Clients
Enclosure-style
Torrentocracy is a plug in for
MythTV, a "tivo-like" software package for Linux.
I don't run MythTV, so I can't vouch for the quality of
Torrentocracy, but I haven't heard anything bad about it.
If you don't run MythTV, it's clearly not an option.
RSS Import is a plug-in for Azureus
.
Its interface is fairly bare-bones
and it seems to ignore its own parameter which specifies how often to
check the RSS feeds for changes. It takes a list of feeds
separated by semicolons in a small text box as the means of input,
so clearly the UI could use some improvement. It supports filtering,
but there's no way to associate particular filters with individual
feeds. All filters apply to all feeds.
It's also somewhat lacking in documentation. For instance, to use
it you both have to set a default save directory for Azureus and
tell Azureus to save torrent files and specify a directory for that.
There's no documentation to tell you that, although the RSS Import
console does clue you in on the first one when you try to use it without
setting that. The second one I had to puzzle out on my own, however.
Despite these difficulties, it works well,
begins downloads fully automatically, and does save all of your
settings for both filters and feeds. This should run on all
platforms on which Azureus runs.
bitTorrentIntegration.root is a plug-in for
Radio.
Radio is a commercial product which I have not purchased, so I
have no personal experience using this plug-in.
The documentation suggests that this only runs on Windows,
that it supports multiple feeds, that it does not support filtering,
and that it does begin the downloads completely automatically without
user intervention.
iPodder's main focus is on downloading audio enclosures, but the newer
versions also automatically download bittorrent enclosures. I've tested
the Windows version of this client, and I was fairly impressed with it.
The interface is straightforward and everything worked fairly smoothly.
It is not
as feature-rich as some of clients. For instance, it does not support
filters of any sort. It does have a more feature-rich scheduler than most
of the clients, although it does not any way to respect the TTL (time to live)
field of the actual feed. Also, the options for how frequently to check
for new feeds are limited to a set of choices, rather than just allowing you
to set your own time.
It also does not hang around and help seed the torrents at all,
and I found that it would sometimes launch iTunes to play a Quicktime
movie which seems like a definite bug.
And when given a new feed, it only downloads the most recent entry.
If you want older ones downloaded, you have to do it by hand.
Still, because of its overall ease of use,
this is the best choice for most users for enclosure-based
feeds so long as they do not need filtering.
This supports Windows and Macintosh (10.3 and higher).
There is a Linux
version in beta form.
iPodderX is a Mac specific version of iPodder.
I don't know what's different about it versus the original iPodder except
that the download is much smaller. It also needs 10.3. As I only have
10.2 right now, I can't really investigate it.
Synclosure is a general-purpose enclosure downloader which supports
BitTorrent.
Synclosure is written in Python and should work on Windows, Linux, and
Mac OS X. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. More information
soon.
Link Style
Buttress is a steadily improving product. It's a standalone
application which launches your chosen BitTorrent client on the
torrent files it downloads.
It currently supports filtering and you can now save your filters
as well as your feeds.
Buttress provides flexibility in terms of which BitTorrent
client you run, which could be an advantage for those of you
who prefer other BT clients to Azureus. However, right now,
they don't support the download beginning automatically on
clients other than Azureus.
This is something that they're working on.
I haven't tested it with
any clients other than Azureus and the standard BT client (the
one from bittorrent.com). But
it successfully passes torrent files to both of those clients.
If you're already using Buttress and have version 0.3 or 0.4,
be sure to go get the most
recent version as the improvements are significant.
Buttress is written in Java, and should run on all Java supporting
platforms.
It does not automatically begin downloads under OS X because
they haven't implemented AppleEvents in order to pass
arguments to OS X BitTorrent clients. Many of the OS X
BitTorrent clients don't support AppleEvents anyway,
meaning that there is no way to automatically start torrents
on them from an outside program. In short, it is not really
a flaw in Buttress.
It should
run on other unixes although it needs to
be launched by using the command "java buttress.jar".
RSS Feed Scanner is a plug-in for
Azureus. Of the different clients which I've tried, this one has,
by far, the best overall interface. The settings are clear, everything
gets saved. It supports filters and the filters can be either positive
or negative and can be associated with any one feed or with all feeds.
Different feeds and different filters can even save to different directories.
