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)

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...