RSS + Bittorrent + Xbmc == Bliss
I wanted to take a second and explain exactly how I’m using RSS and Bittorrent to download the television shows I watch, otherwise known as broadcatching. I use a combination of Azureus & an RSS plugin to download the shows, and Xbox Media Center to watch them. My current setup consists of a PC running Suse 9.2 that is strictly used as my Media Server. It has two storage drives, one for movies and one for tv seasons/episodes. All of my content is kept on this computer. I have an Xbox running Xbox Media Center downstairs in my living room and another one in my bedroom. Both Xboxs play the content off of my Media Server through SMB shares. All of my content is centrally located and accessible from each television in my home. No media is needed, and no media is used. Between this and my iPods, I don’t use media anymore, just mass storage. All of my DVDs serve as backups after I rip them into my Media Server.
So lets get on with it.
Safe Keeping
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First off, I’d like to go into some detail about the directory structure I use for my setup. I have an entire 100 gig drive dedicated to television in my Media Server. At the root of the drive I have three directories. Downloading, Torrents, and TV. The Downloading folder is my default download folder for Azureus. The Torrents folder is where I have told Azureus to put all the torrent files it captures. And my TV folder contains everything that I actually share to my Xbmc. )
It contains three folders. Full Seasons, Now Playing, and Specials. Full Seasons contains folders for each show that I archive. Now Playing is where all my new shows get moved to once they are done downloading. Once I’ve watched them, I archive them to Full Seasons. Specials contains random shows and content that are not affiliated to any kind of series.
A Few Options
There are 2 RSS plugins for Azureus. The one I use isn’t available for download for some reason. And the one that IS available stinks, so I’m going to provide you guys with the plugin I use.
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After installing Azureus there are a couple options I set to make my system more user friendly. Open up the options and choose Files. From here I set the default download directory. All files that are downloaded to this directory will be moved to another directory once completed, if the option is set. Next, I set the directory for Move Completed Files To. )
The reason I use these options is for usability. When sharing to my Xbmc, the directories Now Playing and Full Seasons are both available. I set my Move Completed Files To directory to the Now Playing directory inside my TV share, and the default download directory is the Download folder outside of my share at the root of the drive. The point of all of this is so my incomplete televisions shows are not available until properly completed. What happens is that Azureus begins to download a show and puts it into Downloads, once its done, it gets moved to Now Playing, and is then available to my Xbmc.
Usability Sidenote
Each show can be set to download to its own directory, but I like to seperate my new content from my old content. By creating a Now Playing directory, I know that everything inside of this folder is new. Inside my Full Seasons folder I have a folder for each show that I archive. So instead of having to check each folder for new content, I only have to check one. Once I’ve watched the shows inside of Now Playing, they’re old and I manually archive them into the Full Seasons folder.
Feeds and Seeds
Once I have Azureus setup and the RSS plugin installed, I choose RSSfeed from the Plugins menu. This will bring up a tab dedicated to the plugin. I choose this tab and it will display multiple tabs below it: Status, Options, Download History, and Help.
- Status - Lists the RSS feeds and their respective items
- Options - The meat and potatoes of the plugin. Here is where shows and feeds are added.
- Download History - This pane will show all of the shows that have been picked from the feeds to download.
- Help - This gives a little info on what RSS feeds are and how to use this plugin.
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First let’s go to the Options tab and add an RSS feed. Feeds can be added from any torrent site that I’d like, and as many as I want. I add a feed by clicking the Plus button. This prompts me for a few options on the right. I name my feed, set the URL for the feed, and set the path for where shows pulled from this feed will be downloaded. Here I choose the same place I set as the default download directory. That way, when shows are downloaded to this directory and completed, they will be moved. Next I choose accept and my feed is set up and saved.
Time to add some shows to download. The RSS feed plugin uses Regular Expressions to search each feed for the shows I am looking for. Regular Expressions can be tough to wrap your head around, but I’ll keep it really simple, and you’ll just need to use about one type to get the shows.
By clicking the Plus button, I add a new filter. There are quite a few options I am able to set here, but I’m going to just go over the ones that are important.
Name: Set the name of the filter, I like to just use the name of the show.
Directory: I leave this blank and the download directory will be inherited from the feed the show is downloaded from.
