Bridging Torrent and RSS

lerhaupt writes "PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller, is a small php script which find all the enclosures in an RSS 2.0 feed URL, and utilizing Prodigem's new bittorrent API will have a torrent created and seeded for each. As an example of just what this exactly means, Prodigem is now using PEP to automatically torrent the top items found in the del.icio.us popular video feed. In general this now means distribution via bittorrent can be had with almost zero work or duplication of effort."

Comments

PEP source code

[NoInfo]

PEP is less than 400 lines of PHP. Here's the source code for the curious:
http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt

(from the PEP home page)

Re:PEP source code

[tolan-b]

Slight correction:

# : For Bash, PHP and many others

// : For most languages with C like syntaxes (Including PHP as that's the example we have here)

/* something */ : Ditto

<!-- something --> : HTML

Re:PEP source code

[pmjordan]

Sorry to be pedantic, but the comment syntax for HTML is actually , as it is in XML, and also SGML, since that is the 'big daddy' of both markup languages. SGML and HTML actually have more than just that, but:

The Wikipedia Article on comments gives you a list of the comment syntax of quite a few programming (and markup) languages, so I won't make an inferior attempt at doing so here.

~phil

Re:PEP source code

[Anonymous Coward]

# for bash scripts

# for almost every interpreted language on UNIX. You have to ignore the first # because of the shebang, so it's just as easy to ignore it on every line.

Terrible writeup

[Bogtha]

Okay, to clarify a few things:

Enclosures are basically the RSS way of providing a link to an external resource instead of having a normal entry. Think podcasting - basically an RSS file with links to MP3s instead of textual entries.

What this tool seems to be intended to do is take an RSS feed, download all the external resources from it, then generate and seed torrents for each external resource.

For those of you thinking that this is a way of distributing RSS feeds via BitTorrent, think again - the feeds are distributed normally, and this doesn't let existing feed readers do anything new with BitTorrent, they'll still be downloading both the feeds and the external resources though HTTP.

So basically, this would take a podcast, download the MP3s, and generate/seed torrents for each of the MP3s. The torrents would then appear on this PHP page for people to download, but feed readers wouldn't know anything about it and carry on operating exactly the same as normal.

Re:Hmm...

[glesga_kiss]

This was done like a year ago and there have been no issues so far. Remember, most folk will be downloading non-execuatable media, and any binaries will not be automatically executed on download. Downloading pirate binaries has always been "at your own risk". Really, this is no more dangerous than the same number of users manually clicking the link. Neither way is less vunerable WRT viruses.

Azureus and other BT clients already have RSS readers, using Regex's to match media in the RSS xml. This rules for TV series that are currently airing, it's great to return home to two or three new episodes each day. Many BT sites have RSS feeds, however the only one that got it right was btefnet, who had the inteligence not to post the same media twice. Most other sites have moron users who will post a 200 meg version of the file, followed by a 50 real media rip that no one wants but wastes our bandwidth because we get it anyway!! Throw in ratio sites, users dropping in 4 gig "season 1 dvd rips" and you can see why I stopped using it in the end. We just need a BT site that "gets it". Answers on a postcard please...

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're out there, but much less high profile than btefnet.

Re:not-so Terrible writeup

[lerhaupt]

Just to clarify, Prodigem comes with a torrent feed for each user. So once all your enclosures have been converted to .torrents, you can provide people with your new feed. For example, http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/rss/pep_delicious .xml

Re:Video?

[Thuktun]

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Re:SwarmStream?

[shadowmatter]

Try CoolStreaming. Although I haven't seen it in action, some of my friends have (mostly while visiting Europe or Asia), and they say the quality is near-perfect. And this isn't a stupid academic exercise -- it's a real implementation, with up to 10,000 simultaneous users recently. The academic paper, providing the general algorithm, can be found here. Google for more on the implementation.

- shadowmatter

Re:Just another pollutant

[Bogtha]

A RSS feed is chosen by a conscious decision to download a little bit of data at a regular interval. Joe Schmo sets something like this up and we could have 1000's of people downloading gay p0rn when a web site gets hacked, etc.

Firstly, if somebody hacks a website, they can put gay porn on it anyway. This script doesn't change that.

Secondly, if you are objecting to the fact that people can be tricked into downloading unwanted videos instead of simply unwanted pictures, then a) you can do that with normal web pages anyway, and b) it's enclosures that do this, not this script.

But most importantly, you seem to be viewing this as some kind of tool to automatically download things via BitTorrent. That isn't the case. This is a script that sets up a normal web page, with normal BitTorrent links, that just happens to get the original data from an RSS feed.

As far as end-users are concerned, they don't go anywhere near the RSS feed. This just looks like an average SuprNova style web page to them. There's no automatic downloading by end-users.