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Bridging Torrent and RSS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the working-out-the-kinks dept.

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."

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. anybody... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    have a torrent for this?

    seeds please.

  2. Hmm... by FlyByPC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Automatically-downloaded RSS, distributed over the Net;

    Automatically-initiated Bittorrent downloads;

    ...Is it just me, or with the addition of a few local scripts, does this sound like a virus-writer's favorite fantasy? They need to make sure there are some very good safeguards on this!

    Then again, with Genetic Algorithms, perhaps this is the next missing ingredient for cybersentient life...

    --
    Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
  3. Terrible writeup by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha