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Setup of a media center with automated episode downloads in the background.

These are the applications this setup configures and automates for you:

• OSMC the operating system for the mediacenter, interacting with your own TV remote.
• Transmission to download torrents
• Flex to automate jobs and such as the episode search, download, add subtitles or keep the house clean
• Subliminal to integrate subtitles in your language
• Cronjobs, several of them to keep everything working in background

Watch TV as soon shows are released without doing anything.

Requirements

• A running OSMC (Download and install here, easy as hell to install).
• Hardware: A Raspberry Pi (1 or 2 or 3), Vero or Apple TV
• An account in ShowRSS or similar feed service that configures your own feed.

This setup has been running since 2015 and now in 2018 has been updated to support raspberry 3 using OSMC release 2018.03-2 (if there is a newer version now, should work)

Features

After the installation you get a mediacenter operated from your TV remote. All your selected TV Shows are puctually downloaded in their correct folder with its subtitles, and the filesystem is kept clean and organized, no maintenance to do. Some of the features are:

• Operation from the remote, no mouse nor keyboard needed.
• The setup of your preferred TV Shows taken from ShowRSS or any other feed of your interest.
• All downloads automated, moved to the right folder structure when completed. Using real episode names and season information (taken from TheTVDB) is optional by uncommenting lines in the config.
• Automatic download of subtitles and retry of failed ones every hour.
• Downloads folder and transmission tasks always clean.
• Updated Kodi library with TV Shows covers and art cover.
• [optional] Delete shows that have been already seen to save storage

The following services can be used remotely:

Samba is not installed, all my downloads go to an external storage (USB) that I can carry everywhere. Think that the Raspberry is not a regular PC and you can hit memory limits easily, the less services you put the better. Occasional transfers can be easily done using scp myfile [email protected]$OSMC_HOST.

Installation

In order to start the installation just SSH to your fresh OSMC installation in the raspeberry:

ssh [email protected]_OSMC_IP

Then the installation starts by copy-pasting this line:

bash <(curl -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -s 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alombarte/raspberry-osmc-automated/master/install.sh') /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated  2>&1 | tee /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated/logs/installation.log

The installation script will download all necessary files and will configure the raspberry for you. At the beginning of the installation process you will be asked for your RSS feed URL, your IP and the mountpoint of your external storage (if any). Once you have answered the questions, leave the computer and do something else. The process is long, and if there is anything broken you will be able to see it in the installation.log.

Your mediacenter is ready!

Getting the RSS feed

If you don't have a RSS you can sign up in a free service like ShowRSS. Once you have done it add some TV Shows to your feed and then get the link by clicking "Generate" in the feeds section

Extending the configuration

If you want to tweak on the existing installation, this might help you a little bit. To begin with, all the configuration variables you chose during installation are saved in /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated/bash/settings.cfg. Don't change them because it doesn't have any effect, they are used only during the installation and are there for informative purposes afterwards.

The following paths assume you installed the application under /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated

Changing the automation of TV Shows

The Real magic happens by configuring this task. The default task downloads all episodes to /home/osmc/TV Shows, it uses a structure like TV Shows/Show name/Season 1/Episode Name

For any changes edit the file:

/home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated/flexget/config.yml

Then execute flexget to see if it's working (the flexget daemon might need to be restarted):

/usr/local/bin/flexget exec

Subtitles

All jobs executed by flexget related with TV Shows try to download the subtitle in the language you chose during installation. There are 2 different attempts 2 download subtitles:

• Just after an episode is downloaded: Flexget will use the subliminal tool to get the associate subtitle. This operation might fail if you are downloading a just aired episode and the subtitles have not been written yet.
• In order to complete any missing subtitles, every hour a cron job tries to download missing ones.

If post-install you ever need to change the subtitle language you need to edit 2 files:

• /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated/flexget/config.yml and change the 2 letter code (e.g es) in the following line: exec: subliminal download -l es ....
• In the crontab with the command crontab -e and look for the line invoking subliminal

Using your addic7ed account

If you have an account in addic7ed you can pass your credentials in the aforementioned places adding the flag --addic7ed YOURUSER YOURPASSWORD. E.g:

/usr/local/bin/subliminal --addic7ed YOURUSER YOURPASSWORD download -l es -s "/home/osmc/TV Shows/"

Crontab

If you want to change the frequency of the feed checking, add, or remove jobs just execute:

crontab -e

Deleting seen shows

In the crontab there is a commented job that deletes TV shows that are marked as seen by Kodi after 1 month. If you want to enable this feature just uncomment the line in the crontab and save.

SSH without password:

If you want to stop typing the password every time you SSH to the Raspberry Pi do the following in your Mac/Linux:

# Put here your raspberry IP, e.g:
OSMC_HOST=192.168.1.10

# Copy SSH key to OSMC server
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected]$OSMC_HOST 'mkdir -p ~/.ssh; umask 077; cat >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

Broken locales?

If you see this message on every login:

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)`

This is a possible fix:

sudo locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
# Choose en_US.UTF-8

Other utils

Download all magnets in RSS feed.

The system keeps track of your series feed and downloads periodically all files found but you might need from time to time to parse and extract from another one (e.g: first day you download a new serie). There is a bash script that adds in your transmission all magnets found:

bash /home/osmc/.raspberry-osmc-automated/bash/download_magnets_in_rss.sh http://showrss.info/show/117.rss

The previous call would add to Transmission all magnets available for the serie.

Spotify and Youtube

The spotify plugin doesn't come preinstalled. If you have a Premium account you will be able to install it using bash/spotify.sh.

The Youtube plugin can be installed manually from the Add-on repository browser.