Top 10 BitTorrent and RSS Tips
RSS 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.
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!
