Hello
I just installed and setup Drone. I wanted to switch from SB/sickrage mainly for the Pneumatic downloader. A feature that comes handy in couchpotato for library integration in XBMC.
Problem is although I selected the pneumatic downloader under settings, the only thing that happens is Drone downloads all the NZBs and drops them in a folder. No .strm files are generated at all. As is, I can not tell what the difference between Blackhole and Pneumatic downloader is? Both seem to do the exact same thing.
Can someone please put me on the right track?
Looks like one setting in Pneumatic was overlooked when we converted to new settings for it.
I have a fix for this that will be in develop shortly, it will require one more folder to be set, which will temporarily store the strm files and drone will import them.
thx markus. looking forward to try it out!
markus. I just came home, updated dev and can report this works. thx a lot.
I have one minor problem though. as soon as I use the manual search after I have already downloaded a file with automatic search, a new .strm file gets created in the .strm folder but the “renamed” .strm file within the shows folder stays the same (links to the originally downloaded NZB). I can only get this .strm to update by deleting the old one manually either from within Drone or with Finder. As I want to use this together with xbmc it would be great to have this automated if possible -> whenever I switch to a manual search the .strm file gets updated correctly as well.
keep up the amazing work - this is great stuff!
To clarify, the new .strm is not moved and the old one says? Is the new .strm a better quality than the existing one? Drone still applies the same rules to .strm files as it would any other video file when it imports the .strm file.
to clarify: I snatch/download an episode via automatic search. the .strm file and all the support files (nfo etc.) get created in the season folder. so far so good. now the nzb doesn’t work for whatever reason. I open Drone and use manual search to select another one. problem is the .strm file still links to the old (not working) NZB file unless I manually delete the .strm file via finder from the folder. For drone the download of the NZB and creation of the .strm is a success while this isn’t necessarily true for me (the user) if the file doesn’t stream/unpack/play. you see my problem?
If I could whish for a pneumatic workflow in Drone it would look like this (I know this might be a lot of work though):
- add show
- grab the youngest available NZB that meets the quality requirements and create .strm and support files
- keep show on monitored (this might be necessary because of possible takedowns inbetween snatching and actually viewing)
- as soon as NZB with newer date is available (from rss) - grab it and overwrite the existing .strm (even if it is not better quality as long as it meets quality criteria overall)
- for a NZB that fails to play in pneumatic I don’t see a way without doing manual work in Drone - manually picking another release if available (maybe even of lower quality if nothing else is available) - this is unless you could grab all available NZB releases and pack them in a single .strm so that you get a selection popup when opening the .strm in xbmc - I have no idea if that is even possible.
I also saw that Drone doesn’t always pick the file with the youngest age if more of the same quality are available? but I have to verify this some more.
Are the nzbs named the same? New .strm files should point to the nzb associated with them, I’d have to look what happens if the names are the same.
Your wish would require a major rewrite, which is unlikely to ever happen given the low number of Pneumatic users and the odds of files disappearing, preventing the file from working at all.
I have to ask, why Pneumatic at all? Seems like a lot of work for the savings of some short-term disk space usage disk space (assuming watch then delete).
don’t worry too much about it - I know most people don’t care about the streaming solution 
why pneumatic? well we are a few people that use the same htpc with different profiles and watched statuses. altogether we are talking about a few thousand episodes worth of shows. that’s not just a little disk space but pretty much of it. we do unlimited download volume on ISP and Usenet but not diskspace. so it seemed convenient to just stream what you want to watch, with practically no waiting time for the download (thanks to pneumatic)
so you don’t have to decide time ahead of what to watch to download it first and still have a full library of shows at hand to stream from. that’s pretty much what genesis plugin from xbmchub does with fileshosters and it works perfectly and with trakt integration. only donwside is filehosters nearly never provide surround sound and often times reduce quality to safe bandwith. I’m thinking of a solution for that for some time now.
the ideal solution would probably be a browser plugin for trakt that is connected to your newznab providers and sabnzb. just open your profile select show/movie/episode from your collection or watchlist, plugin then does a live search on indexers, you choose your link and send it to sabnzbd. click play in pneumatic - done.
if only I was able to code it 
nevertheless drone is a very nice piece of software. you are doing a great job with it.
Maybe I can deposit a feature request here for you to consider when time allows which should be much easier to implement that would make the drone experience a little better for streamers:
- “disable monitoring at all” option - let user just pick release manually
- some kind of a “watched status” for show/season/episode that can be set manually (or when trakt integration will be active pulled from there) - I want to know where I stopped watching for each show
- and related to the last point: send a trakt api post show/episode/seen for each episode that gets either sent to sabnzbd or marked watched manually within Drone (I know people have different ways of organizing their list in trakt so maybe user can decide which notification he wants to send to trakt api)
If this was possible I could just skip the xbmc library at all and manage from drone itself via browser. as soon as the file starts to be downloaded in SABnzbd I only have to grab it in xbmc with pneumatic.
please let me know if you see a chance that this could be happening in the near future?
thx again