videobox 0.6.1

TV series download web app

Videobox

Videobox is a Python web app that lets you discover and download the latest TV series.

Prerequisites

Videobox requires the Python 3 programming language to be installed on your machine. If you are not familiar with it please refer to the official Python's download page for more information.

To check if you have Python installed type the following after in your terminal prompt ($):

$ python --version 
Python 3.9.6

Any Python version starting from 3.9 should run Videobox just fine.

Note: currently Videobox requires an external BitTorrent client (uTorrent, Transmission, etc.) to download video files.

Installation

You can install Videobox along with the main Python installation of your machine or in so-called "virtual environment", which is the recommended approach, since its dependencies may clash with packages you have already installed. Learn more about virtual environments here.

You install Videobox from PyPI via the Python pip utility. Again, type the following command in your terminal:

$ python -m pip install videobox

The install procedure will also create a videobox command, available in your terminal.

Quick start

You use Videobox via its web interface. To access it you start the videobox command on the terminal and point your web browser to the given URL:

$ videobox
Server started. Point your browser to http://0.0.0.0:8080 to use the web interface.

Once the page is loaded Videobox will ask you to update your library by clicking the update button 🔄.

Additional command-line options

Add --help to list all the available options:

$ videobox --help 
Usage: videobox [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --host TEXT     Hostname or IP address on which to listen, default is
                  0.0.0.0, which means "all IP addresses on this host".
  --port INTEGER  TCP port on which to listen, default is 8080
  --help          Show this message and exit.

Building the macOS app

If you are using a Mac you can compile Videobox into a menu bar app.

First, install the necessary dependencies with:

$ make install-package && make install-build-deps

Then build the app with:

$ make build-app

If everything went fine, you will find the compiled app into the dist folder.

The first time you run the app you will need to manually authorise it, please follow these instructions.

The build app process has been tested macOS Mojave (Intel), Ventura (arm64), and Sonoma (arm64).

Roadmap

This is a rough plan of what I would like to implement in the upcoming releases:

• 0.7: Background sync.
• 0.8: libtorrent integration.

Motivation

I've seen too many torrent web sites full of tracking scripts, pop-ups windows and crypto mining to remember. In the past years I've built a number of scripts to scrape such sites and now it's time to put all together in a coherent way.

Credits

Phosphor Icons created by Helena Zhang and Tobias Fried.

Contributing

If you would like to help with the Videobox development these are some essential steps to get you started.

Setup the environment

Starting from the repo root you might want to create a new virtual environment, to avoid messing up pre-existing Pyhton packages on your machine:

$ make venv

And activate it:

$ source .venv/bin/activate

Then, install all project dependencies into the virtual enviroment just created:

$ make install-deps

npm, the Node Package Manager, is required to install parcel to compile CSS styles and JavaScript code:

$ npm ci && make build-assets

Finally, run the web interface in debug mode:

$ make

When you are done you can exit the virtual enviroment with the deactivate command.

Where to find Videobox data

The Videobox Python package stores local database and configuration settings in ~/.videobox, while the macOS app uses ~/Library/Application Support/Videobox.

Using the debugger with Visual Studio Code

Debug works just fine under Visual Studio Code once you pick the Python interpreter shown in the .venv folder created earlier.

Place any breakpoint you need, hit F5 and editor will fire up the application.