RSS can be a real time saver for BitTorrent enthusiasts. Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user. This is exactly what you can achieve by using RSS and these ten handy tips.
For those not familiar with the term, RSS is an acronym that stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It’s a really convenient mechanism which allows you to receive regular automated updates from your favorite sites.
Most news sites, blogs and podcasts have RSS feeds that let you automatically receive updates when a new article is published. However, many BitTorrent sites have also started publishing RSS feeds of their listings, allowing users to download content without having to search for files manually.
In this article we will cover some of the most useful RSS tips and tricks for BitTorrent users.
1. Download via RSS
Let’s start of with the most important part - downloading .torrent files from an RSS feed. There are a couple of BitTorrent clients that are able to handle RSS feeds. Bitcomet, uTorrent and Vuze for example all have an RSS feature. A list of all compatible clients is available on Wikipedia.
The process of setting up RSS downloading differs for each individual client, but it’s not hard to figure out. uTorrent has published an elaborate guide on its website that walks you through the various steps and options. The most important part, however, is where to find the RSS feeds. The next tips will cover this.
2. Search Based RSS Feeds
Most of the larger BitTorrent sites offer search-based RSS feeds. The reason they’re called “search-based feeds” is because they are feeds that relate to particular search terms. For example, if you search for ‘TorrentFreak’ the search results will have a link (orange button) to a feed that will send you updates on all torrents that match this search term.
3. Uploader RSS Feeds
The search feed may work well for less generic searches, but in some cases feeds based on torrent uploader might work better. User based RSS feeds might be a good idea if you want to download all the content that is uploaded by a specific user, aXXo for example. Uploader RSS feeds are supported by The Pirate Bay, Mininova and several other sites.
4. Premade TV-Torrent Feeds
Since quite a few people use BitTorrent as a VCR or TiVo alternative, RSS feeds are a great help in automating TV-show downloads. There are several ways to import your favorite TV-shows into your download queue, but perhaps one of the most convenient is FeedMyTorrent. FMT offers several pre-configured RSS feeds that won’t list any duplicate episodes. The site only launched recently and as such is still in Beta, but the feeds are fully operational.
5. Create a Custom TV-Torrent Feed
Premade feeds are convenient, but impossible to customize. BitTorrent users who want some more control over what appears in their RSS feed might want to give tvRSS a try. With the advanced search options everyone can generate a personalized TV-torrent feed in no time. Detailed instructions on how to do this can be found in one of our previous articles.
6. Download Torrents Remotely with RSS
Instead of relying on content from specific users, tags or searches, there are also ways to add torrents to a feed manually. This can be used to download torrents remotely, so when you’re away from the computer your BitTorrent client is running on in the background. An easy way to add torrents to a personal feed is to use mininova’s bookmark feature. Another service that offers custom feeds, not restricted to mininova is FeedMyTorrents. For both services you’ll need to have an account.
7. Ted
Ted, the torrent episode downloader, is an advanced TV-torrent downloader that makes it easier to import TV-torrents into your BitTorrent client. Ted keeps you up-to-date by checking the RSS feeds of your favorite BitTorrent site for new episodes of your favorite shows. The application comes with several pre-added feeds, so there is no need to find the RSS feeds yourself.
8. Broadcatch with Miro
A great example of an all-in-one BitTorrent solution for video downloads is Miro, formerly known as the Democracy player. Miro is an Internet TV player that allows you to automatically download and watch the latest TV shows, video podcasts and more. These players are especially useful for people who only use BitTorrent to download video files, since the BitTorrent client is built in. Miro is platform independent and comes with several predefined channels. However, you can also add your own RSS feeds for your favorite TV-shows.
9. Read Those Feeds
In the first tip we explained how RSS feeds can be used to download torrents automatically. However, RSS feeds can of course also be used as a notification system. That is, you can use BitTorrent feeds with your regular RSS reader, and decide whether you want to download the torrents that appear in the feed yourself. This way you will have total control over your downloads. The downside is that the downloads will not be loaded into your BitTorrent client automatically.
