Sunday, April 26, 2009

How To Use RSS Feeds To Download Torrents Automatically



There is a lot of content available on BitTorrent these days. Normally you would go to a torrent site, look for the torrent you want to download, download the torrent file and then add it to your torrent client for download. You can automate this process by using RSS and µTorrent (or any other torrent client with RSS support).

So, how to download torrents automatically:



First and foremost you will need µTorrent. You can download it from here.

RSS if you still don’t know is a way to keep track of when your favorite site has been updated with new content. Using something called a feedreader you can get these updates delivered to you. Now whenever a new torrent is added, the torrent sites would update listing it and thus the new torrent would appear in the RSS feed. We can use this RSS feed to view/download interesting torrents automatically

Get the right Feed

So how can you find a feed listing only the torrents you want to download? After all the torrent sites would show every new torrent file in its feed and you couldn’t be downloading them all. Well as it turns out, a lot of torrent sites provide several RSS feeds and ability to create your own feeds as well.

how-to-download-torrents-automatically

Lets look at mininova for example. Apart from separate feeds for different categories you can also get feeds for your searches. Let’s say you are looking for releases by aXXo, so you search for aXXo and then click on the RSS button that appears on the top and there you have your RSS feed. You might want to refine your search to get the results you want. Now whenever there is a new aXXo release, you will get notified and/or can start download automatically. You can use the same approach to get feeds for TV Torrents. Also check out tvRSS for the same.

Setup µTorrent

Now its time to set up µTorrent to take the feed you have created/searched and do its thing! Follow these steps to setup µTorrent the way you want:

  1. Grab the feed url and open µTorrent
  2. Click on Add RSS feed and paste the put in the feed URL. You can choose to automatically download all the torrents that appear in the feed or just view them and then decide which ones to download and which ones to skip.
  3. auto download torrent

  4. Make sure you have the sidebar visible else you will not be able to view the feeds.
  5. There you have µTorrent setup for downloading via RSS, you can stop here or you can take it one step further by adding filters to download only specific files that specify a set criteria.
  6. Right Click on the feed and choose RSS Downloader, Click on add and then specify the filter options. You can specify all kinds of options here including download folder, labels, specify episode numbers to download, the priority to start the download with, the acceptable filetypes and much more.
  7. You can also right click on a feed entry that and choose “Add to Favorites” so that you can then filter entries similar to it and tweak the settings if you would like a bit of finetuning.

You might be wondering why not just use something like Miro or TED to download torrents automatically? That’s because I am a huge fan of µTorrent and would recommend it highly. Lightweight, feature rich, an awesome web interface for remotely starting downloads, set out to do one thing - “BitTorrent” and does it best. Your views may differ, make them heard! Shoot them in the comments section!



By Varun Kashyap
source : makeuseof.com

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