Top 10 BitTorrent and RSS Tips
Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2008RSS can be a real time saver for BitTorrent enthusiasts. Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user. This is exactly what you can achieve by using RSS and these ten handy tips.
For those not familiar with the term, RSS is an acronym that stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It’s a really convenient mechanism which allows you to receive regular automated updates from your favorite sites.
Most news sites, blogs and podcasts have RSS feeds that let you automatically receive updates when a new article is published. However, many BitTorrent sites have also started publishing RSS feeds of their listings, allowing users to download content without having to search for files manually.
In this article we will cover some of the most useful RSS tips and tricks for BitTorrent users.
1. Download via RSS
Let’s start of with the most important part – downloading .torrent files from an RSS feed. There are a couple of BitTorrent clients that are able to handle RSS feeds. Bitcomet, uTorrent and Vuze for example all have an RSS feature. A list of all compatible clients is available on Wikipedia.
The process of setting up RSS downloading differs for each individual client, but it’s not hard to figure out. uTorrent has published an elaborate guide on its website that walks you through the various steps and options. The most important part, however, is where to find the RSS feeds. The next tips will cover this.
2. Search Based RSS Feeds
Most of the larger BitTorrent sites offer search-based RSS feeds. The reason they’re called “search-based feeds” is because they are feeds that relate to particular search terms. For example, if you search for ‘TorrentFreak’ the search results will have a link (orange button) to a feed that will send you updates on all torrents that match this search term.
3. Uploader RSS Feeds
The search feed may work well for less generic searches, but in some cases feeds based on torrent uploader might work better. User based RSS feeds might be a good idea if you want to download all the content that is uploaded by a specific user, aXXo for example. Uploader RSS feeds are supported by The Pirate Bay, Mininova and several other sites.
4. Premade TV-Torrent Feeds
Since quite a few people use BitTorrent as a VCR or TiVo alternative, RSS feeds are a great help in automating TV-show downloads. There are several ways to import your favorite TV-shows into your download queue, but perhaps one of the most convenient is FeedMyTorrent. FMT offers several pre-configured RSS feeds that won’t list any duplicate episodes. The site only launched recently and as such is still in Beta, but the feeds are fully operational.
5. Create a Custom TV-Torrent Feed
Premade feeds are convenient, but impossible to customize. BitTorrent users who want some more control over what appears in their RSS feed might want to give tvRSS a try. With the advanced search options everyone can generate a personalized TV-torrent feed in no time. Detailed instructions on how to do this can be found in one of our previous articles.
6. Download Torrents Remotely with RSS
Instead of relying on content from specific users, tags or searches, there are also ways to add torrents to a feed manually. This can be used to download torrents remotely, so when you’re away from the computer your BitTorrent client is running on in the background. An easy way to add torrents to a personal feed is to use mininova’s bookmark feature. Another service that offers custom feeds, not restricted to mininova is FeedMyTorrents. For both services you’ll need to have an account.
7. Ted
Ted, the torrent episode downloader, is an advanced TV-torrent downloader that makes it easier to import TV-torrents into your BitTorrent client. Ted keeps you up-to-date by checking the RSS feeds of your favorite BitTorrent site for new episodes of your favorite shows. The application comes with several pre-added feeds, so there is no need to find the RSS feeds yourself.
8. Broadcatch with Miro
A great example of an all-in-one BitTorrent solution for video downloads is Miro, formerly known as the Democracy player. Miro is an Internet TV player that allows you to automatically download and watch the latest TV shows, video podcasts and more. These players are especially useful for people who only use BitTorrent to download video files, since the BitTorrent client is built in. Miro is platform independent and comes with several predefined channels. However, you can also add your own RSS feeds for your favorite TV-shows.
9. Read Those Feeds
In the first tip we explained how RSS feeds can be used to download torrents automatically. However, RSS feeds can of course also be used as a notification system. That is, you can use BitTorrent feeds with your regular RSS reader, and decide whether you want to download the torrents that appear in the feed yourself. This way you will have total control over your downloads. The downside is that the downloads will not be loaded into your BitTorrent client automatically.
10. The Latest BitTorrent News
Last, but not least, we encourage every BitTorrent enthusiast to add our RSS feed to their feed reader. Not only will this keep you updated on everything that happens in the wonderful world of BitTorrent, you might also stumble upon some useful tips every now and then. For those people who want to watch TorrentFreak’s latest news, a BitTorrent compatible feed for our TV-show is available here, or alternatively you can subscribe with iTunes.
Do you have any tips or suggestions we missed? Drop a comment!
Previously: TorrentFreak TV ‘On The Streets’
Next: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
31 Responses
The worst thing with RSS is, when you are on a private tracker, and several TV eps. are nuked, and you download 2, 3 sometimes 4 the “same” episode. Is not good for your ratio!
RSS feeds on private sites are pretty redundant.
With scene rules files can be nuked, repacked, proper’d, subfix’d etc this can play havoc with auto downloading files.