10. The Latest BitTorrent News
Last, but not least, we encourage every BitTorrent enthusiast to add our RSS feed to their feed reader. Not only will this keep you updated on everything that happens in the wonderful world of BitTorrent, you might also stumble upon some useful tips every now and then. For those people who want to watch TorrentFreak’s latest news, a BitTorrent compatible feed for our TV-show is available here, or alternatively you can subscribe with iTunes.
Do you have any tips or suggestions we missed? Drop a comment!
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30.Nov.08 
TorrentFreak 
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In this episode we go out on the streets in San Francisco to ask people how they feel about internet piracy. We also talk about new style of in-video ads, another ISP being sued, fanedits not liked by studios, and we give away a free t-shirt
‘TorrentFreak TV’ is a biweekly recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent.
We need a graphics designer to make the show even better, if you want to help us out, send an email. For questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to contact the crew at tv@torrentfreak.com.
An iTunes feed is available here, and a regular RSS feed here.
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30.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
An amendment designed to protect Internet users from the anti-piracy lobby has been rejected by President Sarkozy of the European Council. The rejection goes against the will of the European Parliament, where 88% of the members already voted in favor of the amendment, which was originally destined to protect file-sharers from Internet disconnection under the ‘3 strikes’ framework.
When the European Parliament accepted the amendment this September, it did so to protect the rights and freedoms of Internet users. This was much needed, as in recent years, anti-piracy lobby groups have called for tougher monitoring of Internet users and are actively working to erode their rights further.
The amendment, drafted by Guy Bono and other members of the European Parliament, was supposed to put a halt to the march of the anti-piracy lobby. However, despite the fact that is was adopted by an overwhelming majority, with 573 parliament members voting in favor with just 74 rejections, the European Council went against this democratic vote.
In September, Bono stated in a response to the vote: “You do not play with individual freedoms like that,” going on to say that the French government should review its three-strikes law. Sarkozy had other plans though, and in his position of President of the European Council, he convinced his friends this Thursday to reject the proposal.
The rejection also goes against conclusions from the EU culture ministers last week, who sided with the more balanced view of the European Commission, by encouraging copyright holders to work on offering “high quality, accessible, easy to use and consumer friendly” content online - instead of chasing pirates.
Guy Bono was appalled by the recent decision of the Council, which he referred to as “an arrangement between friends.” Not all is lost though, the amendment might pass in January or February 2009, when it will be proposed again. However, as Bono noted, this initial rejection is likely to result in a negative image of European democracy.
It seems that the lobbying efforts of the MPAA, RIAA and others have paid off, and for France and other European member states the road to a ‘three-strikes law’ for alleged pirates is now wide open again.
In France, Sarkozy will now go forward with implementing his controversial three-strikes law. We can only hope that other European countries wont follow this example. What a great demokarzy Europe has.
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29.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
A week ago today, customers of the ISP Orange across the UK and France found that they could no longer access The Pirate Bay. Many of them fired off emails to the service provider, worried that Orange was censoring their access to the Internet. Now, a week later, Orange have answered officially - its customers should have no further difficulty accessing the world’s largest tracker.
When reports from last Friday started to escalate over the weekend, BitTorrent users with the ISP Orange grew more and more concerned. Out of nowhere it appeared that The Pirate Bay was off limits and they could no longer access the site.
Reports coming in from France told the same story - no Pirate Bay and no helpful explanation from Orange, despite many complaints. Many believed that Orange had taken the decision to block the Swedish tracker and they began voicing displeasure.
TorrentFreak picked up the story on Monday, contacting Orange PR for an explanation. After a reminder on Tuesday, we published the response from Orange who said: “Our understanding is that Orange doesn’t block access to any sites other than those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, that relate to illegal child abuse imagery. However, we’re looking into this and will update you again as soon as we can.”
File-sharers live in uncertain times and when organizations such as the IFPI actively take steps to force ISPs to censor the Internet, it’s little wonder that people come to the conclusions they do. So we asked Orange customers to tell us directly if they could access The Pirate Bay or not. An overwhelming majority said they couldn’t, but a few explained that they could, which cast some doubt on the ISP-wide block theory. However, with nothing official coming back from Orange, lingering suspicions remained.
