is in Settings -> Quality -> Sizes

What do the sliders do? Are we picking size preference for each quality type or specifying quality type preference

can watch for better versions and upgrade your existing episodes (to from TV DVD/BluRay for example)

This is what I am interested in. Can I configure it to keep getting higher and higher quality copy replacements as they become available with no size/cap limit?

[Infraded]

First of all, big congrats on getting this out the door. It seems to be remarkably stable

Secondly, thanks for making it open source. As a .net web dev, I have been looking for the best way to run a web demon in a .net environment and this project will undoubtable be a useful reference for that.

The app seems very intuitive to set up and use. My only confusion is in Settings -> Quality -> Sizes

What do the sliders do? Are we picking size preference for each quality type or specifying quality type preference

can watch for better versions and upgrade your existing episodes (to from TV DVD/BluRay for example)

This is what I am interested in. Can I configure it to keep getting higher and higher quality copy replacements as they become available with no size/cap limit?

My understanding is the sliders are used for the detection of existing media only and assignment to a proper quality. Downloading is differentiated by a higher quality being searched for in the indexer queries.

The way you would have further quality improvement steps would be to define more profiles (I believe). Current default is SD and HD, with HD being anything above DVD quality. If you wanted more differentiation, you could add another profile and w/ just the BluRay qualities in it. This could provide an SD tier, a 'web HD' tier, and a 'real HD' tier.

There could definitely be more clarification in this section though. My description is only on best-guess and context, and I'm still not sure if the sliders are looking for minimum or maximum filesize, or what the 'Cut-off' drop-down really is. Also, if you're trying to avoid requiring the user to go through too many options, you may want to put some 'safe defaults' in the quality sliders.

[markus101]

I think this response will cover everything in the last few posts, if you need further clarification, please let me know.

Absolutely wonderful program guys. It's super fast and has a nice clean interface. I have had a couple issues w/ a fresh setup of SAB and NzbDrone though.

- Settings > SABnzbd config fails if no custom categories defined in SABnzbd
This was a bit odd as the fresh install of SAB had no categories defined and I hadn't realized it. Only took a couple minutes to figure it out, but may want to provide better feedback to the user as the error was very generic.

I hadn't noticed this in my testing - I'll will get this fixed up.

- Missing .ogm as a media extension
Please add?

Sure, this is pretty simple - What format should treated as if the filename doesn't contain any indicators (for example, .avi = SD, .mkv = HD). My crude research leads to to believe it will be SD, but, please confirm.

- No options to customize indexer queries
I use Newzbin exclusively as my indexer and looking at the queries in the code it's pretty straight forward, but I would like to see the option to customize this. Use case is mainly about tweaking queries to improve the quality of results NzbDrone finds. I realize you don't want to expose too many options to the user, but something like this, and the above media configs would be great types of things to read out of files instead of hard-coded. That way the option is there if it needs to be changed, but not thrown in the users face as to overwhelm them.

Personally and as a team I/we think this would open up a more problems to less inclined users and have a small user base, that said, we'd love your feedback on what specifically we can improve when searching for series. If you need examples of what we would currently search for, please let me know.

- Series > Add Series > Add Series Already on Disk - Folder names w/ periods are not parsed properly - "The Venture Bros. (2004)" turns into " (2004)"
Should be an easy enough tweak

This is a "bug" in ASP.NET MVC2/3 in how it displays labels, I have fixed it and it will be in a new version that should go out in the next day or two.

Looking forward to seeing what else may develop from this, thanks for a great program!

Thanks, we're glad you like it and appreciate your feedback.

First of all, big congrats on getting this out the door. It seems to be remarkably stable

Secondly, thanks for making it open source. As a .net web dev, I have been looking for the best way to run a web demon in a .net environment and this project will undoubtable be a useful reference for that.

The app seems very intuitive to set up and use. My only confusion is in Settings -> Quality -> Sizes

What do the sliders do? Are we picking size preference for each quality type or specifying quality type preference

can watch for better versions and upgrade your existing episodes (to from TV DVD/BluRay for example)

This is what I am interested in. Can I configure it to keep getting higher and higher quality copy replacements as they become available with no size/cap limit?

My understanding is the sliders are used for the detection of existing media only and assignment to a proper quality. Downloading is differentiated by a higher quality being searched for in the indexer queries

The sliders are actually used to prevent downloading large files that get classified incorrectly, or prevent downloading large releases (typically seen with Bluray releases). It would limit the download size we would treat as acceptable, for example, setting Bluray720p to 2000MB would prevent NzbDrone from sending a Bluray720p release it found that was 5GB for a single episode, this also scales depending on how many episodes are found in that release, a full season (10 episodes) would allow for a maximum size of 20GB using the previous example values.

The way you would have further quality improvement steps would be to define more profiles (I believe). Current default is SD and HD, with HD being anything above DVD quality. If you wanted more differentiation, you could add another profile and w/ just the BluRay qualities in it. This could provide an SD tier, a 'web HD' tier, and a 'real HD' tier.

Yes, define more profiles for more control over what qualities you want for specific shows.

There could definitely be more clarification in this section though. My description is only on best-guess and context, and I'm still not sure if the sliders are looking for minimum or maximum filesize, or what the 'Cut-off' drop-down really is. Also, if you're trying to avoid requiring the user to go through too many options, you may want to put some 'safe defaults' in the quality sliders.

I hope it is more clear now (sliders), the cut-off does this: if you have a show that you want in HDTV, WEBDL or Bluray720p and you want the best available when it first releases, but you don't care which it is NzbDrone will download the first copy it finds and skip any "upgrades" it comes across later. If you wanted HDTV or WEBDL and later wanted to upgrade to Bluray720p it would download the highest quality it first finds and then continue upgrading until it reached Bluray720p (It could in theory then download HDTV, WEBDL and finally Bluray720p - depending on what is made available)

First of all, big congrats on getting this out the door. It seems to be remarkably stable

Secondly, thanks for making it open source. As a .net web dev, I have been looking for the best way to run a web demon in a .net environment and this project will undoubtable be a useful reference for that.

Thanks we hope you continue to find it useful and enjoy the source code.

[afly]

Sorry if am misunderstanding but does this mean that if i create a new profile called 'All', select all defintion modes and set the cut off @ 1080p it will keep replacing the download with higher versions?

e.g true blood s0xE0x is broadcast,

First to hit usenet is a SD version an hr afterward, that gets downloaded.

6 hrs later a HDTV version emerges, it gets downloaded and replaces the SD one

2 days later, a monster trollHD 1080i version is released, it gets downloaded and replaces the HDTV one (if i have 1080 slider up very high!)

Is this how it works? If so, consider me a convert!