Download Movies Using CouchPotato In Linux

Today, we'll see an interesting and useful tool which will help the Movie freaks to download movies in the best quality as soon as they are released in popular torrent and Usenet sites. Meet CouchPotato, a free Open Source, multi-platform application. It is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader.

You can keep a "movies I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the torrent to a specified directory.

You don't have to manually search on each torrent site to download best quality movies. Just add the movie titles you want to download in CouchPotato and do your regular work. It will automatically download the movies in your desired location when they are available on Internet. And of course you can define the download location of your own.

It works well on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Also, it has browser extension for popular web browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Disclaimer:

Some countries have banned Torrents and copyrighted movies on Internet to download and use them. Check with your Country rules. Neither the author nor Ostechnix is responsible for any kind of misuse or illegal use of torrent. Use this application with caution.

Features

• Automatic downloading and sending of NZBs to SABnzbd.
• Automatic downloading of torrents files to a specified directory.
• Easily add movies via IMDB UserScript.
• Movie sorting & renaming.
• Trailer downloading.
• Quality options to download best available. Overwrite if better is found.
• A "Coming Soon" page with soon to be released DVD and Theater info.
• Support for NZBs.org, NZBMatrix, Newznab.com and ThePirateBay.

Install CouchPotato in Linux

First, install the following prerequisites:

1. Python
2.  Git

To install python and Git on Debian/Ubuntu based systems, run the following command from your Terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install python git

On Fedora, CentOS:

 sudo yum install python git

Make a directory for CouchPotato in /opt/ location.

$ sudo mkdir /opt/couchpotato

Change to the CouchPotato directory, and git clone CouchPotato repository as shown below.

$ cd /opt/couchpotato/

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotatoServer.git

Now, make CouchPotato to run automatically on every reboot.

Copy the init script to /etc/init.d/ location.

$ sudo cp CouchPotatoServer/init/ubuntu /etc/init.d/couchpotato

Create a file called couchpotato:

$ sudo nano /etc/default/couchpotato

Add the following contents:

CP_USER=sk
CP_HOME=/opt/couchpotato/CouchPotatoServer
CP_DATA=/home/sk/couchpotato

Here, "sk" is my username. Replace it with your own username.

Make it executable using command:

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/couchpotato

Add it to defaults:

$ sudo update-rc.d couchpotato defaults

Finally, start CouchPotato daemon using command:

$ sudo service couchpotato start

Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:5050/wizard/.

This is how my CouchPotato web console looks.

Download movies with CouchPotato

In CouchPotato dashboard, Scroll down a little bit, and fill the details in the General section. If you want to access CP(CouchPotato) from outside your local network, you better secure it a bit with a username and password.

Select your default torrent application (Ex. Transmission) and Enter the username and password. Also, select the location where you want to download the torrent files. If you leave blank, the torrent will downloaded in your Torrent application's default download directory.

Scroll down further and fill all required details.

Finally click the Big green button at the bottom

You'll be redirected to the CouchPotato login screen again. Enter the username and password which you defined before. Voila! We're ready to download the movies.

By default, CouchPotato will show some suggested movies. If you want them, just hover the mouse over the movie and click the (+) button to add it your wanted list.

Select the movie quality (Ex. 1080p, 720p etc.) and click Add.

Now, the added movies will be shown in the "Wanted" section.

To add additional movies, enter the movie name on the Search box (Ex. Mission Impossible). Select the movie quality and click Add.

Similarly, you can add any movies of your choice. Once they available on the Internet, they will be automatically downloaded to the specified directory. You can access the Settings page later bu clicking on the gear button on the top right corner of the CouchPotato dashboard.

Also, CouchPotato developer has developed extensions for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari browsers to add movies easily via IMDB.com.

Updating Couchpotato

To update CouchPotato to latest available version, do the following.

$ cd /opt/couchpotato/CouchPotatoServer/

Pull new updates using command:

$ sudo git pull

Or, you can directly update it from the CouchPotato from the Dashboard.

Go to Settings by clicking on the Gear button on the top right corner.

Select Check for Updates.

Cheers!