Rename, Move downloaded file without breaking torrent

[tolandmike]

I consider myself a 'capable' uTorrent (3.3.2) user -- i.e. I have a healthy knowledge of how it all works and what settings and knobs will optimize my setup -- but one thing I could never get right, or at least I could never solve was this: How can I 'manage' the downloaded files (specifics in a second) without breaking the torrent itself and thus negatively impacting my seed ratio? It's probably best to explain what I mean here with a few of my most common scenarios and pain points. Keep in mind that 99% of what I download are video content like TV series and movies here and there.

 

Scenario 1: I want to keep the underlying file(s), not the folder in which it came packaged. You've all seen this, the video and possibly other files like *.nfo and JPG's are nicely packaged in a file folder. But I just want the files, not the folder. The reason is that I have my own folder and file taxonomy on my server and want whatever I download to honor that. I have dependent services like Plex Server that expect a consistent folder and file naming structure in order to correctly process and index content. This also helps me quickly find duplicate downloads (another increasingly painful side effect of having auto-downloads from RSS) when I do manual cleanup tasks.

 

I haven't found a "just download the files, not the folder" uTorrent option and I doubt that something like this exists. My solution so far has been to manually move the files to where I want them and just delete the folder but that breaks the torrent --> can't seed anymore --> seed ratio negatively impacted --> etc.

 

Surely I'm not alone here. There's got to be at least one of you out there that feel the same pain I'm feeling, right? What have you done as workaround?

 

I had other scenarios I was going to write but alas I've gotten busy with other things and frankly this is the most important issue I'd like to focus on. Please help.

 

-jk

[advancednoob01]

I asked this same question the other day.  I never did get a reply so i assume people here don't know?

 

You can try lifehackers guide, although it did not work for me.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5612315/how-to-seed-moved-or-renamed-files-in-bittorrent

 

if its effective for you, lets you change file name AND keep it seeding then let me know or if you find some other way to fix this I'd like to know.

 

I'd rather have

 

"Rocky"

 

in my media player's playlist instead of

 

"1.Rocky.1976.1080p.Bluray.x264.anonXmous_" 

[seanap]

I know im about 3 months late answering this question but here is how you can accomplish Automatic post processing, and the pro's and con's that go with it.

 

You can use a program called Filebot.  There is a script that filebot runs called AMC check it out http://www.filebot.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=215 . this script will:

 

• Unrar archives
• Group movies and episodes and then handle them seperately (auto-detect episode-vs-movie file)
• Fetch subtitles and transcode to SubRip/UTF-8
• Copy and Organize episodes, movies and music files into folders and rename files properly
  • Movies will be sorted into {output}/Movies/Name (Year)/Name (Year) [CD123].ext
  • TV Shows will be sorted into {output}/TV Shows/Name/Season N/Name - S00E00 - Title.ext
  • Music will be sorted into {output}/Music/Artist/Album/Artist - Title.ext
• Fetch artwork and generate .nfo files
• Notify XBMC (via TCP on port 9090) and/or Plex (via HTTP on port 32400) to rescan it's video library
• Log into MyEpisodes and mark newly downloaded episodes as 'acquired'
• Send a report about newly added files per email

 

Here is one possible way to have an automated set up:

1. Use  RSS auto downloading, set up filters in uT 
2. have all dloads go to a seeding folder.  
3. When the dload completes, filebot amc script automatically runs using the "Run program when download completes" setting
4. Filebot AMC runs in the background and will unrar, puts tv in your TV folder and movies in your Movies folder renames them to the proper naming convention (eg. "The TV Show S01E01.mkv" and "Movie Title (2014).mkv") . 
5. Then you can have plex automatically scan these folders when it detects there is a change

You literally do nothing except pull up plex.tv and your content is just there (like magic!)

 

This sounds great, right, and it is BUT when you start to have a serious collection it becomes really hard to seed everything for long periods of time.  The problem seeding is when uT completes a torrent the AMC script will rename and move the file in one of four ways:

1. -move  This will literally move the content from your seeding folder to your organized folder, you cannot seed unless you do a "Relocate" within uT (this gets really old when you have thousands of files)
2. -copy    This will leave the file you dload'd in the original seeding directory alone and just make a copy and move it to your organized folder and rename the copy correctly.  This is great because it lets you seed from you seeding folder, and lets you have a perfectly organized media folder.  The problem is you will have 2 of the same files, when you have 10's of Terabytes of content having duplicates costs a lot of money for HDD space.
3. -symlink   This option is where filebot creates a symbolic link.  The original seeding folder is left with a 1kb "shortcut" to the actual content in your orgainized media folder.  This sounds like a great option, the only problem is uT cant handle symlinks well.  They will seed but if you restart uT you will need to do a force recheck every single time, not a big deal for a couple of torrents but when you have thousands of torrents this process will take many many hours.
4. -Hardlink   This option is where filebot creates a hardlink.  This sounds like the perfect solution!  allows you to keep the original name (for seeding) , allows you to have your content organized and named properly, and only takes up space in 1 location (no duplicates).....  BUT you can not hardlink between different HDD's or when using Windows Storage Spaces.

