Download TV shows automatically (Flexget + ShowRSS + Yahoo Pipes + Transmission)

In this tutorial, we are going to setup a  system which will download the new episodes of the shows we wanted. We will need Flexget, Transmission installed in our system and a ShowRSS and YahooPipes accounts.

Transmission

Install Transmission. For sabayon you can simply

equo install transmission-gtk 

Setup the transmission web interface. Put a username and password for the web interface and that is it. You can either start transmission as a daemon or as you login autostart. I prefer it to start when I login (to gnome) as a user and, I have autologin for the specific user. Add transmission to the gnome startup by 

"ALT+F2" -> gnome-session-properties. 

This is just a preference but daemon mode is better if you ask me. You can go either route. 

Flexget

We will start with installing Flexget. You have many directions to go at this point but I will cover only the installation without root privileges. It is almost directly from their website but in a compact way.

I assume you have python and virtualenv installed in your system.

virtualenv ~/flexget/
cd ~/flexget
bin/pip install flexget

Now create a very simple task which will download all the torrent files from the rss and put in a folder.

nano ~/.flexget/config.yml

We will generate this rss address using yahoo pipes which is I think the most useful web service I have ever seen. Just make sure that download section in this configuration is the check folder for new torrents folder of transmission. Basically we are sending all the torrent files to transmission check folder.

tasks:
  download:
    rss: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=91234400ce80xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
    accept_all: yes
    download: /home/bla/bla/Torrent_check_folder/

Then you can run flexget as a deamon or cronjob. In this case I was using cron but the daemon mode just works. You can add the daemon to startup programs

"ALT+F2" -> gnome-session-properties. 

~/flexget/bin/flexget daemon start

ShowRss

Simple. Open up a web browser and go to 

http://showrss.karmorra.info/

open an account and select the shows you want to download. It will generate an RSS address for you that you can test if it is what you wanted. Write down your RSS address for now, we will use it with Yahoo pipes.

Yahoo Pipes

The best service I have ever seen. Basically you can do whatever you want with this service. What I do is I have multiple RSS feeds from torrent servers, I compare, search strings, combine them etc then in the end generate a filtered one link. This one link only includes the torrents I wanted at the specific quality. Use ShowRSS link in here, if you want to combine another torrent server add that as well and generate your RSS address.

Use this yahoo pipes RSS address at Flexget configuration given above.

All set. You have a full automatic torrent machine which can be controlled online.
Bon appetit.

PS. There are many ways to do this job. Someone may argue with me that this Pipes is unnecessary as flexget can combine and filter RSS too. However, flexget runs on my computer and I do not want to put stress on my guys if I can get it done free.

References
1) http://flexget.com/
2) http://www.transmissionbt.com/
3) http://showrss.karmorra.info/‎
4) http://pipes.yahoo.com