Since I never heard of Sickbeard, sabnzbd, or Astraweb, I figured I’d do a little research, and post my (Score: 5 Informative?) findings here. Please correct me if I made any mistakes….
Sickbeard is an open source, GPL licensed Python application (so runs on Windows and Linux and other platforms), that watches newsgroups, looking for announcements of TV shows whose torrents have been put on the web. In Sickbeard, the user can specify which shows he is interested in, and it keeps an eye out for those shows. Once it finds shows that the user has specified, it can queue up a retrieval program, but Sickbeard doesn’t retrieve them itself.
Sickbeard will request the show from sabnzbd. Sabnzbd is also open source, Python. Its function is to go retrieve binaries from newsgroups. So it seems to me that the newsgroups have both the announcement of the availability of a TV program (like a torrent tracker), and the actual program. Sickbeard is watching the announcements, and Sabnzbd is grabbing the program.
Astraweb is a newsgroup website that apparently allows you to download newsgroup posts. This is a paid service, and the parent post signed up for a $25 service for 180GB of downloads. Based on my MythTV experience, I’m guessing this might be 180 half hours of TV (please correct this number if I am off!).
So for $25 plus 2 free open source programs, I can have almost 200 half-hour programs that I can watch anytime (starting a few minutes after they air). Interesting!
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