 

The "Action --copy" option is probably the simplest and easyest method even though you would have to manually relocate content through uT to your organized folder and delete the copy in your seeding folder, if you wanted to seed for eternity without duplicates.  So do some reading on that filebot amc script and use it to automatically process all your downloads.  I really wish there was a better way to handle post processing within uT.   Honestly how hard would it be for uT to integrate in a automatic rename/relocate natively so that we can have an organized media library AND seed?!?!?  At the very least GIVE US SYMLINK SUPPORT!

 

All this being said, I am trying to find a solution that would seed all torrents indefinitely (this would be great if you were on a Private Tracker).  If you are ok with seeding something for just a month or so, you can automatically stop the torrent after x amount of time seeding in the uT settings and then manually select and right click the finished torrents and click "remove and delete torrent + files", which would only give you a month worth of duplicates.  In this case the AMC script will do exactly what you need it too.

[muik]

I managed to simplify this process with a python script: http://pastebin.com/Vk3RXb17 (sorry, forum won't let me upload this)

 

Instead of toying with uTorrent's location, the script creates a mirror of the torrent files as folders/symlinks in another location. You can then manually rename / move the links in the place of your choice - the original data remained untouched. This script allows you to have your data scattered around several drives but still keep them all in the same folder somewhere.

 

Save it in your torrent download root as "symlinks.py". Place yourelf into it in command line, then by doing the following command, you mirror everything in the folder to another location - great as the first step:

E:\YourDownloadPath> symlinks * --dest "E:\YourLinkPath\NEW_STUFF"

Then in uTorrent, in the preferences you can run a program each time a torrent is downloaded (this option is also available in the advanced properties of each torrent):

E:\YourDownloadPath\symlinks.py "%F" "%D" --utorrent --dest "E:\YourLinkPath\NEW_STUFF"

This way, you get a new link everytime a download completes! It woks for files/folders, and the original data remains untouched. But be aware: If you change the original data's location, the links will cease to work!

 

Oh, and some programs (including VLC) can sometime fail to open media this way - dvd rips (.ifo/vob/etc) is a good example. But it will work for pretty much everything else.

[PiusX]

If your not uploading the torrent your doing so much work for nothing. All you had to do was have a second HDD like I did install the program onto that drive and create folders for each torrents ie...complete, trash, torrents, download this way in the preferences each goes to the right folder/directory and you don't have to waste the time your doing to move when it will do it automatically for you. And even if you have one Large HDD this can still be done using my same method keeping files separate and saving you time and effort moving and trying to rename when that will accomplish next to nothing that I can read from this thread.

[Wakeforest02]

If your not uploading the torrent your doing so much work for nothing. All you had to do was have a second HDD like I did install the program onto that drive and create folders for each torrents ie...complete, trash, torrents, download this way in the preferences each goes to the right folder/directory and you don't have to waste the time your doing to move when it will do it automatically for you. And even if you have one Large HDD this can still be done using my same method keeping files separate and saving you time and effort moving and trying to rename when that will accomplish next to nothing that I can read from this thread.

 

 Wouldn't this create a duplicate drive - basically 1 HDD that allows the seeding - and another HDD that servers as your media server?

[seanap]

If your not uploading the torrent your doing so much work for nothing. All you had to do was have a second HDD like I did install the program onto that drive and create folders for each torrents ie...complete, trash, torrents, download this way in the preferences each goes to the right folder/directory and you don't have to waste the time your doing to move when it will do it automatically for you. And even if you have one Large HDD this can still be done using my same method keeping files separate and saving you time and effort moving and trying to rename when that will accomplish next to nothing that I can read from this thread.

 

First of all, when OP wanted to know about managing his files and moving them to the right folder he implied that he wants an organized media library (eg. c:\TV\Show Name\Season #\Show Name SxxExx.mkv)  as someone who knows ppl with 13HDD's worth of content just adding a HDD and not organizing (as in 13 large dl folders) is terrible. 

 

Moving and renaming content will benefit you by:

• Having the media named properly (From this: "nogrp-tmnt.bla.bla.bla"  to this: "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (2014).mkv")
• Having the media named consistently (Instead of "tbbt.102.bla.bla.bla"  or "tbbt.1x02.bla.bla" to this: "The Big Bang Theory S01E02.mkv")
• Being organized so that you can actually find what your looking for.   (eg. c:\TV\Show Name\Season #\Show Name SxxExx.mkv)
• With separate folders for movies and tv it makes integrating into plex or xbmc MUCH easier, and with them properly named the programs scrape the correct info 99.9% of the time.
• Making life 100x easier for those with serious collections.

You don't have a large collection, and you probably arn't archiving any of your content.  Also, you may not be using programs like Plex or xbmc either.  If thats the case then you are right there is no need to try to organize a small and expendable folder of shows.  There are ppl out there though that like to archive their large collection of media, which simply cannot be done with your method.  Seriously, remember the old days when you downloaded music off napster/limewire/bearshare etc, and your itunes library looked horrendous with things missing meta data, named wrong or differently and then along comes something like Rdio? Same concept.  

 

The whole point of OP's post was to find a way to not only organize his media but to find a way to seed loooong term.  Although, I haven't found a way to completely automate relocating the seeding file within uT, there is a way to do a bulk relocate using a program called tvrenamer (tutorial here http://www.torrent-invites.com/showthread.php?t=214619)

 

In regards to "doing so much work for nothing", I would highly recommend you take another look at filebot.  It takes maybe 2hrs to set up the AMC script but then it AUTOMATES everything, I hardly see that as hard work.