Danger! This software is half-baked. At the moment, it only works with Easynews. It's not released yet. If you want to try it, expect some pain.

Stagehand is a manager for your favourite TV series. It automatically downloads new episodes of the TV shows in your library, and provides a convenient interface to download previously aired episodes.

Here are some of the main features:

• Pretty, modern-looking UI
• Support for multiple TV metadata providers (currently TheTVDB and TVRage): easily choose the authoritative provider per-series
• A Just Works design principle: no cumbersome setup or external tools
• Support for Easynews HTTP-based global search

The core of Stagehand is quite robust, but many essential features are missing (but planned):

• NZB and NNTP support (for non-Easynews Usenet services): the most critical missing functionality
• Bittorrent
• Web-based configuration UI
• Ability to import an existing TV library
• Multi-platform: it is Linux-only right now
• ... and a bazillion FIXMEs and TODOs in the source

Stagehand is Linux software.

Assuming your distro has a relatively recent version of pip (0.5 or later), installation should be fairly straightforward:

This is what's needed for Ubuntu or Debian. Adapt as needed to your distro.

# Install base dependencies
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-beautifulsoup python-pycurl python-pip libglib2.0-dev git-core

# Install kaa-base and kaa-metadata from git
$ sudo pip install -U git+git://github.com/freevo/kaa-base.git git+git://github.com/freevo/kaa-metadata.git

# Install Stagehand from git
$ sudo pip install -U --no-deps git+git://github.com/jtackaberry/stagehand.git

Once installed, run it:

$ stagehand -vv

It will output a line that looks like:

2012-05-10 00:02:13,011 [INFO] web: starting webserver at http://orion:8088/

You should be able to browse to this URL (from inside your network, presumably).

Ideally you'd be able to configure Stagehand from the web interface, but this isn't implemented yet (in spite of the fact that there is content in the Settings section). You will need to edit ~/.config/stagehand/config which should be fairly self-explanatory. Minimally, you will need these lines:

searchers.enabled[+] = easynews
searchers.easynews.username = your_easynews_username
searchers.easynews.password = your_easynews_password

Once you save the config file, you're ready to start using Stagehand. No reload is needed; you should see on the console:

2012-05-10 00:07:11,433 [INFO] manager: config file changed; reloading

You can daemonize Stagehand if you want to run it in the background. Logs go to ~/.cache/stagehand/logs/. For debugging purposes, it's recommended you run Stagehand with extra verbosity (-vv).

$ stagehand -vvb

I realize there are several programs that do what Stagehand does, including and especially the very popular Sick Beard.

There are a few reasons Stagehand exists:

• I needed an excuse to learn CoffeeScript
• I wanted a real-world application to exercise the Kaa application framework, which is another project of mine.
• I was a bit annoyed at Sick Beard's need for SABnzbd
• I suffer horribly from NIH