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What is RSS?


P4v3l

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In general, it's an automated, low(er)-overhead way to check for updates to a web site. In the context of µTorrent, it's a way to check for new torrents and automatically download them. Note that the web site you are interested in has to support RSS by providing you with a link to their RSS feed.

If you'd like an example of how to configure an RSS feed in µTorrent, let me know and I'll post the one I'm testing with. It's a "legal" feed so it's safe to post.

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Here goes. I know this looks a bit complicated but it'll seem easier once you've tried it...

1. First you need the URL for the RSS feed you are interested in. The feed has to have torrent enclosures. For example, here's the URL for the Rocketboom daily video blog (totally legal):

http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/rss/rocketboom.xml

2. To prevent µTorrent from automatically starting all the torrents in the feed when you add it, temporarily set the "New torrents start in stopped mode" option on the General Options page of µTorrent's Settings dialog (Ctrl-P). You can change this back after you've added the RSS feed.

3. Open µTorrent's RSS dialog (Ctrl-R), click the Add button on the Feeds page and paste in the RSS feed URL and click OK.

4. Now click the Releases tab to see the names of the torrents which µTorrent found in the feed. To manually download a particular torrent in the list you can just double click it. To configure µTorrent to download them automatically (the real point of all this RSS stuff), continue....

5. Click the Favorites tab and click the Add button. This is where you specify the pattern to match the names of the torrents you want µTorrent to automatically download for you. To download all the torrents in the feed, just type "*" (without the quotes). To be more selective about what you download you can specify more of the torrent name (like "*Fri*" to match only the Friday episodes). Note that unless you use wildcards (*), the pattern you enter must match the entire torrent name. So you will normally want to include at least one wildcard in every pattern you enter in the Favorites list.

Build 395 now also supports '?' (match any single character) and '|' (match the pattern on the left OR the right). For example, the pattern "*Mon*|*Wed*|*Fri*" (without the quotes) would match all the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday episodes.

6. On the right side of the dialog, choose the "Save in" directory where you want µTorrent to download the files (it will create subdirectories for multi-file torrents).

7. Choose the Feed URL from the drop-down list.

8. For this example, ignore the quality and episode options because they don't apply to the Rocketboom torrents.

9. Check the checkbox to the left of the filter name to enable the filter.

10. Click the Releases tab again and click the Update Now button. In a few seconds µTorrent will add all the existing torrents in the feed to the main window.

11. Click the Close button to close the RSS dialog.

12. Assuming you selected the "New torrents start in stopped mode" option before you added the feed, you can manually start the torrents you want and delete the ones you don't want.

13. Now you can uncheck the "New torrents start in stopped mode" option so µTorrent will automatically start future torrents added to the RSS feed.

If I've made any mistakes or if there's an easier way to do this, let me know. One shortcut for adding a filter is to right-click on a torrent in the Releases list and click "Add to favorites". Then on the Favorites page, edit the filter name (if you want it to match more than just the torrent you selected) and select the "Save in" directory.

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You have to use wildcards unless your filter matches the entire name in the Releases list. So wrap some splats (*) around your filters and it should work. For example:

*Security Now*

*Infected*

etc.

But if you know you want to download ALL the torrents in a feed, you can just use splat all by itself to match anything in the feed:

*

If a feed has enclosures for more than one media format and you only want one of them, wrap the format you want in splats:

*avi*

*h264*

*wmv*

*mp3*

*ogg*

To avoid matching those letters inside other words (like "having"), look at the format of the name in the Releases list (which is what the filters on the Filter page are matched against) and see if the format is surrounded by spaces or periods or whatever and include those in your filter. For example:

*.avi * (period in front, space behind)

If you want more than one format (for example, audio for listening in your mp3 player on the go and video for watching on your PC), use the '|' operator:

*avi*|*mp3*

Also, note that NerdTV isn't going to work because that feed doesn't use enclosures. So you'll never see any releases in the NerdTV feed. Same will be true for any of the other feeds which don't use enclosures.

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µTorrent supports enclosure URLs, GUID, and link

Thanks for the info. Sadly, NerdTV's RSS feed has the torrent URLs buried in the description CDATA. All the links and guids point to web pages, not torrents. Definitely not a state-of-the-art feed.

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You might want to try out build 405 or newer, as the RSS dialog has been reworked in those releases.

As for the RSS dialog, if you're using any private sites, try accessing www.sitenamehere.com/getrss.php. If they have the script installed, using the "Standard" method and embedding the cookie in the URL using :COOKIE: will work fine. :)

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If you want the torrents to automatically download and start without any further input, you MUST specify a folder in Save in:!

Leaving it blank - also works now, using the default path that was specified. This is the easiest way.

You may want to refer specifically to the "NOT" (exclude) line where you give the exclude example ...

I would also explain the "reset" button - resetting both timouts & "smart ep records"

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