Couchpotato

Couch potato is a colloquial term for a person who spends a large portion of their free time seated on a couch, watching television, streaming movies and shows, or playing video games. The phrase conveys a sedentary lifestyle and is commonly used in casual speech and popular culture to poke fun at excessive leisure. The term is widely understood in English-speaking countries and has appeared in various media since the late 20th century.

CouchPotato, often written with a capital P in the middle, is the name of an open-source software project that automates the process of downloading and organizing movie files. Built primarily for use on personal computers, it is written in Python and provides a web-based interface. The software integrates with download clients and indexers, and allows users to specify quality targets, languages, and a watch list of movies. When a release matching the criteria is found, CouchPotato can fetch, rename, and move the file into a local media library.

Development began in the early 2010s and was sustained by a community of volunteers. Over time, official updates slowed, and the project has been largely superseded by forks and alternative tools that perform similar tasks. In the contemporary media-automation ecosystem, users often migrate to newer projects that provide ongoing maintenance and modern integrations with media servers and streaming platforms.

See also: media automation, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, and related tools.