Finally today, an Orange spokesperson responded officially, thanking TorrentFreak for bringing the matter to their attention and offering the following message:
We can confirm that we have not actively stopped customers accessing the web sites reportedly affected. However, following investigation by our network partners, a small section of our Internet traffic was rerouted by one of them which has now restored access to the sites concerned.
As has always been the case, it is Orange UK’s policy to not block customer access to websites, other than to those containing images of child abuse as identified by the IWF.
So there it is in black and white - Orange customers can officially access The Pirate Bay again. As the proof of the pudding is in the eating, we encourage feedback in the comments - are you an Orange customer and has the site returned for you?
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28.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question. The “witch-hunt”, carried out by the UK law firm Davenport Lyons on behalf of Atari, based on spreadsheets full of IPs gathered by a company named Logistep, continues to lose credibility.
For regular readers of TorrentFreak, Davenport Lyons and Logistep are familiar names. For more than a year now we have reported on their missteps, threatening tactics, and especially their reluctance to have their evidence challenged in court.
Recently their efforts to make money from alleged pirates was picked up by the mainstream press, because an elderly couple was incorrectly accused by them of pirating an Atari game, Test Drive Unlimited. It is of course a stereotype to think that people over fifty don’t play games, but with the help of consumer magazine, Which? Computing, the lawyers were forced to drop the case.
If anything, this suggests that the evidence they gather for use against alleged sharers is not as strong as it should be. In fact, this is not the first time that a case has dropped before it went to court. Apparently, the lawyers that represent the various copyright holders will only make their case when they have a sure win - that is, when the defendants fail to show up. Others who dig in their heels and refuse to pay learn that the consequences aren’t nearly as bad as the law firm would have everyone believe.
Meanwhile, thousands of UK citizens are receiving letters in which they are accused of downloading music, games or more recently, adult entertainment. In these letters, they are asked to pay a few hundred pounds, or else they are threatened with the prospect of being dragged through court, where the fine - if the law firm is to be believed - will be multiplied several times over.
There aren’t any precise figure on how many alleged pirates have paid up, but based on earlier comments from the law firm itself, it’s believed to be between 40 and 60%. It’s not unthinkable that some copyright owners are making more from this type of pirate-chasing than they do from sales of their actual products. Quite an innovative business model actually, especially since in many cases it guarantees a revenue stream for sub-standard products that otherwise simply wouldn’t sell.
But now, according to The Register, computer game manufacturer Atari has had enough, as they have canceled their collaboration with Davenport Lyons and Logistep. Exactly why is open to speculation, but it is difficult to find a single positive article about the activities of these companies, particularly when recent and rather more potentially embarrassing actions are taken into consideration. It’s not surprising that they choose to longer associate themselves with the operation.
In a comment to El Reg, Atari said that it will “always retain and reserve the right to protect our intellectual property from illegal copying and piracy.” An interesting comment, since cashing in on alleged piracy happens after the offense, and has nothing to do with protection. However, this statement seems more of an attempt to show that this withdrawal doesn’t indicate that Atari is going soft on piracy.
Of course, copyright holders have every right to protect their material, or even make up for the losses they claim to suffer. Whether it is the right thing to do is questionable though, especially when the tactics are as aggressive as they are in these cases.
The complete lack of transparency in respect of the evidence gathering techniques just makes matters worse, and every negative aspect is compounded when people like Simon Davies of Privacy International speak about facets of the operation in very unfavorable terms. “This is appalling, it breaches a number of fundamental human rights,” he said. “They risk bringing the law into disrepute - just because lawyers can do something it doesn’t mean that they should.”
A great example of where copyright has gone wrong has emerged recently. In a leaked contract between DigiProtect (copyright protection outfit) and Evil Angel (content producer), the copyright was actually transferred in order for DigiProtect to make it available on filesharing networks.