It even has a Help tab. I highly recommend this client. If it
handled enclosures and could filter based on
the story, not just the title and the link, it would be the perfect BT+RSS
client. It should run on every platform on which Azureus runs.
Videora is a video-centric RSS feed reader which hands off to a
torrent client for the download. It definitely simplifies things
to the novice by coming with one as part of the default install.
What distinguishes Videora from the other items on this list,
though, is that it's a pay product. There is a free trial version
and that all I've evaluated. If someone wants me to evaluate the
pay version, they'll have to buy me a copy.
Anyway, Videora is a clearly piracy-oriented client which is more intended
to let your computer act like a TiVo than anything else.
It comes with a set of feeds for downloading television programs
built right in and a facility to update the list automatically.
Also, it features things like want lists and season
tickets, although those are not enabled in the free version.
In fact, the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed is not
enabled in the free version, so it doesn't even really qualify to
be here in a technical sense. You can add RSS feeds (although
not delete them) and you can chose individual items to download
from them, but that is all.
In general, I have to give the free trial version of this product
a fairly low rating. It gets high marks for ease of set-up, but
many of the options are confusing and the extremely limitted functionality
makes it unsuitable for general use.
I've seen a lot of talk about videora floating around, and I have to
assume that it's because they've done better at generating publicity
than other clients because I don't really see any other reason.
It doesn't respect TTL on the RSS feeds.
Entering an RSS feed URL and then setting up a regular download
with a filter requires using a total of three different panes (in
the pay version, in the trial version it's not supported).
It doesn't support enclosures.
Plus, fundamentally, charging for a product whose primary purpose
is illegal downloading is likely to eventually get your pants sued off,
so one can't really count on any form of long-term customer support
in return for their payment.
This wins some points for having
lots of feeds included automatically, and if what you want is hassle-free
television piracy, then this might be the client for you.
But if you're looking for a tool for automatically downloading
arbitrary files from RSS feeds, look elsewhere.
As it exists right now, this client does not belong on this list,
as it cannot successfully parse RSS feeds and download torrent files.
However, past versions of this client have worked on at least some
RSS feeds, and as it is still being developed, I am certain that it will
support it again in the near future. Right now, there are serious
user interface problems with the XML feeds feature, and a custom parser
seems to need to be written for each site's feed.
I will, however, keep this one on the list for one important reason.
Despite the general credit given to Steve Gilmore for inventing
the idea of combining RSS and BitTorrent in December of 2003, this
client had support for it (albeit perhaps imperfect support) as of
the end of March 2003. Clearly the author of this client was
promoting the combination of BitTorrent and RSS long before anyone
else. I will also be investigating the older versions of this client
to see if any of them works with most current RSS feeds of one type
or the other.
It's a Linux client.
As I haven't got a linux box to play with right now,
I asked a friend to try it out.
He reports that TV RSS only supports feeds from two specific sites.
It apparently has custom parsers for each site it works with
rather than using a general purpose RSS reader. It did not
properly parse either of my test feeds.
It is a GUI front end, but he described it as being a very poor GUI.
It makes calls to command-line applications without properly
escaping special characters, meaning that there is a security
vulnerability in running it on an untrusted feed.
Supports Both Types
This is a python-based client which has the BitTorrent code built right
into it. It will download from both links and enclosures. It has no gui.
Instead the all the settings are set by editting an xml file. When it works,
it works well. When it fails, however, it fails horribly, just dumping
out a list of python errors. This might happen when you do something like
leave out the beginning or ending slashes in the path since it doesn't take the
location of the RSS feed in the normal URL style, instead separating it
out into server, path, and file, and expects the path to both begin and end
with a slash.
It supports filtering by keywords. Specifically, you can provide lists of
keywords. If every keyword in one of the lists is matched then the torrent
will be downloaded. The keywords only match against the title.
It also does not reparse feeds if you change the filter keywords, always
only parsing new stories when you run it.
This one is unusual in that it only checks a single feed per instance.
The only way to deal with this is to run multiple instances in
different directories in order to have different nucleus.conf files
which point to different feeds.
It also does not keep monitoring the feed on its own.
Instead, it has to be rerun regularly. This should not be too difficult
to deal with if one is willing to somewhat technically inclined.
I must strongly recommend against this client for novice users, but
the more advanced user may find this worthwhile. It should run on all
platforms on which python runs.
