TiVo& Amazing TipsWednesday, February 9th, 2005
Using bittorrent client software, and sites like tvtorrents (RSS) or btefnet (RSS), it’s easy to grab a copy of most popular shows hours after (or sometimes before!) they air.
Using bittorrent client software, and sites like tvtorrents (RSS) or btefnet (RSS), it’s easy to grab a copy of most popular shows hours after (or sometimes before!) they air.
February 9th, 2005 at 5:52 pm
Do any of the bittorrent client apps work in an offline mode? For example, can you download a list of files thru a batch facility such as cron on Linux?
February 9th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
Good question!!! I’ve been a bit disappointed as to the types of bittorrent clients that I’ve found out there. It seems that all the software assumes that if you’re using it, you plan on being a good bittorrent citizen, and that you’ll leave your connection going after you’re done to “seed” other clients (because that’s what makes this whole thing work).
That being said, I’ve written two scripts (bt.pl and btefnet.pl) that I run via cron. The first goes out to btefnet (via their RSS feed), and grabs the .torrent files for shows that you’ve requested (via regexp in the code). The second script looks for any .torrent files in a directory (hardcoded), and starts a btget process, get’s the file, stops itself, and repeats. It hasn’t been thoroughly tested, but seems to work so far. Give it a try and tell me what you think.
- The Goose
February 11th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
I just read about another program in this space, Videora. It’s a commercial product (though it’s under $25). From what I can see with the screenshots, it’s pretty good looking (plus it’s a Windows solution). Though my scripts will work nicely for linux folks, this might be a good way for Windows users to go.
February 13th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Are you able to play any of the .avi files from tvtorrent in QuickTime? I’ve downloaded a video codec for QuickTime, XVID, and the movie portion of the .avi is playing fine, but there is no sound. QuickTime properties indicates that the .avi audio portion is formatted with MPEG Layer-3 and I can’t find any clear information on whether this format is supported in the lastest version of QuickTime, or not.
February 13th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
I’ve used Windows Media Player without problem. I’ve got Quicktime installed too, so I’ll give it a try. On OS X, I had to use MPlayer OS X, which worked nicely.