“LICENSOR grants DIGIPROTECT the exclusive right to make the movies listed in Appendix 1 worldwide available to the public via remote computer networks, so-called peer-2-peer and internet file sharing networks such as e-Donkey, Kazaa, Bitorrent, etc. for the duration of this agreement.”
So, DigiProtect makes the files available to cash in on the people who attempt to download the files, but not to protect their intellectual property in a way copyright law was put in place for. In fact, this has nothing to do with copyright protection, they are simply exploiting the system. Probably a good thing that Atari got out before it all falls apart.
The question now is how are the other publishers feeling now that Atari has had enough? Since they are based in the UK, the focus now falls on CodeMasters, who are still pursuing people over Colin McRae Dirt, but does the return on the project cancel out the mountains of bad PR it generates? Time will tell.
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27.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
Until today, uTorrent - the client of choice for most BitTorrent users - was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.
uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005, and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application.
In 2006, uTorrent was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., who continued to develop the application, and promised a Mac version.
The uTorrent for Mac projects started roughly two years ago. Initially it was based on libtorrent, but last year the development team decided to make the client a port of its Windows counterpart. A few months ago, an early Alpha release of the Mac version had leaked to the public, the official release, however, has some significant improvements and is much more mature.
The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta. Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that they are working on getting the bugs in PowerPC fixed as well as back-porting to Tiger. “We’re obviously really psyched that we finally got this beta out there. This is indeed a port of the Utorrent source on top of OSX,” Simon said.
“On Windows, uTorrent is by far the best Bittorrent client out there on a power:performance basis. Following on from uTorrent’s roots, we have continued to focus on only features that users really want, and we have avoided bloating up on lots of clutter. We’re now looking forward to bringing that specialness to the world of Mac-lovers,” Simon added.
uTorrent for Mac can be downloaded over here. Since it is still in Beta, the uTorrent team encourages early adopters to post bugs and annoyances in the uTorrent forums.
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26.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
In February 2008, a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The controversial ruling was under appeal but today, in a move which will delight the IFPI, the High Court upheld the decision to force the ISP to stop its customers from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.
The original court case to force Danish ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay was initiated by the IFPI, the anti-piracy organization representing the worldwide recording industry. IFPI argued that Tele2 was assisting in mass copyright infringement, and that access to the site therefore had to be blocked.
At the time, The Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak: “I hope the torrent community understands what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight this.”
In February, a Danish court sided with IFPI and ruled that Tele2 had assisted in copyright infringement because they give their customers access to The Pirate Bay, thereby copying copyrighted material in their routers.
The decision heated the debate on ISPs filtering the Internet, not least because it goes against European law, which states that ISPs are not responsible for the traffic their users generate. Nonetheless, IFPI booked an initial success in forcing Tele2 to block the site on a DNS level.
However, at this stage, all was not lost. Traffic to the site only increased as a result of the publicity generated by the block, and the decision was subject to a Tele2 appeal. The Pirate Bay also promised that if Tele2 subsequently won, they would claim compensation and use the money to fund aspiring Danish artists who make music and release it for free.
The result of the appeal was announced just a short time ago, and it is not good news for the Swedish tracker, Tele2, and potentially other ISPs who desperately do not want to become unpaid ‘Internet policemen’. The High Court upheld the decision to force Tele2 to continue the DNS level block on The Pirate Bay, so that its customers cannot access the site.
This isn’t the first time a Danish ISP has been ordered to censor the Internet. In December 2006 a court ruled against Tele2 in a similar case, ordering the ISP to block access to Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, Tele2 was willingly infringing copyright if their customers use AllofMP3 to download music.
At the time of the initial decision in February, the IFPI threatened that if it was successful and Tele2 lost its appeal, it would take further steps to force other ISPs to start blocking The Pirate Bay too. Jesper Bay, the head of the Danish IFPI told Computer World today that he expects other ISPs to follow suit, and block access to The Pirate Bay as well.
Whether or not Tele2 will appeal the decision at the Supreme Court is not known yet. More on this pivotal breaking news as we get it.
