SickBeard is a PVR for newsgroup users (with limited torrent support). It watches for new episodes of your favourite shows and when they are posted it downloads them, sorts and renames them, and optionally generates metadata for them. SickBeard can be run as a Windows Service using FireDaemon Pro, which allows you to have the application start automatically at boot prior to login, start multiple instances of the application and more. This HOWTO will show you how to set it up. You can also use FireDaemon Fusion to manage FireDaemon and other Windows services via a web browser.

SickBeard Setup Under FireDaemon Pro

Download the latest SickBeard files from here.

Extract the download somewhere on your hard drive. For the purposes of this HOWTO, we will be using C:\SickBeard-win32-alpha-build500. The folder name will look different when a new version is released or if you choose another directory.

Download and install FireDaemon Pro into the directory of your choice, typically C:\Program Files\FireDaemon.

Next start the FireDaemon GUI from the desktop shortcut. Click on the "Create a new service definition" button in the toolbar (or type Ctrl+N) and enter the information into the fields as you see below. Adjust the paths to suit your installation.

Now click on the Settings tab. If you DON'T want to see your SickBeard console running, uncheck the Interact with Desktop check box & select “Hidden” from the “Show Window” dropdown. You can optionally run SickBeard as the user you installed it as. You can change the Process Priority to allocate more CPU time to SickBeard or specify which CPU or core SickBeard will run on (in the case of multi-processor, hyperthreaded or multi-core CPUs). You must change the "Job Type" to "Global Job", otherwise when the SickBeard is restarted, any child processes will not be terminated properly.

Now click on the OK button to finish setup and start SickBeard. Open a browser window and go to:

http://localhost:8081/