On downloading television shows...

[nowalmart]

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.

Comments

[sheeep.livejournal.com]

I love rtorrent.. but I just run it on an old linux machine. Sometimes it freezes, but I always launch it from the command line and it tells me exactly where it failed. Yea.. and you have to setup the config file to get it to watch a directory. I've also heard some good things about Deluge, it uses rss, but I'm not sure if it's command line.

So.. I'm totally stuck trying to setup my rssdler. What kind of rss feeds have you gotten to work with it? I've tried ones with the .torrent attached, linked.. everything and I can't get it to work. An example of one of yours would be awesome if you still use the program.

[nowalmart.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I definitely still use RSSdler. It gets the job done nice and easily.

Below is my config.txt. It shows two example feeds, one from a fansite and one from TVrss.net.

Note that I just have a RSSdler folder in my home directory (as you can see from the first two variables set). As a result RSSdler gets called from launchd Launch Agent (you can just use a crontab entry) using this command:

/usr/local/bin/rssdler -r -c /Users/NAME/Library/Scripts/rssdler/config.txt

And now on to the config.txt file referenced above.

# lines (like this one) starting with # are comments and 
# will be ignored by the config parser
# the only required section (though the program won't do much without others)
# sections are denoted by a line starting with [
# then the name of the section, then ending with ]
# so this is the global section
[global]
# download files to this directory. Defaults to the working directory.
downloadDir = /Users/NAME/Downloads/torrents

# makes this the 'working directory' of RSSDler. anytime you specify a filename
# without an absolute path, it will be relative to this 
workingDir = /Users/NAME/Library/Scripts/rssdler

# if a file is smaller than this, it will not be downloaded. 
# if filesize cannot be determined, this is ignored. 
# Specified in MB. Remember 1024 MB == 1GB
# 0 means no minimum, as does "None" (w/o the quotes)
minSize = 0

# if a file is larger than this, it will not be downloaded.  Default is None
# though this line is ignored because it starts with a #
# maxSize = None

# write messages to a log file. 0 is off, 1 is just error messages, 
# 3 tells you when yo download something, 5 is very, very wordy. (default = 0)
log = 2
# where to write those log messages (default 'downloads.log')
logFile = downloads.log

# like log, only prints to the screen (errors to stderr, other to stdout)
# default 3
verbose = 0

# the place where a cookie file can be found. Default None.
# cookieFile =

# type of cookie file to be found at above location. default MozillaCookieJar
cookieType = MozillaCookieJar
# other possible types are:
# cookieType = LWPCookieJar
# only works if urllib = False
# cookieType = MSIECookieJar

#how long to wait between checking feeds (in minutes). Default 15.
scanMins = 120

# how long to wait between http requests (in seconds). Default 0
sleepTime = 2

# to exit after scanning all the feeds, or to keep looping. Default False.
runOnce = False

# set to true to avoid having to install mechanize. 
# side effects described in help. Default False.
urllib = True

# the rest of the global options are described in the help,
# let's move on to a thread

###################
# each section represents a feed, except for the one called global. 
# this is the thread: topgear
###################
[topgear]
# just link to the feed
link = http://feeds.feedburner.com/finalgeartorrents

# Default None, defers to maxSize in global, otherwise,
# files larger than this size (in MB) will not be downloaded
# only applies to the specific thread
# if set to 0, means no maximum and overrides global option
maxSize = 0

# like maxSize, only file smaller than this will not be downloaded
# if set to 0, means no minimum, like maxSize. in MB.
minSize = 0

###################
# this is the thread: greys
###################
[greys]
# just link to the feed
link = http://tvrss.net/search/index.php?distribution_group=combined&show_name=Greys+Anatomy&show_name_exact=true&filename=&date=&quality=720P&release_group=&mode=rss

# Default None, defers to maxSize in global, otherwise,
# files larger than this size (in MB) will not be downloaded
# only applies to the specific thread
# if set to 0, means no maximum and overrides global option
maxSize = 0

# like maxSize, only file smaller than this will not be downloaded
# if set to 0, means no minimum, like maxSize. in MB.
minSize = 0

[nowalmart.livejournal.com]

I suppose the one thing that was not immediately clear (but now makes sense) is that minSize and maxSize both check the size of the file the .torrent is distributing, not the size of the actual .torrent file itself.

If you set maxSize too small (thinking "I just want to download the .torrent file"), RSSdler will never download anything.