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Filters: Here is where I add the regular expression to use to search the feed for this particular show. Basically, all I do here is place the name of the show into this field. The plugin then searches each item in the RSS feed for this name, and if it contains it, it will download the torrent and start the download. If the show has more than one word, I place the characters “.*” in between the first and last words. For example, Will & Grace (will.*grace). What this does is tell the RSS feed plugin to find an item in the feed that starts with will and ends with grace, with anything else in between it. So it is able to find Will & Grace. If an item in the feed happens to be something like Will Builds a House For Grace this too will be downloaded, but there isn’t much of a chance that this will happen. You may find that some shows’ words will overlap as is the case for Mr. Las Vegas and Las Vegas, I will correct this later with excludes.
Feed: Choose the feed to use while searching for this show.
Active: Check this box to make this filter active.
Mode: Set this to pass.
Choose accept and the show is now added.
No, Not You
Now that I have added a show, I want to assure I don’t download extra shows, or the wrong format. One of the best features of this plugin is that it allows you to set a Pass or Fail flag for each filter. So if I add a filter and set it to Pass, it will be downloaded, if its set to Fail, it will be skiped. This comes in handy with VCD or HDTV rips. Instead of searching specifically for HDTV rips for each show, I have instead excluded all VCD rips. By having a whole filter named No VCD that searches for the word “vcd” and mode set to Fail, the plugin reaches an item in the feed that matches this filter and skips it. This keeps it from downloading any vcd rips. The only thing left is HDTV rips.
Excludes also work well when TV shows’ names overlap. In the case I explained earlier, there is a show called Las Vegas as well as Mr. Las Vegas, I added a Pass filter for Las Vegas(las.*vegas), but had to add a Fail filter for Mr. Las Vegas(mr.*las). One last Fail filter I’ve added is to keep Azureus from downloading full seasons of shows I have set to download.
FINISHING UP
Now that my directories are setup, my shows are added, and my excludes are in place, I’m pretty much finished with the configuration. Now all I have to do is wait. Azureus will check the feed every 60 mins, and as soon as my shows wind up in the feed, the torrent file will be downloaded and automatically started. It will be placed into my default download directory, and once finished, will be moved to my Now Playing directory.
Xbmc
Now this is the key element in the setup. Since the best quality formats are distributed in the Mpeg-4 variant Xvid codec, the only thing that can play it in the house is my computer right? Nope, enter Xbox Media Center. I’m not going to go into huge detail on Xbmc, you can look that up your self. Its the best device you can have in your entertainment center, and its really the missing link in this entire setup. Sure I can download all my shows without it, but who wants to watch all their Tv on their computer. Not me. With Xbmc in the equation, all my downloading happens on my Media Server and is totally transparent to me. I just kick on my Xbmc and navigate to my Tv section and check the Now Playing folder. Bam…there are all my new shows. If I want to watch an older show, I go to the Full Seasons folder, and browse for something to watch.
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So as you can see, this system can be a very powerful one. I’ve been using it for quite some time now, and its great. I love it. I’ve given up my Tivo for the great quality of these formats. You just can’t beat it.
Resources:
Azureus
RSS Feed Plugin
TvTorrents *new
TvTorrents
BtEfnet
Xbmc News
Xbmc
Well as you can see, a lot of the tv torrent sites are down. If you know of a good Tv Torrent site with an RSS feed, plesae leave it in the comments!
http://www.tv-torrents.org/
Comment by dsw — July 12, 2005 @ 11:08 am
ehhh, it hasn’t been updated in weeks though.
Comment by Jon — July 12, 2005 @ 12:53 pm
this site is good for Television Torrents, but NO RSS FEED!!!!!
Comment by Tip — July 12, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
http://bt-tv.net/
Comment by Tip — July 12, 2005 @ 12:57 pm
Well, a feed is the most important part. Hmm, depending on how consistant that site changes, i may be able to parse it and make my own feed.
Comment by Jon — July 12, 2005 @ 1:02 pm
I have a very similar setup, bittorrent downloads to XBMC to watch. I find that I am watching full seasons of shows like Scrubs or Arrested Development that i didnt get to watch when they first aired. It is much better to watch 3 22min epis in a row then watch one with commercials, its easier to follow the storylines and connect with the characters.
I have also watched shows like Dr Who and The Office UK version that i would have never watched if it wasnt for bittorent.
