PUBLIC MARKS from holyver with tags p2p & rss

This How-To is fairly straight forward, we’re going to download a Java engine to run a BitTorrent client, along with a RSS plugin which will look for the TV shows we tell it to look for. For our example we’re going to use a PC (Windows XP) but all of this work on Mac OS as well and possibly Linux, but we didn’t have a chance to test that out on the Linux box here. This How-To is fairly straight forward, we’re going to download a Java engine to run a BitTorrent client, along with a RSS plugin which will look for the TV shows we tell it to look for. For our example we’re going to use a PC (Windows XP) but all of this work on Mac OS as well and possibly Linux, but we didn’t have a chance to test that out on the Linux box here.

We’ll be using RSS and BitTorrent to look for and download TV shows. RSS also known as “Really Simple Syndication” is a way to publish information so other computers can read it in a simple and standard way. In the context of this How-To there are RSS feeds that will tell another application where and when a new TV show is available. BitTorrent is a way to transfer files over the web, instead of download the same file over and over from a central server, which will become slow or busy with high demand, BitTorrent uses the bandwidth of all the people downloading the file and sends parts to everyone as it downloads, so the more people who are downloading the better, and the more you upload, the faster you get your files (it definitely ends the free rider problem of other p2p applications). For downloading TV shows, this of course is a perfect match, the more popular a show is, the easier it is to get.

I wanted to take a second and explain exactly how I’m using RSS and Bittorrent to download the television shows I watch, otherwise known as broadcatching. I use a combination of Azureus & an RSS plugin to download the shows, and Xbox Media Center to watch them.

Broadcatching is the downloading of content that has been made available over the internet using RSS syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. The general idea is to use an automated mechanism to aggregate various web feeds and download content for viewing or presentation purposes.