Also on public sites fake torrents are in abundance so you can’t check authenticity or user feedback/comments like a human would.
whats the point of using RSS?
@Anonymous
They can allow you to download torrents without actually searching for them.
The functionality is useful but I prefer to check what I’m downloading, read comments, sync issues etc.
Some nice sites.
I like to get the episode as soon as it’s up, so I like to know when it’ll be airing in the US.
I wrote a little script that checks when the next episode of a show is airing and then it gives me a link to download from IsoHunt.
Check if out:
http://www.diggering.co.uk/pull/
That’s just how I keep on top of downloading episodes.
These are some great tips.
I use http://TorrentMoon.com to find all my torrents.
Nice tut, could be broken down further but no need to really spoon feed I suppose, at least you have given them a solid foundation to start with.
Nice tips, I never really used RSS for downloading TV episodes but I might start. Good one
http://Torrentino.2500mhz.info/
Here’s the bug with Transmission for RSS: http://trac.transmissionbt.com/report/ticket/1339
What external apps might he be talking about?
Firefox has built in support for RSS feeds, but like others have said, I would rather search for and download torrents manually.
There isn’t always enough information in them to tell you what quality a given torrent is, and comments on sites normally don’t make it to RSS.
Ive never really seen the point of RSS Feeds, all they create is duplicate content of articles etc.
Actually, I think that manually trawling is the best thing to do. After all, it’s not more work; it’s basically part of what BitTorrent is about. Indeed, isn’t “choosing for yourself” part of what downloading in general is all about? I suppose that there are people who too lazy to even choose for themselves… but they should learn to be more self-reliant and make choices for themselves.
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
@Nukes: that’s where FeedMyTorrents comes in. Even if the same episode torrent is uploaded several times, the feed will only show the most active one.
@Roze: It’s a choice you make – either select the files yourself, or have it run automatically (if episodes air at 03:00 AM, you can have the file downloaded by the time you wake up).
@Mojah
It seems that they might be somewhat useful if one knows exactly what is going to go in an RSS feed, but it still seems somewhat haphazard to automatically download files without absolute confidence.
Roze
@Roze: very much true. Their FAQ says this:
“ARE RSS TORRENTS SAFE TO USE?”
We like to think so, because we use these feeds ourselves. They contain only links to the TV show you choose – nothing else.
But just to make sure – configure your BitTorrent client to queue the torrents received through RSS feeds, don’t let them be started right away. After all, you’re trusting us enough to let your computer download the files we pick – you should think twice about letting it process them automatically too.
We strive to provide quality & safety – but to you, we’re still strangers. You can trust us, because we’re all nice guys, but we’re still strangers.
I like the FeedMyTorrent feauture better as the webUI, great to have it.
A suggestion: use Opera to read feeds. It’s very comfortable and reliable.
@Jasper van Weerd: the main feature of FeedMyTorrents is not much more than a no hassle tvRSS (which I still tend to like a bit more), but the own RSS feed feature is indeed very welcome.
I’ve tried RSS feeds a few times. Never really worked for me, and when it did it downloaded the same ep 2 or 3 times. I prefer just going to EZTV every morning. It has all the shows I want on the frontpage. Much quicker than RSS I reckon
@Piratebarn: the issue you’re describing, downloading the same episode multiple times, can be solved through tvRSS or FeedMyTorrents. If you’re still awake when new torrents are posted, and _need_ to have the episode the very second it was released, you should indeed just visit EZTV. If you’re asleep, or don’t care if the download starts an hour or so later, then RSS could really come in handy.
seems lazy and gay
and the Top10 list?
I dunno, I dont see what all the fuss is about with RSS feeds.
jess
http://www.anonweb.eu.tc
@Ali: I really appreciate your torrent file tracker finder; it is probably one of the most useful bittorrent tools on the ‘net.
http://www.diggering.co.uk/hashfind/v2/
@Anonymous: Thanks alot!
It’s not complete, but it’s kinda useful.
I appreciate the feedback :)
I get fed up with monitoring mininova RSS feeds for the latest releases that contained the phrases “R5″, “DVDRip” and “DVDScr”.
They just produced too many results!
After a bit of playing with scraping of these rss feeds i came up with “Mininova totalised”.
http://www.monkeyr.com/rss/mini2.php?occur=8
“Mininova totalised” searches Mininova rss feeds for the terms “R5″, “DVDRip” and “DVDScr” every 15 mins. The feed titles are then merged to give a list of common phrases with their total occurrence. The data is kept for 7 days to ensure you never miss a thing! Add ?occur=8 to the url to only get results that occur 8 or more times. Now with added data from IMDB (where possible).
Give it a try in your fave RSS reader. Hope someone else finds this useful!
mh
Thanks for these tips, they help me a lot! keep up the good work
bebo upload
I Think,?t’s Good…
http://www.demlisohbet.com
I Think,?t’s Good…
http://www.demlisohbet.com
These are great tips for a newbie like me. I didn’t even know you can subscribe to RSS feeds for torrents… :(
axxo is a cock head sick of fake torrents so f-ck it im off
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