My only problem is what will I do when I am all caught up. Once Sept. rolls around and the new episodes start airing do I watch them live or download them and wait till i have a few before watching them. Its a nice problem to have!
Jon are you concerned about disk space? I want all the shows accessible all the time, so backing them up to dvd is fine for archive but I want more disk space without building another pc just for drive space.
Comment by ACE — July 12, 2005 @ 1:12 pm
I LOVE THE OFFICE! Yes, I too would never have watched that either, and its such a great show. I love getting a whole season at once as well, I did that with Lost and man, it was soooo much better watching them all in a row. I couldn’t stop watching. But for other shows I just let the system run, when, and if, i have time I’ll sit down and watch the shows I’ve marked.
As for space, as I noted in the post, I have a dedicated Media Server for all of this. Its just a pc running Suse LInux with tons of hard drives in it. I backup some stuff to dvd, but some i keep on the drives. I’ll never watch that stuff again I’m sure, I’m just a data pack rat.
Comment by Jon — July 12, 2005 @ 1:17 pm
I am a data pack rat also. I have my eye on Netgear Storage Central http://www.livedigitally.com/?p=166 but it hasnt been released yet. I want a solution where I can just add more drives, they are getting so cheap now.
Comment by ACE — July 12, 2005 @ 1:24 pm
Exact setup here :) except on my balcony I got a big tower, 3ware sata controller running raid 5… 3 300 GB Seagate drives, about 300 movies on there now and seinfeld and friends dvd seasons :) One problem with XBMC is that dvds with menus seem to crash it a lot… so I need to rip the movie after download it again and only have the movie without any extras that works perfectly…
ALSO one new big problem more and more movies are the 3ivx movies that our coming out great quality and supposedly XMBC 1.1 supports them but I cannot get them to play but they work on my pc… any ideas?
Comment by Bart — July 12, 2005 @ 6:13 pm
http://www.centraltracker.org/ and http://www.centraltracker.org/rss/ for the feed. tv-torrents.org actually feeds off of it.
Comment by Tom — July 12, 2005 @ 8:24 pm
Yeah there are no good torrent sites that I can find to get this working. I wish. I got www.torrentspy.com working but never get anything really good. Anyone got any good places to get this stuff? Not just TV, movies but everything!
Comment by Damien Benoit — July 12, 2005 @ 8:57 pm
This is a great idea. I have tried it before and it’s great. Not having any decent feeds sucks though. I always hear Kevin Rose talking about how he uses this and has ditched cable.. I’d love to know where he gets the shows from though. Oh well.. I guess I can still download the occasional show that I see…
Comment by BRODEL — July 12, 2005 @ 9:54 pm
http://www.blogdigger.com/media/torrent.xml works.
I have found a few feeds like http://www.tv-torrents.org/rss.xml that RSSFeed seems to like, but can’t actually get the torrent files listed on them. Anyone else have this problem?
Comment by Aaron — July 13, 2005 @ 12:43 am
Yeah the thing is, I set this stuff up so the filters are set to “All” in the Feed and I figured it would search all the sites I have listed which are tvtorrents torrentspy and mininova but sometimes when I check the status I see that some of those torrents that should fit my filters get past it and dont download. Now what the hell? I want a good updated TV Torrent site too but I cant seem to find any!
Comment by Damien Benoit — July 13, 2005 @ 6:35 am
Also, wanted to add… that it refreshes the RSS feeds every hour but what if I wanted it to do it every 15 or 20 minutes?
Comment by Damien Benoit — July 13, 2005 @ 7:12 am
Man this sucks, I will go refresh and see whats in the RSS feeds I have then go back and make a filter for it then refresh and see the stuff is there but it doesn’t download.
Comment by Damien Benoit — July 13, 2005 @ 7:15 am
http://www.eztvefnet.org/
It has some sort of silly IRC RSS brew going on their. Its the only TV+BT+RSS solution out there right now.
Right now is a dark period for BT, but I’m sure things will get better. At least I have my PVR to fall back on.
Comment by Andrew Escobar — July 14, 2005 @ 12:10 am
Here’s the site for the RSS Feed Scanner plugin.
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=rssfeed
Comment by edu — July 14, 2005 @ 5:37 pm
try isoHunt.com
Search using their box, then you can get the RSS of the results.
