Sonarr is a TV series download manager capable of downloading from Peer to Peer and Usenet networks. It is comparable to Couchpotato or Headphones except it manages only TV series. It integrates with rTorrent, uTorrent Server, Deluge, NZBGet and many more downloaders. It can also make use of Jackett to communicate with BitTorrent trackers.
NZBGet is a Usenet downloader that is stable, fast and packs a lot of features. It is available as a package on Arch Linux but does not come with systemd file out of the box. Fortunately it is simple to add a systemd configuration file.
Maraschino is a web-based front end that brings together several applications together like XBMC, CouchPotato, Headphones, uTorrent, NZBGet and more. It aggregates information from these applications and displays it all on one page. Maraschino runs on python and is easy to install and configure. For a similar alternative check out how to Install HTPC Manager on Ubuntu Linux.
HTPC Manager combines many media related applications and provides an easy way to view and control them in one place. It supports applications like CouchPotato, NZBGet and XBMC / Kodi among others. Currently it is still missing support for NZBDrone / Sonarr.
Headphones is an automated music downloader and manager. It uses MusicBrainz service to query for music metadata which can unfortunately be unreliable at times. It is comparable to CouchPotato or Sonarr but for music. For improved security it is installed under it’s own user and group. Backing up settings and the library is very simple and only requires a database and configuration files to be saved.
NZBDrone / Sonarr is an automated TV show manager and searcher. It will find and send TV episodes to your preferred download application. As a newcomer NZBDrone has an impressive amount of features that a more mature application like Sickbeard is missing. It is recommended to use a mono 3.6 or newer.
Media Browser is a media management application among other things. It allows you to browser and filter your collection with more precision. Metadata wise it does a lot of what XBMC and the like already do but MB lets you compartmentalize metadata retrieval and playback. This leaves XBMC to just playback content with no need for write access which is great when it comes to ensuring your data security and ease of configuration of new clients. The most unique and handy feature is probably it’s ability to transcode streaming video.
NZBGet is a popular Newsgroup download application. It is similar to SABnzbd but only in a generalized sense. NZBGet is much faster and easier on system resources, it has modern features, is easier to use and simply looks better. NZBGet 12 can be installed from the official repository but unfortunately version 13 needs to be compiled. Installing and configuring version 13 not as simple as it could be but the extra features are worth the effort.
CouchPotato python based automated movie downloader. To be exact it will search for a movies and send them to a download application like NZBGet or uTorrent to do the actual downloading. I don’t trust CouchPotato to select the correct release since it is does not integrate with release databases. Instead I use it as a search aggregation and bookmark application for movies.
