SpearNZB

L Fixes date parsing error with NZBClub

Fixes error when items are not found on NZBClub

Only updates TVDB database once a day. When a series is being updated on TheTVDB it can be marked as updated various times. If we only update once a day this will mean we will usually update the information only once and not with each episode search.

If an episode air date is greater than seven days and the episode is not found it is marked as downloaded to avoid searching in the future.

This fixes an issue where shows are selected to downloaded that aren't available, plus lots of episodes that won't exist. DVD extras, Web Episodes are usually marked as season zero. Every unfound search on NZB Matrix takes a minute due to their API waiting 30 seconds between calls. 

Known issues. 

Have multiple search selections that are no longer valid (SpearNZB search, TVNZB) can't remove them due to crashing the database if they are in use. 

Just a quick update to handle when invalid XML is returned from TheTVDB via Asian characters in this case. 

It has been a couple of weeks of a lot of changes in the NZB world.

First the usefulness of Newzbin has been greatly reduced, and second NZBMatrix has updated their API due to performance issues. 

Their API is being used to the point of slowing down their site, so they did a quick change to reduce the API load. 

Only 1 query is allowed every 60 seconds. SpearNZB will go through a list of download candidates and search NZBMatrix one a time, downloading the ones that it finds. 

This is not bad in the sense that you download maybe five episodes a day and they are found. But if select every season of Cheers and it is not available with the hope that some day it will be, this could cause 192 queries per hour. And that is only one series and one user.

I don't know if that is actually happening, but it could, which means that I need to address it.

I have also noticed my cost on my own database usage has tripled in the last month, so the querying of new episodes needs to be allot more efficient. 

In the mean time you might have noticed that only one episode is being download per search due to this issue.

I'm working on a solution, but the API works the way that it does. 

One idea is to only search for one show, download it and then search again. Still not a perfect solution because if it isn't found you still need to wait 60 seconds to search for the next one. 

Kraig.....

Hello SpearNZB Users

The updates keep coming. This version has some updated libraries, and some small tweaks from user request. 

1. Updated synth library

2. Option to hide alerts. Alerts can be annoying if your watching something and SpearNZB decides to notify you of downloaded content. Suggestion was to use Growl, but since this runs on Windows as well not an option at this time.

3. Fix for shows not in the database. If a series is not in the the database it can't be added. All shows listed from TVRage (US) Prime Time are added automatically. If another series not added via TVRage an error occurred. Fixed.

4. Not able to change look and feel. Fixed.

5. Various fixes with the SpearNZB episode search. This is the search that uses it's own database. Not Newsbin or NZBMatrix.

http://nzbmatrix.com/forums.php?action=viewtopic&topicid=25865&page=1

And speaking of that, NZBMatrix started to refuse connections and now is not returning from queries. 

Hopefully this is a glitch that is being fixed. 

Maybe checking for shows every hour is taxing their system, so it's possible that I need to get smarter about how often episodes are checked. Or maybe it has nothing to do with SpearNZB.....

Over the last few weeks since the last version I've been going over database updating. 

Version 1.1.0 also moved where settings are located which resulted in a few bugs which are fixed in 1.1.1

Look and Feel along with Copy Videos to where not working. 

One major bug was the app not starting up due to zero getting placed in the check interval setting. Thanks to the SpearNZB user who helped in fixing this. 

One known issue are shows that air two episodes in one night (The Office, Smallville ext..) When this happens TheTVDB is usually wrong, which causes SpearNZB not to update. Probably minor in that it's usually fixed the next day, but TVRage is usually correct so possibly I can work around it. 

I think that SpearNZB is pretty stable in it's current state, so I'm more experimenting on using a web browser and video playback in the application. 

The sales of SpearNZB has been great and thanks to all of the license users. 

Thanks again,

Kraig

Version 1.1 of SpearNZB is mostly about databases and bug fixes. 

About a month ago TheTVDB was going up and down on a daily basis. More and more web sites and applications are relying on their great service and they are also in the process of moving to other technologies. 

Since this application relies so heavily on their database I started to think about how I decouple SpearNZB from them. If they decided one day to shutdown, or they revoked the key used to connect with their service, I would have allot of upset users. 

On top of this was the fact that the information is provided by the community and so if a volunteer doesn't add the show information, then it will not get downloaded. 

The answer seemed to be adding TV show information to the SpearNZB database. Currently this database gets information from both TheTVDB and TVRage. The idea is getting the best of both worlds. If there is another source to draw on in the future that can also be done without changing the application. 

This was quite a bit of work, and by using the application you shouldn't even know that it's happening. 

