Configure CouchPotato with Torrents

couchpotatoCouchPotato is your automatic feature length video downloader from usenet or torrents. You add content you want to see to a watchlist and CouchPotato will automatically search for them and download them through your usenet downloader or torrent client. It will even rename and sort the videos for you so your archive is nicely organized for importing into Plex or XBMC. This guide assumes you have already installed CouchPotato on your operating system (Windows, Mac OSX, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi). The torrent clients I show you how to set up with CouchPotato are uTorrent and Transmission, rtorrent, Deluge and many others are supported and the same logic applies.

For a better experience I recommend using a combination of usenet and torrents with CouchPotato. The benefits of usenet are outlined here: Comparing Usenet and Torrents – Which is Better? If you are stuck on torrents then please use a VPN like Private Internet Access or PureVPN.

Usenet Provider
Backbone
Retention
Speed
Connections
VPN
Monthly
Annual
UsenetServer
UsenetServer
3199
Unlimited
30
Yes
$10
$95.40
Newshosting
Newshosting
3199
Unlimited
30
Yes
$10
$99
Frugal
Frugal
3000
Unlimited
20
No
$4.16
$50
Usenetlink
Cloudgate
2000
100 Mbit
30
No
$15
$140

Configure CouchPotato with Torrents

Go to http://ip.address:5050 to open up your CouchPotato web interface

CouchPotato Settings

If it is the first time you have logged in just scroll to the bottom and click the big green button

couchpotato finishing up

In the top right corner, click Settings under the Settings cog

configure couchpotato click settings

Click General

Set a username and password to access the web interface

couchpotato general

Enable Searcher

Click Searcher on the left and choose torrents as First Search.

Add KickAssTorrents and Torrentz as free providers, you can enable private trackers as well.

couchpotato searcher enable torrent defaults

If you only want to leech then set your Seed Ratio and Seed Time to 0

On private trackers you usually need a seed ratio of 1 or seed time of 48 hours, adjust appropriately.

couchpotato searcher enable leech

Click Categories, here you can adjust the filters that CouchPotato uses, you can have several keywords separated by commas.

You can tell CouchPotato to prefer releases with certain words if there is a group that you like or groups that embed subtitles (e.g. DKSubs or SWEsubs). Put those in the Preferred box and CouchPotato will try and get these releases first.

If there are releases with keywords that you require add them to the Required box, no other releases will be downloaded unless they contain these keywords

In the Ignored box you can put keywords for CouchPotato to ignore, if there are groups that release stuff that you absolutely hate, add their names here.

couchpotato searcher categories

Adjust CouchPotato Qualities

Click Qualities under Searcher

Here you can adjust the quality settings, by default Best tries to get the highest resolution possible and then starts settling for lower quality. It searches the qualities from top to bottom.

You can rearrange the quality priority by hovering over the 3 lines next to the quality setting. You click and hold and drag up or down.

If Finish is checked next to the quality then it will stop searching for the other qualities on the list.

configure couchpotato move quality setting

You can also delete quality settings by clicking the red x

configure couchpotato delete quality setting

I have removed 1080p and 720p settings because I only wanted to find SD quality releases that are not huge.

configure couchpotato quality made sd

If you scroll down you can change the order the quality settings will be shown in the dropdown box. For convenience you should drag your default quality preference to the top. This is why I modified the Best quality because it sits at the top by default but I could have just as easily moved the SD profile to the top in this section.

Uncheck any qualities you are not interested in.

configure couchpotato qualities chnage order

Disable Blackhole as a Downloader

On the right click Downloaders

Disable BlackHole by unchecking it unless you use a torrent client which monitors a watch folder for new .torrent files.

configure couchpotato disable blackhole

Enable Transmission Torrent as a Downloader

You need the WebUI enabled so CouchPotato can communicate with it. My linux guides for Transmission cover this, for Transmission on Windows go to Edit -> Preferences.

transmission open preferences

Click the Remote tab and check Allow remote access

Enter a username and password, Only allow these IP addresses is a security measure, if you want remote access to Transmission from any computer disable it by unchecking the box.

You can click Open web client to view the Transmission web interface.

transmission preferences remote tab

On the right click Downloaders

Enable Transmission by checking it. Add your username and password for transmission. In Directory, choose a directory for the downloads to go to, you do not want this to be the final directory the videos will end up in. Instead you want it to be a temporary folder that CouchPotato monitors for new videos which it then renames and organizes nicely for you.

