Transmission RSS companion

[macintoshhd]

I wanted a good, easy to use graphical solution to download torrents from RSS feeds for Mac OS X. Most UNIX utilities are complicated command line that don't fit well with the OS X experience.

Since Transmission.app (the only decent Cocoa mac client that is allowed on many trackers) will not integrate RSS support for a long time (against philosophy). I decided to create an Automator script (Leopard-only) that downloads torrents from RSS feeds to a folder. From there Transmission, or any other torrent client can pick them up and start downloading.

The workflow is Leopard only because of the RSS features are exclusive to Leopard. However, my workflow is not perfect, it is a barely working solution. I haven't got the hang on how to use Automator variables correctly (to display the name of the torrent in a confirmation dialog). I also haven't got the hang on how to make it skip torrents already downloaded and run continuously looping without an external utility.

I used the Automator Loop Utility (set at 600 seconds/10 minutes) to convert the application to a recurring workflow that runs every X minutes.

I also used some custom automator actions included in the download.

The RSS filtering utilities that Automator provides are excellent and graphically intuitive, and I am sure the output can be piped out to the shell/perl/python/ruby/etc to match regular expressions.

I am hoping Mac users will find this useful, but I am also hoping somebody will extend this and make it better for all the community.

Download here

[Waldorf]

I think most feeds expect a 30 min refresh time as not to hammer the server (remember those days T used to do this?). That said, tvRSS maintains a minimum refresh time of 5 min, but notes that the average is 15 on "prime-time" ones.

This utility is quite a single purpose one, but looks promising.

[macintoshhd]

I copied the post from the Tracker I work on, that is their limit (10 minutes), anyhow, it is configurable.

TVShows is tvRSS specific, there is no way to adapt it, at least not the current version.

It would be nice to have something like Clutch but for RSS, a companion. I hope TVShows becomes that someday, but in the meantime, the automator script is the only viable solution (other than complicated command line utilities).

I don't mind regular expressions, I know them, but the UI filtering on the Mac (i.e Leopard find) is more than enough for most.

[Gonz0]

I am hoping Mac users will find this useful, but I am also hoping somebody will extend this and make it better for all the community.

Download here

Thanks macintoshhd,
I appreciate your automator script.
As I am not too much into Automator myself, I'd like to ask you, if you could add support for RSS Feeds that don't download the torrent directly in the subsequent link but show first a description page where you can find the torrent download afterwards.
On the first look I've found that Automator has some ability of URL handling, filtering and subsequent file handling.
Would be great, if you could add this or make a new version of your Automator workflow!

Thanks in advance,
Gonz0

[beekum]

Hi all,

Thanks for your work macintoshhd first of all. I modified the script to make it hassle-free without pop ups. I use a @tmp folder inside the downloads folder in transmission and in my script.

The script does the following:
- delete the current torrent files inside downloads/@tmp folder (otherwise you'll get a huge list because transmission only uses the first time it sees a new torrent)
- get the rss feed
- filter the rss feed
- download the desired feeds into the downloads/@tmp folder

Before using this script do the following:
- make a @tmp folder in your downloads folder
- set transmission to check the @tmp folder
- enter the correct feed and use the automator loop utility (described by macintoshhd)

Good luck with this!

Download script here

[refulgentis]

very impressed with this. I had no idea how many automator actions there were for RSS. Now I just need to think of a way to generate logic so each episode is only downloaded once in case of a feed with multiple copies of the same TV episode...

[stevenD]

Haven't tried it myself yet, but maybe this might be something:
http://codingcurious.com/automatic/

[porkozone]

Haven't tried it myself yet, but maybe this might be something:
http://codingcurious.com/automatic/

Automatic does look very nice. I like that it's a prefpane, not a separate app - so it's virtually in the background.

[Ephilei]

Another option similar to Automatic is Reader Notifier:

http://code.google.com/p/readernotifier/

It's a OS X background application (menu bar app) that's primarily for sending growl notifications when Google Reader has a new RSS item. There's a feature for downloading torrentcasts to local folder. Then set the Auto Add feature in Transmission to that folder. You'll need to subscribe to the feed using Google Reader. I have used Reader Notifier for a while and it's quite good. Haven't used the torrentcast feature tho.

[Ephilei]

I've tried Notifier with torrents now and so far so good. Especially with Transmission's new ability auto-group based on name and then send the finished download to a custom folder.

[pruhnke]

When I saw of Automatic looked like it would have been great, but alas I don't use Transmission on a Mac, I use it on Ubuntu. I searched around and found an easy to configure Java script that works on any Java capable platform. Not much support or development on it, but it does the job and supports filters. Just configure the tvrss.properties file and add it to Cron.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tvtorrentrss/

[hippy dave]

Haven't tried it myself yet, but maybe this might be something:
http://codingcurious.com/automatic/

Automatic does look very nice. I like that it's a prefpane, not a separate app - so it's virtually in the background.

i'm a big fan of this one. works great & the developer is very responsive when contacting him about any problems.

[bozo_z_clown]

i'm a big fan of this one. works great & the developer is very responsive when contacting him about any problems.

Seconded. Automatic is a great companion to Transmission.

http://codingcurious.com/automatic/

Perry

[phects]

I scripted a Transmission RSS companion called transmission-rss in Ruby for this purpose. It solves my problem of downloading some TV series frequently and comes with a GTK configuration frontend (transmission-rss -e). I just use it on Linux but would appreciate some feedback about it running on other platforms. As RSS service, I would recommend http://showrss.karmorra.info.

A link to the Ruby gem:
http://rubygems.org/gems/transmission-rss

And some documentation:
http://rubydoc.info/gems/transmission-rss/0.1.6/frames

[atanamir]

Have you ever tried FlexGet?

http://flexget.com/

It is very easy to config and very powerfull.