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[Janoz]

Together with a colleague of mine I came up with the idea for this application. It's a tool to automatically download your favorite episodes. Using the web interface you can configure which  series you want toe download and which episode your still missing. It will also monitor tvrage to see if new episodes are aired.

The Episode Butler only fetches NZB files. It can pass these files to Sabnzbd, but they can also be saved to a  directory so every newsgrabber that can monitor a specific directory can be used.

The tool has been in development for a few months now and me and a few friends of mine are using it. In my opinion its becoming mature enough to share it with the rest of the world. Just give it a try.

The Episode Butler works on windows and on linux and doesn't necessary need a GUI. I myself use it on a headless linux server.

http://episodebutler.janoz.com

[mnkykyd]

Sounds pretty cool, but I'm on OSX only a the moment.
Is it possible you could give any advice on how to install/setup for OSX?

[RXP]

Nice idea, would be neat if you could select attributes to select for each show e.g. x264, 1000mb-1300mb etc.

[soudlous]

thank you for this , it is very very appreciated.

perhaps when you get some of the simpler kinks out you can put in attribute checking.

really good stuff so far.

thanx.

[soudlous]

left ya a message. let me know if you didn't get it.

[soudlous]

some info please, how long does it update, on what interval?

you might consider giving the user more options and more controls.

on intervals attributes, what the quality meter actually do, waht is considered high quality medium quality?

[Janoz]

Thanks for all the replies. I'll try to address them all:

mnkykyd: About OSX. The only reason there is no native OSX version is because i don't have a Mac tot test it on. You could download the Linux version and try to run the episodebutler.jar. I think it will work, but I never tested it. I'm planning to make a native OSX build, but as I said, I need a mac (or someone with a mac) tot test it on.


RXP: I'm trying to make it as easily usable as possible. I'm afraid adding all kind of attributes might hurt the workings of episode butler (ie it can't find shows or finds the wrong versions). The only thing I did added was a quality selector. It's based on the three versions of an episode I come across. The low is the 400mb version, medium is the 800mb version, and high is the 1200mb version.

soudlous: See above for the info about attributes (and of course in the email I send you in response to your questions). The intervals currently are 6 hours. Every 6 hours the Episode Butler checks if new episodes are available. In the 0.5 version I'll make this part of the configuration instead of a hardcoded value.

[Janoz]

I just uploaded a new version because it turned out some changes to the search made my Episode Butler stop working. In a week I'll come with version 0.5 which has a more robuust implementation (ie: not dependent of the v3 beta site). Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Dark Horizon]

Any chance you could add the ability for users to add a series?

[Janoz]

Sorry for the late reply.

I've been giving it a lot of thoughts. The problem with that is that it shouldn't conflict with new updats, but I think I found out how to do it. I'm not sure if I will implement it in the next version, or the version after that. Currently there are some issues concerning the search on newzbin and I'll be addressing those first. After that I'll add the functionality to add your own shows.

[GeK]

Great Application 

Just one small design question is there a particular reason why you choose to use the java SQL database instead of plain old text files (which would be alot easier to edit).

And now a small bug: Opera 9 does not list the series... I have to tell opera to identify itself as IE to get any output.

[Janoz]

The reason for hsqldb is because the querying for information is a lot easier. The searching for episodes to download can now be done in a single SQL query in stead of implementing a full fledged text based file parser. Besides that the HsqlDB is small so it doesn't make the total application to heavy.

Also, using the right tools, editing of the information is quiet simple. (I myself use the Quantum DB plugin for eclipse)

I will look into the opera9 bug. I find it really strange because there is no browser check involved what so ever.. Hmmm while I was writing the last sentence I guess it might have something to do with some ajax functionality, but that doesn't explain why the series aren't listed.

I'll try to replicate the bug this week to see if I can find a solution (After this week I'll be on vacation for about 3 weeks so I thing a fix can't be expected before august)

[JohnGoodie]

Any news on this... really would like a feature to add a show to the list of shows you have.

Thanks,
John

[Janoz]

I've been very busy lately so I didn't have much time to spend on the Episode Butler, but since the new seasons are starting again (I'm a Prison Break and Heroes fan) I'm forced to start working on it again .

[rascalli]

I tried to use it , but somehow I could not find the command to start it with in linux.

Any idea ?