Comment by Evan — July 22, 2005 @ 3:07 pm
I been trying to download xbmc off of bit torrent and edonkey with no luck i even desided i going to compile my own but i am having just as much trouble finding the xbox compiling stuff.. any help??
Comment by mike — July 27, 2005 @ 4:44 am
XMBC can be found at the “usual places”
ok, so for those who don’t know, go to #xbins in IRC
Comment by dcemuser — July 28, 2005 @ 5:55 pm
And have an FTP client :D
Comment by dcemuser — July 28, 2005 @ 5:56 pm
What software do you recommend for ripping DVDs?
Comment by wicz — October 21, 2005 @ 9:21 am
on windows, autoGK is the all time hands down winner, it just rocks. But thats for transcoding it to Xvid. YOu still need something to rip the dvd to the hard drive. Theres lots out there and they all do the same thing, there isn’t much difference in them. All its doing is decrypting and copying to the hard drive.
I’m not too happy with any transcoders on Os x or linux. if anyone has any suggestions beyond DVD:RIP for linux, post em!
Comment by Jon — October 21, 2005 @ 9:27 am
This guide is awesome. Just completed setting up my system. But I have one question. I really like the [eztv] releases since they are avi and not rar or rm. But as I understand “Regular Expressions” everything in brackets is discarded. So if I set the plugin to download “South Park.*[eztv]” (since they start with South Park and end with [eztv]), it will grap anything called South Park. What should i type to get it to get the correct releases?
Comment by Lasborg — December 8, 2005 @ 1:56 am
check it out.. go use the feed at http://tvtorrent.info
All of those are xvids, none are rared up. that should solve your problems completely.
Comment by Jon — December 8, 2005 @ 2:02 am
Thanks a lot, thou i think you the right link is http://www.tvtorrent.info/ the other one was very strange. But i found it anyway. Thanks Jon
Comment by Lasborg — December 8, 2005 @ 2:23 am
The latest version of utorrent now supports RSS feeds directly in the client.
It also adds the ability to use a .!ut extension for incomplete files so that XBMC doesn’t see them :)
Now with the eztv feed, and utorrent.. I have the world greatest PVR.
uTorrent
http://www utorrent.com
EZTV (best group)
http://tvrss.net/sources/eztv_m/
VTV
http://tvrss.net/sources/vtv/
Comment by camson — January 17, 2006 @ 10:21 pm
when my scanner runs, all it does is “Search x/46…” where x= any number between 1-34. nothing ever downloads. any idea what’s going on? if it matters, which i dont’ think it does, i’m running os 10.4.4 with the newest version of Azureus.
Comment by nick — February 11, 2006 @ 4:53 am
use ted! it searches for new episodes of tv shows that you like and opens them in your favourite bittorrent client.
check http://www.ted.nu/
Comment by roel — February 16, 2006 @ 5:38 am
I also have problems with Azureus stuck in “Search x/46…” and nothing ever downloads. If someone has a solution, please place a comment here.
Comment by Cyche — February 19, 2006 @ 8:28 am
OK found the solution, uncheck the box that says “use URL as referer.”
Read this on http://tvrss.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9
Comment by Cyche — February 19, 2006 @ 8:35 am
I have a similar setup using utorrent.. I also built a macro executable that prioritizes eps 1-3 as high, 4-10 as normal, 11- as low in the beginning, and scans for completes then reprioritizes.. This is convenient when downloading whole seasons if you want to start watching sooner..
A good source for xbmc builds with extras is www.xbox-sky.org.. Its a private torrent site if you are worthy of maintaining a ratio..:)
Lastly, I have a pretty much completed bittorrent python script for xbmc that I have successfully used in the same manner, however due to 64MB of ram in xbmc its performance usually doesn’t match the pc.. (I also need to create a gui, support multifile torrents, and am currently porting a newer core shadow exp into its core.. Multiple torrents is a slight possibility, but I doubt performance would be great.)
Lastly, I am working on a script that will do a similar rss scan for newer xbmc builds and download/extract > import current scripts, trainers, script menu > install as an app to allow testing incase of skin changes that crash stuff with a settings backup > then installs over previous build as either dash/app..
I’ll post back when things are more bug free.