Two Part Solutions
There's also the possibility of putting together a two part solution
where one client downloads the enclosures and the client launches
BitTorrent. Specifically I will here mention clients which download
RSS enclosures to some predetermined directory and clients which
check a directory to see if there are any torrent files to
begin downloading.
BitTorrent Client
btlaunchmany is part of the original BitTorrent client suite.
To use it on Windows, one needs to install
Python and download the python source
release version of BitTorrent. There is no graphical interface for
btlaunchmany.
RSS Enclosures Downloaders
This is a very barebones RSS Enclosure downloader. It depends on
Microsoft's .NET framework and hence is Windows only
(althought it might run under Mono) and also
fails with a non-helpful error message on any system which does not
have .NET installed. It is also a
command-line client which only runs once
and a script of some sort would need to be written if regular
updates are desired. Other than that, it works fine.
Vox Lite is a full featured RSS Feed reader which supports enclosure
downloads. It also depends on .NET, but at least the installation
fails with an error message which indicates that this is the case.
It works fine,
Big Honking Table
A Table of All Evaluated Clients
| Name | Interface | Platform
| Filtering | Feed Style
| Timing | Level of Polish
| Requirements
|
|---|
| GUI | Command Line | Plug-in
| Windows | Mac OS X | Linux | Other Unix
| By Title | By Name | By Body | With Reg. Exp.
| Enclosure | Link | Runs Once
| By Clock | By Delay | Respects TTL
|
|---|
| Torrentocracy | | | X | | | X | | Unknown | X
| | Unknown | MythTV
|
| RSS Import | | | X | X | X | X | X | X | | |
| X | | | | X | | Low | Azureus
|
| bitTorrentIntegration.root | | | X | X | | |
| Unknown | X | | Unknown | Radio
|
| iPodder | X | | | X | 10.3 | Beta | | | | | | X |
| | X | | | High | None
|
| iPodderX | X | | | | 10.3 | | | Unknown
| X | | Unknown | None
|
| Synclosure | | X | | X | X | X | X | X | | | | X
| | Unknown | Python (some platforms)
|
| Buttress | X | | | X | eh | X | X | X | | | |
| X | | | X | | Moderate | Java
|
| RSS Feed Scanner | | | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | | X
| | X | | | X | X | High | Azureus
|
| Videora | X | | | X | | | | X | X | | X | | X
| | | X | | High | None
|
| Personal Torrent Collector | X | | | X | | | |
| | | | | Maybe | | | | | Moderate | None
|
| TV RSS | X | | | | | X |
|
| Nucleus | | X | | X | X | X | X | X | | | | X | X
| X | | | | Low | Python(some platforms)
|
| Enclosure Download Only (require btlaunchmany.py for
Bit Torrent support)
|
|---|
| GetRSSEnclosures | | X | | X | | | | | | |
| X | | X | | | | Low | .Net
|
| Vox Lite | X | | | X | | | | | | | | X |
| | | X | | Moderate | .Net
|
Servers
I'm sure that there are quite a number of homebrewed ways to do this,
so this section is unlikely to be an exhaustive list. I don't know
of any tools other than the one I just made yesterday
to create link-style RSS feeds, but clearly suprnova,
amongst others, was already doing this, so they must have some system
rigged up. Likewise,
LegalTorrents is providing
enclosure-based torrents, but not using the methods that I cover here.
If you know specifics about how anyone is creating these feeds,
especially if it involves publically accessible
tools, please let me know.
Enclosures Blosxom Plug-In
Enclosures is a plug-in for Blosxom,
which is a free, perl-based blogging tool. Enclosures can be downloaded
here or you could first read the
README. As you might gather from
the URL, I'm an author of this plug-in. Dave Slusher did most of the
work. I really only pollished his stuff up a little. The plug-in
is not the super most fanciest thing in the world and depends on LWP
to do some of the needed work, but it gets the job done.
There are two flavour packs included (both based on Mike Mason's RSS 2.0
flavour):
one which generates enclosure-style
feeds (.rss20) and one which generates link-style feeds (.btrss).
It seems to work fine. It should run on all platforms on which
blosxom and LWP run.
MT-Enclosures is a plug in for
Movable Type. Movable Type is a commercial product which I have not
purchased, so I don't know diddly-squat about it. The web page does
indicate that it supports the MIME type for BitTorrent, however.