About a year ago TorrentFreak caught up with RSS inventor Dave Winer, who noticed that the RSS feeds on most torrent sites were a ‘mess’. Nearly every site uses a different format, and this is problematic for application developers who want to create tools for BitTorrent users.

“It’s pretty much a mess,” Dave Winer told TorrentFreak while outlining some suggestions for a BitTorrent RSS namespace in a blog post. “Let’s clean it up,” Winer said, encouraging torrent site admins to join the discussion.

This call for action was soon picked up by various torrent site admins, and yesterday the EZTV team launched a BitTorrent RSS standard on their sister site ezRSS.

“The current RSS spec was rather limited when it came to torrent information and some of the methods other RSS feeds were doing in regards to torrents was just messy, by creating a bit torrent RSS namespace, we can now give more specific data to applications and users in a structured format,” EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak.

“Dave Winer gave some good advice, and we have taken a lot of it on board. We still plan to expand on the spec, so far we just released version 0.1 xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/ – xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/dtd/ and version 0.2 is already in the pipeline,” he added.

Although the technicalities may not be of interest to most users, everyone who uses RSS feeds on BitTorrent sites will eventually benefit from standardization. It will allow applications to include more options and features, including magnet links and more advanced download ‘rules’ based on the number of seeds and peers.

EZTV’s Novaking further told us that this new standard has been developed with input from other key figures in the BitTorrent community, to guarantee a broad adoption among torrent sites.

“I have talked to quite a few other torrent admins and we are currently coding up an easy to use RSS builder which will generate the RSS feeds using this new namespace, this will allow easy implementation for anyone who wishes to use it,” he said.

The first version of the new spec is now live on ezRSS and users and fellow BitTorrent developers are encouraged to send in their feedback for the next version of the spec. If all goes well the new standard should lead to a wide range of new and exciting RSS tools for torrent users, to make downloading even more convenient and seamless than it already is.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It therefore came as a surprise to many that the site went blank this June. At first rumors surfaced that the site was shut down through legal action, but in reality EZTV was busy transferring the servers to a new location, and working on implementing several new features while they were at it.

EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak that downtime was initially caused by hardware problems, but they decided to take advantage of the situation and relocate all hardware to a new datacenter while implementing several new features.

“It was hard to work on the new features while the site was operational, as I don’t get enough hours in the day to maintain and code a new one,” Novaking told TorrentFreak, explaining why the downtime took longer than expected.

The wait is over though. Today the site has returned with more features than ever before. Aside from getting the forums back online, EZTV now dedicates a full page to each released episode, with download statistics, a sample of the release and several download mirrors.

In addition to these episode pages, all the TV shows now have their own page as well as a user generated show rating, a description of the show and related news items and general information.

On top of the changes in the site’s functionality, EZTV has also switched to using the OpenBitTorrent tracker instead of those of The Pirate Bay. “That was a pretty easy decision,” Novaking told us. “With the current sale of TPB it would only be a matter of time before we couldn’t use it anyways, so we made the switch before that happened.

As if that’s not enough good news already, there is even more for TV-torrent addicts. Coinciding with the relaunch of its site, EZTV is launching a replacement for TVRSS, a site where users could generate custom made RSS feeds for their favorite TV-shows.

The new site, named ezRSS, has the same functionality as the TVRSS website that was taken down two months ago, and is compatible with all BitTorrent clients that support RSS downloads.

Novaking said that ezRSS is one of features he’s most excited about, although it’s still uncertain if it will be able to handle the stream of new users without any significant problems. “I’m hoping our servers can handle the load,” he said.

There will be plenty of interest, that’s for sure.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.