pyBox Project

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pyBox introduction

pyBox is a live web based movie catalogue management system.
pyBox is an Internet Media Recorder accessible over the web anywhere anytime.
pyBox is the convergence of technologies: television, computer and internet.
pyBox is any-ware.

pyBox catalogues your movie collection automatically once a .torrent file is being downloaded. The imdb link is automatically detected through AI. pyBox has a customizeable multithreaded feeder to extract .torrent file from you favorite torrent sites. Various user friendly reports allow you to query it's movie database.

Downloaded movies are automatically unrared and cleaned. With the smart ready to play feature you can watch a movie or through .asx stream the movie over the internet.

How I use pyBox

Every couple of hours I check the New Arrivals on my pyBox. I can see for example that the season finale of Lost has been downloaded and decompressed automatically. I got a low resolution and a HD 2GB version. When I check the pyBox New Arrivals and click on "Lost"(2004). I see a description of the series. But I also see two versions and so I can delete the low resolution verion. Now I hit the play button and can watch the season finale in HD on the laptop through the Wifi network. I can also see which movies with description and actors are being downloaded and how they are rated on IMDB. If I don't like the movie I can delete it

When do you need pyBox?

You want to download some TV series or movies automatically but want to keep track of the progress of downloads anywhere in the world.
Suppose you are on vacation and you want to check via the mobile phone which movies you can delete that have been downloaded to make some more diskspace.
Also with the pyBox search filter it becomes easy to select which movies you want to view or delete as you have the IMDB rating and movie outline of the movie.
You want an easy tool to allow friends to watch your movies over the internet.
The movie catalogue with posters just looks very pretty!

pyBox features:

Fast multi-threaded feeder

feeder.py: The feeder extracts .torrents from web sites automatically through a scheduled task , filters .torrents by exclusion rules and launch the .torrent automatically in uTorrent. Once the .torrent is launched we will detect from the content what is the movie or content that is being downloaded and created automatically the movie folder with IMDB movie information. This allows to quickly make a call if we already have this movie or that it is not good enough to keep.
The feeder is smart to not allow the disk to go full. It checks that there is at least 1GB free disk space so it can launch decompression jobs, etc. If the disk is full the .torrent launching is skipped.

AutoRAR content decompressor

decompressor.py: The decompressor will scan for the new downloaded content and then decompress ZIP/RAR files from the content folder It will delete non essential files from the content folder. The target is to only have a .avi/.divx file that can then be playedback locally or remotely.

IMDB content parser

pyBOX uses IMDB to extract movie information to populate it's own database. It support unicode character sets to handle foreign movie descriptions.

movieposterdb integration

When a movie has been identified pyBox automatically finds the most suitable poster from movieposterdb with the right poster size and language.

Tight uTorrent integration

If a movie that is being downloaded gets deleted in pyBox an http command is send to uTorrent to delete the .torrent that is being downloaded. We also show the estimated time of arrival of when a .torrent will be completely downloaded.

Pretty movie reports

- Movie search to filter by Genre,Year,Actor names: it then shows the list of movies including it's posters.

- Movie poster accordeon(JQuery): display the relevant Poster movies by genre
- Movie list sorted by disk size
- Movie posters: visually cool to show five posters per row. Click on any poster to jump to the movie page and play back the movie.

- Movie poster changes are made easy as you can show the available posters and with 1 click the default poster is updated in the movie desciption.

- Movies by actors: It shows the frequently featured actors and the mopvies that are in your collection.
- Movies by rating: It shows the movies sorted by rating
- Movies .csv: Exports the whole DB to csv format
- Movies table: experimented with JQuery to show a table with movies from the .csv file
- Duplicate movies: you can quickly identify that you downloaded "Lost" as a low res 350 MB file and HD 1GB file. Then you can delete the 350MB file.

Local movie viewing

pyBox can translate the movie local directory to the remotely mounted directory name so that you can watch a movie from a laptop connected to the same network as the "pyBox" server.

Remote movie streaming

pyBox can create automatically the .asx extension so that you can stream the movie over the internet. This feature is still experimental. I guess in a couple of year will prove very usefull as internet bandwidth will increase. I'm sure our Asian users will enjoy this feature to provide access to goods friends so they can watch movies from your server.

Data browser

Using the Django data browser for navigating through each hyperlinked movie elements. Click on the Genre Action and see all Action movies. Click on Kalifornia movie and see the movie description. Click on Brad Pitt and see all his movies you have in your colleciton.

User administration

You can manage different users and authorizations. Some people can watch movies from you collection. Other users can manage the collection and delete content.

pyBox dependencies:

- Django 1.0: is a high-level Python Web framework that handles site administration, DB management, web templates
- Python 2.5: scripting language

Options for better results:
- Apache 2.2: web server when using pyBox in productive mode
- uTorrent and webui: tight integration with uTorrent as you can control the deletion and upload of torrents
- WinRAR: good decompression tool to automatically decompress downloaded content
- Currently running on a DOS box but I'm sure some Linux wizard will tell me how to port pyBox to Linux.

Web sites that are parsed:
- www.google.com search to find movies/TV Series/games (including adult movies :-o )
- www.imdb.com web site for movie information extraction
- www.movieposterdb.com site for movie poster references
- www.newtorrents.info site by the feeder for example fresh .torrents

pyBox Installation Manual

Follow the pyBox Installation Manual.

pyBox User Manual

Here you find the pyBox User Manual.