nowalmart ([personal profile] nowalmart) wrote2008-08-28 08:59 am
Entry tags:

On downloading television shows...

I have been without a television for several months now, so I have resorted to downloading episodes of shows I want to see. In the past I used Azureus and its RSS handling abilities. As the program has grown into the Vuze monstrosity, I have been moving over to other things if possible.

The first step was moving to an RSS downloader to automatically download .torrent files. With minimal work I got RSSDler working. Great, so now I have a folder full of .torrent files.

I tried several command-line BitTorrent clients, but I either could not get them installed or could not get them working effectively. rTorrent looks the most promising, but I never could get it to work. I will have to give it another try soon. The other option would be cTorrent, although I am not sure cTorrent supports a watch-folder, so a little more work would have to go into getting that to work.

In the meantime I have continued to use Azureus, set to watch the folder RSSDler is downloading to. It works, but moving to a non-GUI client would be nice.

[identity profile] bigpeteb.livejournal.com 2008-08-28 06:48 pm (UTC)(link)
rTorrent is amazing, especially now that it includes support for DHT. It's become my standard client because I can run it inside screen(1) on my dvr, whch lets me control it remotely just by sshing in.

I've never run it on a Mac, but I really recommend trying to get it working, because it's a very good client.

And with a bit of Googling, here's some code that would make it watch a directory and automatically start/stop torrents that appear in the directory. (Put in your .rtorrent.rc.):
# Watch a directory for new torrents, and stop those that have been
# deleted.
#schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent
#schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=/home/[user]/watch/*.torrent
schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
schedule = tied_directory,5,5,start_tied=

[identity profile] nowalmart.livejournal.com 2008-08-28 11:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I am not sure what happened when last I tried rTorrent. I think it shot to 99% CPU usage and became unresponsive each time. The documentation for the .rtorrent.rc file was really poor, so it might have been my problem with a faulty .rc file.

I will give it another try after I move.

[identity profile] bigpeteb.livejournal.com 2008-08-29 03:26 am (UTC)(link)
Try it without a .rc file first, which is how I run it. (Typically I start it once when I boot the machine and leave it running; I don't do any directory watch kind of stuff.)