Automation
Over the past couple of months i've been tweaking a particular kind of setup to automate the download process of TV shows via BitTorrent.
Even though a significant majority of readers of this blog wouldn't have interest in the details I want to write about it anyway.
Most TV shows are shown in the US and UK at varying times during the day, shortly after they air they get captured and are uploaded to a number of sites so people can download and view them from around the world.
Instead of going to the site directly, searching, scanning through the results and clicking a download link for each show, the process below does it all automatically with notifications (for OSX).
The general gist of it is:
1) An application called Automatic scans a RSS feed from a download site every 15 minutes for a particular show.
2) When it finds a match based on a number of rules (name, date) it downloads the linked file.
3) The BitTorrent application, Transmission, automatically detects the torrent file in the downloads directory.
4) It adds it to the queue and starts downloading the contents.
5) A notification is generated which is sent to an application called Growl which displays notifications on the top right of the screen.
6) If the computer is idle for a certain amount of time, Growl relays the notification to a service called BoxCar which sends notifications to mobile devices like the iPhone.
7) A few seconds later the message is displayed on the device stating the download has begun with the name of the file.
8) After a certain amount of time Transmission finishes downloading the file and another notification is displayed and relayed to the mobile device stating the file has been downloaded.
It took a little while to setup but it's now like a well oiled machine. There are hundreds of ways to something like this but this is my particular way which i've found to work really well.
I've always liked automating stuff; taking a bunch of services and making them all work together, very cool.
Software used:
- Automatic (paid)
- Transmission (free)
- Boxcar (free)
- Growl (free)