In Host put your host and port for transmission, the default is http://localhost:9091 if it's on the same machine as CouchPotato.

Click Test and you should see Connection successful.

configure couchpotato enable transmission

Enable uTorrent Downloader

Note: The label system in uTorrent is quite buggy so I recommend using Transmission for Windows instead.
uTorrent uses labels to sort downloads much like Sabnzbd and NZBGet use categories. You need to open up uTorrent to do some configuration first before enabling it in CouchPotato.

Open uTorrent and go to Options -> Preferences

Click Advanced and then WebUI

Check Enable WebUI and enter a username and password

Check Alternative listening port and pick a random port that is not being used, I use 7070

Click Label on the left pane and check Use Label and Directory Rules

In the Label box enter movies and in the Contains box enter movies and click the + sign.

configure couchpotato utorrent custom movies add label

Now you can choose movies from the drop down menu in the bottom left corner.

Click the button and browse to your temporary download location that CouchPotato will monitor for new releases, it should not be your final movie destination directory, that will be taken care of in the Renamer. Click the + sign to add it to the list.

configure couchpotato utorrent custom movies add label directory

Now you should see your movies label in the list. Click Apply and OK.

configure couchpotato utorrent custom movies label added

Back in CouchPotato click Downloaders and check uTorrent

Input your Host as localhost:7070 or replace 7070 with the port you used in uTorrent

Enter the username and password for the WebUI you just configured

Enter the Label movies and click Test.

Enable CouchPotato Renamer

To help understand CouchPotato's renaming here is a diagram. No matter which program you use to download, CouchPotato will monitor that folder as the From folder and move files to your final destination the To folder. It will make sense in a minute.

couchpotato-renamer-post-processing

Click Renamer

CouchPotato will monitor your From folder for new video downloads and post process them. When they are post processed the video file will have its own folder in the To folder. The From and To folder must be different for the Renamer to work. This is the key component of getting CouchPotato to work properly with usenet downloaders and torrent downloaders simultaneously, you will be feeding the downloads into the same folder CouchPotato will be watching.

You should also check Unrar in case the release you download is packaged in rar files.

configure couchpotato enable renamer

By default torrented CouchPotato downloads will be symbolically linked to your To folder. This is so you can still seed the torrent. If you are not interested in seeding click Show advanced settings and scroll down until you see Torrent File Action and change it to Move. If you are private trackers you probably need to seed so leave it as link if that's the case.

configure couchpotato advanced rename torrent file action

CouchPotato Notifications

Click Notifications

I have enabled Pushbullet notifications by copying my access key from the Pushbullet settings page. Click Test to make sure it works.

Here you can also enable Plex and XBMC library updates. For XBMC you will need to have the web access enabled.

configure couchpotato notifications

CouchPotato Automation

CouchPotato can automatically import your imdb watchlist. This means you can just add videos you want to see using the IMDB app on your phone or in a browser and CouchPotato will add these items to your wanted list.

Click Automation

For personal IMDB watchlist importing to work you will have to make your IMDB watchlist public.

The URL has this format http://www.imdb.com/user/urxxxxxxxx/watchlist that you should paste, remember to tick the box next to the URL

configure couchpotato automation imdb watchlist

Scroll down to the Automated section

You can have CouchPotato automatically add all new popular videos from IMDB that meet your criteria.

You can adjust the minimum rating, which year the content was released and so on.

configure couchpotato automation imdb import

It is now best to restart CouchPotato

In the top right click the Setting cog again and choose Restart

configure couchpotato click restart

Add CouchPotato Movies

Click the magnifying glass icon in the top right

configure couchpotato click search icon

Type in your video name, I am using Night of the Living Dead which is in the public domain.

If there are multiple video titles click the correct one

configure couchpotato add movie

Then it will change so you can choose the quality preference from the dropdown, click Add

configure couchpotato add movie click add

You will see a message saying it has been successfully added.

configure couchpotato movie added

In the bottom right hand corner you will get some messages that CouchPotato is searching for the content on your torrent trackers and then snatching it (downloading the torrent file) and passing it to your torrent client for downloading.

When it's done it will rename the file nicely and put it in your videos folder.

You can check the status of your movie list by clicking Wanted

The off green color means the video has been snatched and sent for downloading, once it has been renamed and processed it will turn a nice green color.

configure couchpotato wanted list

Enjoy your CouchPotato torrent system for automatically downloading videos.