Category Archives: desktop

Automating NZB Movie and TV Downloads

SABnzbd
http://sabnzbd.org/

SABnzbd is a usenet reader/downloader that is highly extensible and handles downloading, verifying, repairing and unpacking .nzb files for you.  Its lightweight, written in Python and runs on almost every OS; OSX, Windows, Linux, BSD.

CouchPotatoApp
http://couchpotatoapp.com/
http://forums.sabnzbd.org/index.php?topic=4636.0

CouchPotatoApp connects with SABnzbd and nzbmatrix.com and lets you maintain a want list of movies and helps automate searching, handoff, and post download file modifications.

CP scans every X hours for titles you add and allows you to configure with different options such as file size and quality.  It also renames and moves files which is very useful if you download and store on two different machines or drives.  This app is also Python based and multi-platform.

Have a look at some of the work this app is doing for you in the log

15:06:52 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.renamer] XBMC metainfo for imdbid, tt1542344, generated
15:06:44 INFO  [    app.lib.cron.subtitle] Finding subtitles for: /Volumes/My Passport/New Movie 2010)
15:06:44 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.trailer] Finding trailers for: /Volumes/My Passport/New Movie (2010)
15:00:22 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.renamer] Moving file "/Users/michaelkahn/Downloads/complete/Movies/-----/newmovie.avi" to
/Volumes/My Passport/New Movie (2010)/New Movie (2010).avi.
15:00:22 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.renamer] Quality Old: 0, New 700.
15:00:17 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.renamer] Creating directory /Volumes/My Passport/New Movie (2010)
15:00:17 INFO  [     app.lib.cron.renamer] Trying to find a home for: newmovie.avi
15:00:17 INFO  [          app.lib.library] Retrieved metainfo: {u'common': [{u'comment': u'Has audio/video index (5.6 MB)',
u'mime type': u'video/x-msvideo', u'image height': 304, u'frame rate': 24.0,
u'producer': u'VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release)',u'image width': 576, u'endianness': u'Little endian', u'duration':
 u'1:32:49', u'bit rate': 1000000.0}], u'audio stream': [{u'compression rate':
11.300000000000001, u'compression': u'mp3', u'sample rate': 48000.0, u'duration': u'1:32:49', u'bit rate': 135800.0,
u'channel': 2}], u'video stream': [{u'image height': 304, u'compression': u'xvid', u'image width': 576, u'bits/pixel': 12,
u'duration': u'1:32:49', u'frame rate': 24.0}]}
14:33:27 INFO  [        app.lib.cron.yarr] Finished search.
14:33:27 INFO  [          app.lib.sabNzbd] NZB sent to SAB successfully.
14:33:26 INFO  [          app.lib.sabNzbd] URL: http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd/api?apikey=-----&mode=addurl&name=http%3A%2F%2Fnzbmatrix.com
%2Fapi-nzb-download.php%3Fid%-----%26username%-----%26apikey%-----&cat=Movies
14:33:26 INFO  [          app.lib.sabNzbd] Sending 'New Movie 2010 DVDSCR XviD PEER' to SABnzbd.
14:33:15 INFO  [.lib.provider.yarr.search] Checking if http://nzbmatrix.com/api-nzb-download.php?id=-----&username=-----
&apikey=----- is valid.
14:33:05 INFO  [pp.lib.provider.yarr.base] "New Movie (DVDSCR) (2010)" is too large to be Screener. 2775.04MB instead of the
maximum of 1000MB.
14:33:05 INFO  [pp.lib.provider.yarr.base] "New Movie 2010 DVDSCR AC3 XViD T0XiC iNK (diff group)" is too large to be
Screener. 1413.12MB instead of the maximum of 1000MB.

Very convenient.  After CP finds a movie that I added to my want list, it sends it to SABnzbd, then it moves it over to my SAN (/Volumes/My Passport).  From there my boxee box has the SANs location saved and scans for folder updates every few hours.  So all I have done is added a movie I want to see to the CP want list and soon after its released its ready to play in my living room.  I have heard that Sick Beard is good for TV shows but I do not miss too many on cable with my DVR.  I highly recommend SABnzbd x CP x Boxee for automation and ease with viewing movie downloads.  Enjoy!

Monitoring Resource Usage in OSX

One great pleasure of using osx is that it recovers from high usage and application crashes much nicer then any version of windows could ever imagine doing.  Managing and viewing process status in osx is easy, with Activity Monitor or via terminal with process status (ps).  Also are few widgets for the menubar and dashboard like istat pro that also assist with tracking your usage.

activity monitor Screen shot 2010-01-12 at 10.43.09 PM

A users first option when you notice a lockup or an unresponsive program is to kill it.  This can be done by right clicking on the dock and using force quit or via command line with kill.

So my purpose in writing this post is because I have been maxing out memory usage on my macbook with 4gb in the past few months.  I am working to adjust my usage for a more stable operating system environment until I can make a switch up to a 8gb mbp this year.  To keep a closer eye on my usage I pinned Activity Monitor to my dock and found you can right click on it and change the dock icon to a pie chart of your memory usage in real time.  Do this by right clicking on activity monitor on your dock -> dock icon -> show memory usage.

Screen shot 2010-01-04 at 11.10.23 PM

There are also dock icons for CPU usage, network usage, and disk activity.  This is just one way example of how osx provides a quick easy way to keep a close eye on your usage out of the box.  Pretty awesome.

Followup 5/31/2010
Apple has an article here that explains the different types of mem usage in OSX.
Free (Green):  RAM not being used, that has never been allocated
Wired (Red):   Info in memory that cant be transferred to the hdd
Active (Yellow):  Info currently in memory that has been recently used
Inactive (Blue):   Info in memory not actively being used, but was recently used.  This ‘space’ of your memory is available for use by any application.  It allows for recently ran applications to re-launch faster because it is taking the recently used bits and converting to Active memory.