TELEVISION AND MOVIE STREAMING MADE EASY

Cord Cutter makes it easy to build your own personal video server. Share content with every screen in your home!

Cord Cutter is an easy-to-install integrated video download manager and streaming system.

It is composed of several best-of-breed open-source software components all designed to work nicely together.

And did we mention it's free?

INSTALLATION

Cord Cutter has been designed for and tested against Debian, Ubuntu, and Raspbian. Installation is intended to be performed on a fresh system although efforts have been made to minimize the number of system-wide changes made by Cord Cutter (see below).

After installing your OS, copy the setup script into a folder. You will also need a working OpenVPN configuration file (or files). Place these in the same folder as setup.sh. Once everything is in place, run setup.sh as root or using sudo. There are no options. It either works, or you'll receive a message describing what went wrong.

If your OpenVPN configuration file references other files, they will be copied along with the ovpn file... unless they are referenced using path names. In this case, they will be left alone for you to manage.

UPGRADING / CHANGING VPNs

To upgrade to a new release, simply download the new setup.sh and run it. If you wish to change VPN providers, place the new configuration files next to setup.sh and run it again.

CHANGES MADE

The setup script places everything in /opt/cordcutter. It will check your system for needed packages and install anything missing. Aside from a few system packages, everything will be downloaded and placed into /opt/cordcutter.

NOTE: If you already have 'transmission-daemon' or 'monit' installed, they will be removed from the normal system startup every time you run setup.sh.

USER DATA

Everything created by the various components of Cord Cutter is stored under /opt/cordcutter/data. This is the only folder you need to back up if you wish to migrate to a new system. Anything you edit under the data folder will be left alone by setup.sh. Changes made to anything outside this folder are likely to be lost the next time setup.sh is run.

MOVING USER DATA

You can move the user data folder to a network share or another drive using network mounts or symlinks. If you decide to relocate the data folder, be sure the Monit.conf file remains mode 700 (chmod 700 Monit.conf) and process.sh remains executable (chmod +x process.sh).

WARNING

A script named stop.sh is provided along with start.sh. Be careful with stop.sh - it will tear down the firewall after it attempts to stop all the scripts. If a torrent is running at this time and transmission-daemon fails to stop, you may leak data outside the VPN. Under normal use, stop.sh is never called. It is provided for troubleshooting only.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Should something not work properly, every component of Cord Cutter generates a log file in the corresponding folder under the data directory. The contents of these logs should be enough to help figure out what the problem is or to provide more details to assist when asking for help.