DIY: Cut The Cord With Sick Beard And SABnzbd – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Disclaimer: This How To is written to automate the process of downloading legal TV shows from newsgroups. We don’t encourage or condone downloading of copy written material.

I decided to cut the cord a few months ago after going over our expenses. We had 3 different cable boxes in the house and no one ever used them. We also watched all of our local broadcasts via an ATSC HD antenna I put up. Add those two together, mix in Netflix and iTunes, and we really had no need for cable at all.

I spent some time looking for alternatives that would download episodic shows automatically for us as soon as they aired (or at least shortly there-after) and came across a great one two combo; Sick Beard and SABnzbd.

Sick Beard bills itself as “The ultimate PVR application that downloads and manages your TV shows”, think of it as a PVR for newsgroups. It runs in the background and watches for new episodes of TV shows that are posted to Usenet. It doesn’t download the actual binary files for you (that’s what SABnzbd is for), but it does rename, generate metadata and keep your library organized.

SABnzbd makes downloading binary files from Usenet as easy as possible. All you have to do is feed it an .nzb file (which Sick Beard will do automatically) and it will download, verify, repair (if need be), and extract the file for you.

Both of these excellent programs run under Windows, OS X and Linux, but for the purpose of this How To we will be using Windows. The only other requirement you will need is access to a Usenet provider that carries binary files. I use Giganews myself.

Step 1. Download SABnzbd and install it and follow the directions on the setup wizard. For more information on the wizard options, visit the SABnzbd+ Wiki.

Step 2. Fire up your browser and head over to http://127.0.0.1:8080. Set things up the way you want paying close attention to the post-processing scripts folder. This folder will contains scripts that are run when downloads are completed. We’ll use this later to have Sick Beard organize our episodes for us.

Step 3. Download Sick Beard and install it. Much like SABnzbd, Sick Beard is configured within your browser. Open up http://127.0.0.1:8081 and click “Config” and “General”. Play around with the various configuration option so that they suit your system and needs. You will need to change “NZB Action” to “SABnzbd” so that Sick Beard uses the SABnzbd+ API to queue downloads. Fill in your SABnzbd+ information in the lower-left pane of the page. You can find the API key in the SABnzbd+ configuration on the General page. For the category, enter “tv” and for the IP and port, “127.0.0.1:8080?.

Step 4. You are going to need at least one NZB search provider since this is how Sick Beard finds the actual files. Start by picking one or two of the supported search providers and creating an account with them. You can get your UID and hash from the RSS feed URLs at the search provider.

Step 5. Now it’s time to make them work together. Remember the post-processing scripts folder from Step 2? copy all of scripts from Sick Beard into that directory. Edit the autoProcessTV.cfg script so that it looks like this:

[SickBeard]
host=localhost
port=8081
username=your SickBeard username
password=your SickBeard password

Now we have to tell SABnzbd to use the sabToSickBeard.py script for downloads in the TV category. Open up SABnzbd, go to “Config” and then “Categories”. For the “tv” category, change the script drop-down to “sabToSickBeard.py” and the processing drop-down to “D” (this tells SABnzbd to repair broken files, extract them and delete the RAR files).

Step 6. Now all you have to do is add a show. Open up Sick Beard, click “Add Show” and follow the prompts. The show will show up within a few minutes in your Show List.

Hopefully this will help you out with a over the top/over the air solution to cable. I’ll do a write up soon on adding in Couch Potato which keeps track of movies for you.

Here are some additional resources to help you along the way.