Torrents

This is frustrating since I can't try out anything I'm researching while at work.

If I configure BTN as an indexer on my home computer, does it need to connect to the seedbox, or can it just pass a torrent file to a directory that I specify? I'd prefer to use that approach, since everything is already set up to use Dropbox like that. If it can just pass a torrent file, will it then know that is the file when it shows up in my Drone Factory folder, so that any propers or replacement torrents still get handled properly? Or does it have to connect directly to your torrent client to monitor the progress and such?

I've got all of the Autotools and Dropbox stuff set up already (although I copy instead of hard link), so I'm familiar with how that works. Might require some tweaking or experimenting is all. But it sounds like this Blackhole is the crux of the solution, so I'll look into that. Is that a separate program (doesn't seem so from Google) or just a protocol that Sonarr understands right out of the box?

If that's all it really requires, hell I don't think this will be difficult at all, just need to figure out the proper settings and terminology. I'll either report back with how I set it up, or have more questions!

EDIT: I wasn't aware that the AutoWatch folder could contain subdirectories and it would recursively check all of them. That's good to know.

Sweet, thanks. It sounds absolutely perfect, to be honest. I should just be able to point it to my Dropbox .torrent watch folder, and then have it check my Dropbox download folder, with perhaps a few subdirectories just to smooth the process. Sounds incredibly easy. Thanks for getting me motivated to do this, and for all of the help. I'll detail everything once it is set up in case anyone wants to do the same thing that I've got going on.

Everything is working great, except I can't fucking connect to KODI no matter what I do. I can't access it via a standard browser window either, so it isn't necessarily Sonarr that is having the problem. I have no clue what might be wrong, as I've enabled everything on KODI, tried it with and without passwords, etc. I can access it via localhost from that machine, but I can't access it via IP address from the machine running Sonarr. And I turned on the option to allow control from devices on any system as well.

I've checked and rechecked and retried different ones for the IP address, the port, the username and password, all that. I even forwarded the port in my router, but nothing makes any difference.

Any thoughts?

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Windows firewall? You have the correct port setup? Other than that, I got nothing really.

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Fuck me, apparently upgrading it to Windows 10 changed the network on the HTPC to Public. Changing it to Private made it work immediately. It's always the dumbest thing.

Thanks for the idea, never would have considered that it changed. I'm too exhausted to do much now, but I'll detail exactly how I set everything up in a day or two.

Well, if you don't want to wait for Whatbox to do their thing, or you have a slightly different setup, I promised I'd explain how mine works. Maybe no one will find it useful, maybe someone will. Either way, I've gotten plenty of help here so I'll give back if I can.

First, I pay for a Whatbox seedbox, $25 a month for the Flex2 with 1.35TB of HD space. I also pay $10 a month for a 1TB Dropbox account that I use to transfer everything my seedbox downloads to my home computer. You could get by with less on both (including the free version of Dropbox), you will just obviously be much more limited on space and the maximum size of a torrent.

I also have a BTN account, so it will be specific to using that because I know a lot here do also. If you don't, you could modify it to use something else, as Sonarr works with several other trackers as well, but I won't go into those because I didn't use them.

First thing I did was set up Dropbox on my Whatbox. There is a fabulous wiki on how to do it on their site here:Dropbox WhatboxI did not use exactly the same directory names and locations that they did, but you can do whatever you want in that regard. I will say that if you have problems you are much better off asking the Whatbox staff than me, because I did it well over a year ago and don't remember wtf I did, and they are awesome at helping. There's a decent chance they'll do the whole fucking thing for you (don't quote me on that though).

One of the first things you should do with your Dropbox, assuming you use it for more than just transferring torrents, is to exclude all directories and files except for the torrent upload and download directories. Otherwise your seedbox will get all of your camera uploads, documents, etc. If you want that as an extra layer of security for your files, then go for it, but it counts towards space and bandwidth so you should probably limit what goes there.

It doesn't say it in that tutorial, but you can use * when excluding stuff. It can be a little touchy, but if you keep your Dropbox directories fairly clean it is easy. If you have a lot of directories to exclude, the fastest way is to exclude them all and then add back in the ones you want. If you only have a couple, excluding them one by one might be easier.

To exclude everything, from within your SSH client (I use Kitty), type ~/dropbox.py exclude add /home/<username>/Dropbox/*
(I'm pretty sure the * will work like that, might have to be *.*)
To add a directory back in, use ~/dropbox.py exclude remove /home/<username>/Dropbox/YourDirectoryNameHere

Please note, it has a terrible time handling spaces in directory names, so your best bet is to use no spaces for the two directories you want to use. You can replace spaces with a backslash and space "\ " I believe, but it is safer to just omit any spaces, particularly if you ever need to mess with it later and can't remember what the substitution is.

Obviously replace username with the name of your account. It is slightly possible that your file structure is a little different depending upon where you put Dropbox or how your seedbox is set up. I know that somewhere in the middle of my seedbox history they changed it all around. You can find the proper pathways if you use the Whatbox "Files" section from their management page. Remember to remove from the exclusion list both the directory you will use for placing .torrent files and the download directory.


I won't go over setting up Dropbox on your home computer.

Next, go into your seedbox and, assuming you are using rTorrent, find the settings and select Autotools.