Comment by triggernum5 — February 19, 2006 @ 11:27 am
I came to a compromise for the time being.. I can now handle multi-file torrents, but one file at a time.. xbmc seems to freeze often with all the file handles open in a single instance of the bittorrent script, yet I can run multiple instances and download multiple torrents.. With the new core I’m pulling great speeds too.. (Over 350KB/s over 3 torrents).. I can be reached at triggernum5@gmail.com if you’re interested in a WIP setup that doesn’t even rely on owning a pc, router, or xover cable..
Comment by triggernum5 — February 19, 2006 @ 5:40 pm
Honestly, I gotta tell you that I’m not interested. I prefer to have a main Media Server that does all my work. None of my content is on my Xboxs. They are merely a frontend to play all of my media.
But keep working on that, theres lots of people that would love it. Good Work.
Comment by Jon — February 19, 2006 @ 8:35 pm
Honestly I do too.. I have a .67 bios so I dedicate my 23GB G:\ on my 160GB to video/misc.. Reason being, there is no defragmentor for xbox, and its easier to wip 23GB than 130GB should things go bad.. This setup was supposed to be a proof of concept for myself, (well that and a secondary solution..) (I also have a full copy of my webserver in xDSL, and a specialized 404 on my router, and in xbmc’s webserver, so as long as I have internet I can be running..)
I’ve actually been using it lately since I can now grab torrents from most RSS feeds through another script, and got pysmb working so I can connect to torrents on my pc share. But I imagine that will fade as I leave ‘dev mode’..:)
A scary thought thats been running through my head today is an SMB server script in python.. I doubt its feasible for my puny programming skills, but I’d kill to have my xbox in Network Neighborhood
Comment by triggernum5 — February 21, 2006 @ 9:59 am
I believe there are some tutorials on mapping your xbox to your network in windows. But in the end, just ftp’ing to the xbox isn’t too big of a deal. Also, copying files over the network using explorer uses far more resources and memory than a sandboxed FTP application.
So for long file transfers you’re better off just using ftp anyways.
Comment by Jon — February 21, 2006 @ 10:04 am
I don’t think there are.. (Atleast for 98se) which is what this pc is running.. I have ftp syncing and a plethora of other conveniences setup for common things, but there are always those moments I wish it showed up in Network Neighborhood.. I can mount an smb share on xbox, and log into it from my pc using a simple python smb client I wrote, but I really don’t know what is involved with getting it into windows explorer.. Guess I’ll have to scour protocol whitepapers..
Comment by triggernum5 — February 21, 2006 @ 4:27 pm
Hi. Is there a filter for file size? I keep getting the same massive family guy zip… all I want is the new episodes. I’ve set a fail filter for “season” as Jon suggested and that’s working great… but this file is simply called “family guy” so it squeaks through. Thanks.
Comment by Jamie — May 12, 2006 @ 8:10 am
triggernum5 : you can map a drive to any drive on the xbox using netdrive. Link to download plus instructions are here -http://www.acs.uwosh.edu/novell/netdrive.htm
Comment by paul — August 24, 2006 @ 5:44 am
Love the feeds, Setup an automated usenet downloader to fetch xvid’s with imdb rating of 5+. Great for xbmc, hard to do without at least a TB of space though, have to autodelete aged+. Overall though, Thanks for the feeds.
Comment by Dusty — September 3, 2006 @ 4:18 pm
Hi, great tutorial. I found out about broadcatching a few months ago from a guide posted on Engadget and it sounded like the best thing - bit torrent for the lazy student! I set everything up (even after a few teething problems such as the ‘use url as a referrer’ problem that seems to come by using links to mininova torrents) and everything seemed to be great. That was until the torrents never auto download and start. It isnt a great problem for me as it still means that when using tvrss.net and adding a few filters, i still get a nice streamlined rss feed right in Azureus ready to double click but its just a shame about the autodownloading issue. Does anyone have any ideas.
I like the idea of a media server too but I just ripped out the hard drive from my spare computer to put in my xbox. Its something i may work on tho. Cheers for the great tutorial, keep up the good work with XBMC
Comment by Elliot — September 4, 2006 @ 4:13 pm
Thanks for explaining how to set it all up. Think have an site that is just perfect for getting TV shows and it has rss feed to, so give this a try think you will like it http://tvrss.net/feeds/
Comment by David — September 13, 2006 @ 9:32 am