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

[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