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

Comments

[gogo]

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.

[nowalmart]

I gave Transmission a try about six months ago and found it was noticeably slower than Azureus (I first loaded a .torrent in Transmission, then reloaded it in Azureus).

I might give it another try, but since I want to load the BT client and then forget it, a CLI client might work better for me.

[singitsilent]

I second the transmission/tvshows remark.

[bigpeteb]

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=

[nowalmart]

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.

[bigpeteb]

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.)

[sheeep]

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]

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

[nowalmart]

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.