Enter in the directories that you chose for your Dropbox folders in the appropriate boxes. Note: a_skeleton_03's page looks slightly different, and he got it to work with the "Label" button above, but it wouldn't work for me, so I'm going to just stick with what worked. Maybe use a mix of mine and his if you have to. All it means doing it my way is that everything gets dumped into the same directory, but Sonarr is smart enough to only touch TV episodes, and I'm assuming CouchPotato (which I am not using) would be the same with movies. I've downloaded movies, books, porn, and whatever else you can think of, and Sonarr has left it alone. You don't have to use the same directory names I did, obviously, and mine are more complicated than you need because of reasons I used to have a need for and am too lazy to change.


Please note that I use the Copy function instead of moving or hardlinking. This is because the moment I remove it from the Dropbox folder at home, it would remove it on the seedbox as well (same with renaming), which I don't want because I need to keep seeding it for awhile. This is where the extra space on your seedbox is nice, because until Sonarr removes episodes (and you remove your porn) you'll be taking up double the space.

Once Autotools is set up, you might want to test it out by saving a .torrent file to your torrent directory. It should start automatically (give it 5 minutes or so, rTorrent doesn't poll the watched directory continuously), and then when it is done it will move it to your finished torrent folder AND copy it to your Dropbox folder. Note that if it is a huge file you have to wait for the usually fairly slow seedbox to copy a huge file on its (likely shared) hard drive, and then wait for it to upload that huge file to the Dropbox servers. If you are seeding a bunch of stuff at max upload speed, this could take awhile (and will count against your upload traffic, another reason to upgrade to a decent seedbox plan). Once it is uploaded it should immediately start downloading to your home computer. The nice thing about Dropbox is that you don't actually see the file in the folder until it is totally complete, so Sonarr or any other programs won't keep trying to grab it when it is only partially downloaded.

Assuming you have Dropbox working perfectly, all we need to do now is set up Sonarr. I'll do that in the next post due to attachment limitations, and to break it up a little.

I won't go over how to install Sonarr, since it is trivial, and if you've made it this far you won't need instructions. The only thing you need to be mindful of is that you want to allow it to run as a service. After that, setting it up can be a bit confusing at times, but I'll show you what I did. Below are the different screens and the settings I used. Some of them you are free to change the settings however you want, particularly the Kodi connection notifications. Click Settings in Sonarr and then choose the appropriate tabs across the top, as I list them below. Also, make sure to select the yellow button in the upper right that shows advanced settings.

Indexer is where you tell it to use BTN to find your shows. You will need to go into "Edit Profile" on BTN and click the API tab. More than likely you'll need to click the Generate button, as most people won't have used the API before this. Once you have that, copy it into Sonarr, choose your settings, and save.


Download Client is simply where you configure the "Blackhole" so that Sonarr doesn't try to connect directly with your torrent client. All it will do now is download the necessary .torrent file from BTN and put it into the Dropbox directory you set up previously. Your seedbox will see it and download it, and then move it to the other directory you set up. Once it syncs and shows up on your home computer, the Blackhole will tell Sonarr to look there, and it will recognize that it is the show it previously grabbed for downloading, and then rename it and move it to the show's directory, and update your calendar and send a notification to KODI (in the next step).



This last one (Connect) is where I ran into the mind-boggling issue of Windows 10 turning my HTPC network into a public one, and my download computer couldn't send KODI commands to it until I figured it out and turned it back to a private network. You can play with these settings here, but I've read that sending Clean commands this way is generally not a good idea. No clue if that is accurate or not, but I figure it isn't really a big deal.


After that, you just set up your shows to be monitored, import existing episodes, etc. That stuff is pretty well detailed in the Sonarr wiki and other places, so I won't go into it, and it is highly dependent upon what you like or want it to do. For example, the Quality and Profiles tabs determine what you want it to download (720p, HDTV or Webrip, etc.) and what the minimum "I'm good, don't download anything else" threshold is, etc. Media Management tells it how to handle episode renaming, folder names, etc. All stuff you can play around with.

One thing that wasn't immediately obvious was the "Drone Factory" setting at the bottom of Download Clients (where you set up the Blackhole). That is simply the folder where you can manually put episodes that you want it to import, that weren't downloaded via Sonarr. You could probably just put it straight into the Dropbox download directory and it would do the same thing, but they provide a spot to differentiate the two, so why not?

This is my setup now, and I literally have to do nothing with it now except choose new shows I might want to monitor. You can customize it, or add NZB indexers, other torrent sites (IPT is on there as well, for those of you that don't have BTN, and I would imagine it is very similar to set up), or whatever. Like I said, a lot of the actual Sonarr stuff is better described in the wiki, but if you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them, and I'm sure a_skeleton_03 probably knows the answers better than I will.

Enjoy!

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

The one thing about Drone Factory folder (old name of Sonarr) is that it makes guesses based off of file name. If you have it do a .torrent and then a file shows up with the same file name in the new media folder it knows what to do with it and doesn't have to just guess. With how some people name their episodes you will get some stupid matches just dumping it into the Drone Factory folder.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I had to keep tweaking a file name to make it work when importing like that. It was a "special" episode of Impractical Jokers, so I had to manually rename it to include "S00E07" to get it to recognize it. At least you can manually look at all of the episodes in the Show section and see that it was, for example, E07 in this case.