What's in the database at the moment are current series that are airing in the United States. If someone searches for a Series that is not yet in the database then it is added at the same time that it is added locally. 

Information is synced between TVRage and TheTVDB once a day. 

This also means that the load of SpearNZB on TheTVDB should be much lighter. Instead of every user synching every time they check for episode, it should only happen once a day on our server. 

I also want to encourage people to update TheTVDB, if you know that series that you are concerned about isn't getting updated on TheTVDB. Even though SpearNZB should still download, your media center won't update if it uses TheTVDB.

Java 6 Update 18

This version of Java has some changes that breaks Show Settings during downloading, and possibly other features. 

Windows Users might have noticed this, Update 18 is not available on the Mac currently. 

Bug Fixes / Changes

I can't say enough nice things about the users of SpearNZB. Everyone has been helpful in making it a successful project. 

Since the release of version 1 the question comes to mind on where to go from here. 

Some ideas. 

1. IPhone application. Allowing scheduling, RSS ext from the IPhone.

2. Integration into ITunes.

3. Movie search ability, similar to how Episode scheduling works. 

4. Add TVRage scraper. 

5. Online web page scheduling. Allow RSS selection and selecting an NZB file from a remote location. 

6. Show episodes downloaded in a media center kind of view and allow watching. 

Comment on these features or ask for your own. 

Thanks to all those who have purchased SpearNZB!!!! 

I hope that you find it useful, and look forward to enhancing it, making it the best NZB binary news reader on the market.

I'm constantly  blown away by the nice constructive feedback, that helps make this a better application. 

On that note there is a new version. Do I plan on doing a version every week? Not necessarily but I've made some improvements that I would like to get out there. 

1. No longer uses the working directory when downing the temp segment files. They are placed into the temp directory, decoded and placed in the working directory. This is done to avoid Spotlight from indexing these files.

2. Performance has been a thorn in my side, but it is now even better. Turn out it is not the downloading but updating the user interface that eats up much more of the CPU. 

Thanks to the registered :) user who found that with large (100's) of files in a NZB file that SpearNZB would grind to a halt. 

You might not have seen this, but if you have you should notice the number of files not affecting performance. 

You also can expect better performance with all downloads.

3. Put logging back in. Logging is either on or off. It is recommended leaving it off unless you are experiencing an issues that you would like addressed. Also this is not the same as the logs under the open menu. This is more for debugging purposes, that  generally you shouldn't be concerned with.

4. NZBMatrix now looking for both episode formats. Usually episodes on NZBMatrix are in the format s00e00. It was noticed with Top Gear the format ##x## was used. Now it searches for both, using the first as the primary. 

5. Show Monitor option placed in the Settings Dialog. Sorry for the confusion that most people were not able to find it, in the status bar. 

6.Fixed bug with problem files being re-downloaded from the watch directory. If a file could not be downloaded and repaired, it was downloaded again from the NZB Watch directory. 

Just a minor update today.

I noticed that on very large NZB files that there could be a very large slow down to where SpearNZB become unresponsive. 

This was not in the application code but in a build config setting. After changing this setting, I'm getting the same CPU usage (30-50% on 1 core).

This could have been the bug where over 100% CPU usage was reported. If so then hopefully it's the end of that problem. 

Happy Downloading,

Kraig

A few people have pointed out that the performance of SpearNZB could be better and I agree. I've noticed that downloading takes twice the CPU as say another product 'Unison'. I've spent allot of time trying different things, investing in profilers and the bottle neck seems to be in the Java runtime.

The reason why this seems to be so, is that the code that takes 95% of the CPU during download is the line to read from the network stream. There are different ways that this can be done, buffer sizes ext and it doesn't seem to make a difference. 

My experience however is that this doesn't cause myself as a user of SpearNZB much if any inconvenience. 

My media computer is a three year old PC running Vista with 2 Gigs of RAM, so not top of the line by any means. It is very common to be downloading at full speed (8 to 20 megabit) and watch a High res TV Show or movie via XBMC without noticeable side affects (Jerky Video, pauses ext...) Even during unraring/copying. 

If you can watch a high res video and download at 8 Megabit without any issues, then it would seem that you could surf the web, do email at the same time or whatever else. 

Now to be fair, the faster the download the more resources will be used, so at 50 Megabit this might not be true. I don't know because I can't test that. 

The screen shot below shows typical resource usage on my development machine (IMac 2.4 Intel Cure 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM)

At the beginning of a download CPU usage can go up to 120% (50% per CPU) and then stable out at around 30%. It does jump up to 50% depending on what it's doing, but 30-40 should be the average. 

Hopefully for most people this is acceptable. If not check in every so often, you never know....