Disclaimer: qBittorrent is not the torrent client I usually use. I have been learning qBittorrent along while I write this post. I normally use Transmission which does not seem to offer this feature, but I have been using Transmission together with Flexget instead. The reason why I chose to cover qBittorrent instead is because 1.) I think it’s easier to setup 2.) the guide is partially adaptable to other clients like Deluge (which offers RSS feeds as a plugin) 3.) It is an experiment which results will determine if I switch to qBittorrent instead.
Preliminary steps
For an introduction to RSS you can go here. (and also other posts on my blog tagged #rss) TL;DR: RSS is a file format, containing a list of items (usually a list of articles, blog posts, or new webcomic pages) and a website that supports RSS provides a way to access these items under a specific address. An application (“RSS client”) will then periodically access this file to check for new items.
We can do the same for torrents.
- Enable RSS reader in View -> RSS reader. This will add a new tab for RSS feeds.
2. As the warning tells us “Fetching of RSS feeds is disabled now! You can enable it in application settings.”. So let’s go to Tools -> Preferences.
3. Select “Enable fetching RSS feeds”. In addition, also select “Enable auto downloading of RSS torrents” because we will need that later.
Getting the RSS feed
I will be demonstrating this with a website with an address that consists of two parts, first one is the word “meow” translated to Japanese and the second is the top-level domain of Slovenia.
So I heard there is this good anime airing lately that’s called “Dungeon Meshi” so let’s try searching for it. Select “Anime - English-translated anime”
We’re getting a lot of entries, so let’s filter it down a bit. My usual strategy is sorting by the number of seeders, which means there’s a lot of people owning complete copy of it and likely resulting in faster downloading speeds.
From there I also pick by file size, quality (480p vs 720p vs 1080p), by group distributing it, and by other factors (like: I personally don’t need a Dual Audio because I only watch subs).
From these I settled on picking releases made by “EMBER” so I select the release
The username is “Ember_Encodes” so I click on it, in order to filter the page and search for the torrents releases only done by that specific user.
At which point I select “Anime - English-translated”, and type “dungeon meshi 1080p” in order to filter by quality and anime name
The list of anime looks to be all the exact episodes I want, and so I click the RSS button
This brings up this file, of which all the entries are not really interesting to us on their own, but we do have the URL of the RSS feed in the address bar, so let’s copy it. This is the exact thing we need for the next stage.
Adding the feed to qBittorrent
Go to the RSS tab, click “New subscription” and the address from the clipboard will appear in the new window. Let’s confirm it that it is the address we want to add.
It looks like it is, so let’s proceed with “OK”.
The entries seem to be listed correctly. The entries are highlighted as “unread”. Autodownloading is not active yet, however. Let’s click the “RSS Downloader” button on the top right.
Let’s add a new rule and name it “dungeon meshi”
Using different rules you can set the target directory, and filter unnecessary episodes if your torrent site lists too many entries. You can also selectively choose whether the new entries are to be added paused, or downloaded immediately.
The most important part is choosing the feeds the rule applies to, since we so far have only one RSS feed, we can add this one.
Upon clicking close, we can see all the entries change color which indicates they have been marked as read by the automatic downloader and added to downloads.
From this point on, every new episode will get automatically added and downloaded.