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

[gogo.livejournal.com]

I can't recommend any CLI torrent apps, but Transmission works much better (and is much lighter) than Azureus. Also, look up TVShows for snagging torrents of specific shows.

[bigpeteb.livejournal.com]

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=

[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.