So, in my previous post, I linked to the article I read on boingboing.net about how to get this working. I was so excited to finally find instructions to make this holy grail of RSS combined with bittorrent a reality! Unfortunately, the site that boingboing linked to had exceeded their bandwidth limit, and was unavailable. It is currently still unavailable, but in case it comes back, here’s the direct link.

Google to the Rescue

Of course, my first thought was that if this page was indeed that popular, Google had probably cached a copy of it, and indeed they had. The instructions found there are mostly correct, but one crucial link to the RSS plugin is incorrect (pointing to a similar plugin, but not the one the instructions were written for), which caused a bit of difficulty until I was able to sort it out.

So here is a repost of what was posted at pealco.net, with the incorrect plugin link fixed. I hope it works as well for you as it is for me - and, of course, your mileage may vary.

In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again. This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent and RSS.

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

There are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

The how-to:

1. You will need to use Azureus. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.
2. You will also need the RSS Import plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.
3. In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.
4. Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.
5. Enter http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php as the RSS Channel to import.
6. In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page. For The West Wing, for example, I put in west.wing.*hdtv — which means download any file that include the letters west, followed by any single character, followed by the letters wing, followed by number of characters, followed by the letters hdtv, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so west.wing.*hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv would download The West Wing and Enterprise.
7. Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.
8. And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. You should have it in your downloads folder the next day.

And now you never have to worry about re-runs again.

Thanks, Pealco. Now I can use the great features of Snapstream - pausing and rewinding live TV, on-screen program guide, ability to record or play anything spontaneously, but my favourite progams come in perfectly optimized for how I want to watch them. This is to TV what podcasting is to radio.