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.

Install or update Videobox from PyPI via the Python pip utility. Again, type the following command in your terminal:

$ python -m pip install -U videobox

Quick start

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

$ videobox
Videobox has started. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 to use the web interface.

At startup Videobox updates its library and will attempt to do it again periodically.

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.

If your are interested in hacking the source code or contribute to the project see the contributing document.

Building the macOS app

If you are on 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:

• 0.8: Support for "complete season" torrents.
• 0.9: 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.