Dockerize your tv shows download and streaming to your TV

Aug 21, 2015 · 983 words · 5 minute read

I’m going to explain my setup of how do I watch my favourites tv shows using containers.

Requisites 🔗

TV
WiFi
ChromeCast
Plex for Android
ShowRSS feed. You need to create an account and setup it with your favourites tv shows, so you’ll end up with some rss feed like http://showrss.info/rss.php?user_id=XXXXX&hd=1&proper=1
CentOS 7 (or any distro docker capable) with docker daemon installed and running
Non root user to run all the commands (this is a personal preference, feel free to do it with root user if you want…)
Shared folders to store your multimedia, flexget config & plex config. Something like:

/storage/media/
├── plex
├── flexget
├── music
├── pictures
├── transmission
│   ├── downloads
│   ├── incomplete
│   └── watch
└── videos
    ├── movies
    └── tvshows

I store the media folder in a btrfs subvolume, but that’s another topic :)

Setup 🔗

TV 🔗

ChromeCast is properly setup to your TV and wireless network
Android mobile with Plex for Android installed in the same wireless network

NAT 🔗

You need to open 12345/udp port in your router to your docker host (transmission container connectivity with the outside world)

Docker host 🔗

eminguez/transmission-fedora It will only download files (running 24x7)
eminguez/plex-media-server-fedora It will stream the tv show to my TV (running 24x7)
eminguez/flexget-fedora It will handle the tv shows downloads, move them when finished and clean them up in transmission when ratio or timeout is reached (running every hour)

Why Fedora? Because I like it and I work at Red Hat :D

How does it work 🔗

Transmission container is listening in 9091 for API calls and webgui. Every hour (using cron), the flexget container is executed, and attached to the same network namespace than the transmission container (so it can send API calls to localhost).

Flexget will:

query the RSS feed and enqueue the proper magnet links to the transmission daemon to download the tv shows that you’ve configured
if finished, it will move the tv shows to the proper folders in your media folder
if finished, and ratio or timeout reached, it will clean the transmission queue

Then, when you want, fire the Plex app in your Android phone, browse your favourite tv show, and play it in your big screen TV :)

Installation 🔗

Easy peasy!

Pull the docker images:

docker pull eminguez/transmission-fedora
docker pull eminguez/flexget-fedora
docker pull eminguez/plex-media-server-fedora

Create a simple script to run the flexget container (in my case /home/edu/bin/flexget.sh`) and give it the proper execution permissions

#!/bin/sh
docker run --rm --net=container:transmission -v /storage/media/flexget/:/home/flexget/.config/flexget/ -v /storage/media/transmission/downloads/:/home/flexget/flexget/from -v /storage/media/videos/tvshows/:/home/flexget/flexget/to eminguez/flexget-fedora > /dev/null

Setup an hourly cron task to trigger the flexget container:

0 * * * * /home/edu/bin/flexget.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Configure flexget to get your tv shows. I use the following template, replace the VARIABLES with your settings, and store it in /storage/media/flexget/config.yml:

templates:
  global:
    clean_transmission:
      host: localhost
      port: 9091
      username: transmission
      password: PASSWORD
      finished_for: 2 hours
      min_ratio: 1
    disable: [details]
    # configuration of email parameters
    # each feed will send an email with the accepted entries
    # can be disabled per feed with email: active: False
    email:
      active: True
      from: FROM
      to: TO
      smtp_host: smtp.gmail.com
      smtp_port: 587
      smtp_login: true
      smtp_username: USERNAME
      smtp_password: PASSWORD
      smtp_tls: true
tasks:
  # downloading task
  download-rss:
    rss: http://showrss.info/rss.php?user_id=SHOWRSS_ID&hd=1&proper=1&namespaces=true&magnets=true
    # fetch all the feed series
    all_series: yes
    limit_new: 10  
    # use transmission to download the torrents
    transmission:
      host: localhost
      port: 9091
      username: transmission
      password: PASSWORD
    only_new: yes
  # sorting task
  sort-files:
    find:
      # directory with the files to be sorted
      path: /home/flexget/flexget/from/
      # fetch all avi, mkv and mp4 files, skips the .part files (unfinished torrents)
      regexp: '.*\.(avi|mkv|mp4)$'
      recursive: yes
    accept_all: yes
    seen: local
    regexp:
      reject:
        - sample
    # this is needed for the episode names
    thetvdb_lookup: yes
    all_series:
      parse_only: yes
    move:
      # this is where the series will be put
      to: /home/flexget/flexget/to/{{ tvdb_series_name }}
      # save the file as "Series Name - SxxEyy - Episode Name.ext"
      filename: '{{ tvdb_series_name }} - {{ series_id }} - {{ tvdb_ep_name }}{{ location | pathext }}'

Run the transmission container with the previously used password as environmental variable:

docker run -d --name transmission --restart=always -p 12345:12345 -p 12345:12345/udp -p 9091:9091 -e ADMIN_PASS=PASSWORD -v /storage/media/transmission/downloads:/var/lib/transmission/downloads -v /storage/media/transmission/incomplete:/var/lib/transmission/incomplete -v /storage/media/transmission/watch:/var/lib/transmission/watch eminguez/transmission-fedora

Note the restart=always flag to keep it running 24x7 and survive host reboots!

Run the plex container:

docker run --name plex-media-server -d --restart=always -v /storage/media/plex/:/config -v /storage/media/:/media -p 32400:32400 eminguez/plex-fedora

Note the restart=always flag to keep it running 24x7 and survive host reboots!

Browse to http://your_host:32400/web and configure plex for your environment.

If this doesn’t work, kill the plex container, edit /storage/media/plex/Plex Media Server/Preferences.xml and add the allowedNetworks="192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0" attribute to the <Preferences …> node to allow networking connections, and start the plex container again

Tips 🔗

If you want Avahi broadcast to work, add --net=host to the plex container run command, but this will be more insecure. I’ve setup manually my server in the Plex Android app to point directly to the host in Settings > Advanced > Manual Connections
Set a friendly Plex server name under Plex Settings > Server > General in the Plex web Gui
You can download any torrent/magnet file browsing http://your_host:9091 using “transmission/PASSWORD” and it will be downloaded to /storage/media/transmission/downloads/ folder
As a bonus, you can drop any torrent file in /storage/media/transmission/watch/ folder and transmission will gently download it for you :)

Volume mapping explanation 🔗

Flexget 🔗

`/storage/media/flexget/:/home/flexget/.config/flexget/ to store the flexget configuration, sqlite database and log file
/storage/media/transmission/downloads/:/home/flexget/flexget/from where transmission will move the files once downloaded
`/storage/media/videos/tvshows/:/home/flexget/flexget/to where plex will look for tv shows

Transmission 🔗

/storage/media/transmission/incomplete:/var/lib/transmission/incomplete incomplete downloaded files
/storage/media/transmission/downloads:/var/lib/transmission/downloads where transmission will move the files once downloaded
/storage/media/transmission/watch:/var/lib/transmission/watch where transmission will look for torrent files

Plex 🔗

/storage/media/plex/:/config to store the plex configuration, database and so on
/storage/media/:/media where plex will look for media files (tv shows, movies, music, pictures,…)

References and thanks 🔗

I’ve used the following repos as base and just adapt it to Fedora:

So, thank you @wernight and @elventear :)