Dave’s Rants

With Neil picking up on my mention of Bittorrent yesterday. I decided to do a little post on my Bittorrent + RSS setup.

I mentioned on Boards.ie a while back about how I’ve subscribed to a number of shows using Azureus and a couple of plugins. So basically I’m addicted to 24 and for the past two seasons of the show I’ve downloaded the episodes from the US ahead of their transmission here. This year things have become easier for me, with Bittorrent becoming a more mature technology.

Now it is possible to add a RSS Feed Scanner to your Azureus installation so that you can get it to download some shows automatically.

First as I said you need to install Azureus and add the RSS Feed Scanner plugin.

Once both are installed you add the BTEfnet feed to the RSS Feed plugin. The feed URL is http://www.btefnet.net/backend.php

Now comes the trickiest part, you need to add Filters to the RSS scanner. Most of it is self explanatory, but the tricky part is setting it up so it downloads some shows but not others. To set up the filters you need to use a RegEx. This is a method of matching text to a search string. It is very powerful but can also be very difficult to set up. The other day I found an amazing utility for checking whether you have a search string that works. It’s called the Regex Coach. It allows you to paste in a search string and also to paste in a sample that you may like to match. So in the case of an episode of Dr. Who, I pasted in a sample torrent link and compared that to the search string I was going to use. I’ve shown a sample of the program in action in the screenshot below. As you can see from the screenshot the string will match all episodes of the show regardless of the title of the episode.

So now you simply add this to your RSSFeed Scanner as shown in the next screenshot and that should be that!

Update (7/05/2005 20:30): In an unexpected move the latest version of Azureus has made life far far easier if you want to have a setup like this. The updated version of the RSSFeed reader even allows you to automatically create filters and to test them to see if they work!