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26.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
TV shows are by far the most wanted files on BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?
Heroes is leading the chart again, with over two million downloads for the latest episode only.
The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.
Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.
Top Downloads (Recent Episodes)
Top Downloads (All Episodes)
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26.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today, roughly 5 years after this historic day, the founders of the site are celebrities in Sweden, and rockstars on the Internet.
The Pirate Bay its roots lead us back to Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy), a pro-piracy organization which was founded in August 2003. Since there was no filesharing network in Sweden at the time, Piratbyrån decided to launch one, using the relatively new BitTorrent protocol.
Peter Sunde (Brokep), one of the co-founders together with TiAMO and Anakata, later said that their initial goal was to build a Scandinavian BitTorrent community. “At this time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay.”
When the site launched exactly remains a mystery though, as we read on The Pirate Bay blog. “The official birth date of the site is not 100% sure. We’ve been discussing it back and forth the past week and decided that screw it, you don’t need to know which day. We’ll celebrate anyhow!”
The hardware setup was really primitive initially. When the site launched it was hosted in Mexico, where Anakata hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. The site moved to Sweden later, where Fredrik hosted the tracker on his laptop for a while, But, as the site grew, it had to move on to a more powerful setup.
The Pirate Bay soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and over 60.000 torrent files. Around the same time, the founders also noticed that not only Scandinavians were interested in their site. In fact, 80% of their users case from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on.
Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 in 2005. Its popularity didn’t go by unnoticed in Hollywood either. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided, following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.
The raid brought the site into mainstream press, not in the least because it came back online within three days. All this publicity consequently resulted in a huge traffic spike, sorting quite the opposite effect of what Hollywood had hoped for. In the years that followed, ISPs in other countries including Denmark and Italy were forced to ban the site, again it only increased The Pirate Bay’s popularity.
Last week the tracker reached another milestone, as it broke the 25 million peers mark. This effectively means that at any given point in time, more than 25 million people actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker. Not worried by the upcoming court case in 2009, the ship sails on, larger than ever before. That is certainly something to celebrate.
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25.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
The Pirate Bay isn’t new to the experience of being blocked by European ISPs. Now, according to many customers of the ISP Orange, it has been impossible to access the site for the last five days, unless they route their traffic through a proxy. Are Orange really taking the bold step of censoring the world’s largest tracker?
Orange is a very large ISP, serving more than 10 million customers across the UK, France, Spain, Switzerland and several other countries.
No stranger to criticism, in March 2007 UK consumer protection TV show ‘Watchdog’ held a survey which deemed Orange to be the worst ISP in the UK, with the most unreliable broadband service. The survey revealed that the company also had the greatest number of dissatisfied customers and, if recent reports prove correct, Orange are about to start accumulating a few more.
Last Friday, reports started coming in from UK Orange Broadband users, all of them complaining that they can no longer access The Pirate Bay. Initially it seemed that the difficulties could be related to technical issues but as the days have passed, the situation hasn’t changed. Worryingly, the situation is mirrored by Orange customers in France who are also complaining the ‘bay is off-limits.
Some Orange customers with this problem remembered that when The Pirate Bay was blocked in Italy, a new domain was setup (labaia.org) to sidestep the restrictions, but unfortunately this domain is inaccessible to them too. However, many are finding that if they use a proxy site, such as BlockedSiteAccess.com or Megaproxy, The Pirate Bay reappears.
Customers have been complaining to Orange themselves, who haven’t given any indication of how to successfully solve the problem, while neither confirming nor denying claims of a block. Yesterday, TorrentFreak contacted Orange’s PR company for comment and, after a reminder today, received this response:
Our understanding is that Orange doesn’t block access to any sites other than those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, that relate to illegal child abuse imagery. However, we’re looking into this and will update you again as soon as we can.
Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they are aware of the problem and are looking into it.
We will update this post as soon as Orange respond definitively, but in the meantime, if you are an Orange customer we would like to hear of your experiences in the comment section.
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25.Nov.08 TorrentFreak Comments Off
