Saturday, January 3, 2009

Managing Torrent Downloads

My manual process for managing my TV torrents is bugging me. When only a few shows were involved, it was not a problem, but as the list has grown, the system has become too cumbersome.

The list of shows I am following is stored in a text file. The links to the torrent web sites are bookmarked in FireFox. Each night I open the text file to see what needs to be downloaded, and visit the corresponding web site to check if the next episode is available for each show. I get the .torrent file and queue it up for processing that night. I update the text file to indicate those are being downloaded. When the downloads are complete I updated the text file again to show that an episode is available. After I watch an episode, I change the state of the show in the text file. I've deliberately left out the details since I'm just trying make a point.

The entire process is sufficiently complex that I already discarded any thoughts of trying to do it with a simple script. I've started looking at the smaller processes, and seeing which of those I can automate. My personal projects are becoming a lot more interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment