[Wishlist] automatic new chapter TV series download

[Miguel Mayol]

In micro torrent, you can add to favorites a Tv serie that should be downloaded each new episode it found refreshing RSSs.
With TED you can do the same procedure mixing it with any bittorrent client.

I would like this feature included as a left - alternative - mouse action over an RSS tittle, as add to favorites leading to a menu micro torrent style or even better.

Also less CPU usage would be a great feature

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

Just so you know, the feature is already there, but not the exact same way.

Right click on a RSS feed, select "RSS feed downloader", then add regular expressions for your episodes.

[Patrick O'Callaghan (pocallaghan)]

Cristophe, this is true but it's really not easy to understand. I've just started doing it and I'm not even sure I'm not making mistakes. For one thing, the regular expression syntax doesn't seem to be documented. If you need motivation, notice that KTorrent has some special magic for detecting TV series and chapter numbers :-)

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

@Patrick O'Callaghan: Most people don't actually need to use regex, but they merely input the TV show's name. Regex is a power user feature. Would it really be useful if qBittorrent detects season and episode numbers? I would argue that most users, just provide a RSS feed, input the TV show's name and expects qBittorrent to download all new episodes. There are usually no old episodes in those feeds, nor any duplicates. The only duplicates there may be are for different qualities (720p vs regular). Parsing qualities would actually be a nice thing.

Am I missing some use case?
What could I do (concretely) to improve our current RSS downloader? and importantly, why would that help? (i.e. what is the use case?).

You said that the RSS downloader is not really user friendly and that it is easy to make mistakes. Could you please point out what's most ambiguous/misleading? I spent quite some time designing the new RSS downloader UI but then again, I'm not a regular user and it is difficult for me to understand what's wrong with it.

Also note that I want to keep the RSS downloader more generic, meaning that it should be usable more anything, not just TV shows. Of course, I could add some TV show-specific features that get enabled only if the user explicitly states he is looking for TV shows. This would be fine by me.

I hope we can work together to improve the UI. I had a quick look at TED's UI but it is very specific to TV shows. I also don't quite understand what is the point of specifying a particular episode number. Isn't the point of using RSS to download automatically ANY new episode corresponding to this show?

[Patrick O'Callaghan (pocallaghan)]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Christophe Dumez <email address hidden>wrote:

> @Patrick O'Callaghan: Most people don't actually need to use regex, but
> they merely input the TV show's name. Regex is a power user feature.
>

All the same, if regex is supported it should be documented. There are many
kinds of regex (Perl, Shell, Vi, ...) with slight variations and it's not
always obvious what applies. To take a simple example (not even a regex
really), what does the expression "foo bar" mean? Is it (foo/\bar).
(foo\/bar), (literal "foo bar")? This isn't specified anywhere.

> Would it really be useful if qBittorrent detects season and episode
> numbers? I would argue that most users, just provide a RSS feed, input
> the TV show's name and expects qBittorrent to download all new episodes.
> There are usually no old episodes in those feeds, nor any duplicates.
> The only duplicates there may be are for different qualities (720p vs
> regular). Parsing qualities would actually be a nice thing.
> Am I missing some use case?
>

Yes. When I subscribe to a new RSS feed I may already have some of the
episodes, yet the feed will typically tell me about the last few, not just
the latest one. The exact rules of what does into the feed are not fixed and
may easily vary from one feed source to another. Furthermore, none of them
I've seen actually tell you what the rules are.

> What could I do (concretely) to improve our current RSS downloader? and
> importantly, why would that help? (i.e. what is the use case?).
>
> You said that the RSS downloader is not really user friendly and that it
> is easy to make mistakes. Could you please point out what's most
> ambiguous/misleading? I spent quite some time designing the new RSS
> downloader UI but then again, I'm not a regular user and it is difficult
> for me to understand what's wrong with it.
>

One thing (which may be a bug) is that it can "forget" what torrents have
already been disposed of. Specifically, I subscribed to a feed which offered
a bunch of stuff I already had. I deleted each torrent from the download
queue and waited for some new stuff to appear, which in due course it did.
However at one point I updated my system and logged out and in again. This
apparently caused QBT to forget which RSS torrents I had deleted and start
downloading them again. Perhaps just deleting unwanted torrents is the wrong
way to do this, but in that case what is the right way? There's a button for
"mark items read" but all these items were already marked read before this
happened.

Also, there's no way to select a group of torrents in the right-hand panel
of the RSS tab. They have to be dealt with one at a time.

Furthermore, it would be useful to be able to tell that an RSS feed is
working, e.g. by adding something to the log every time the feed is
refreshed. Otherwise there's no way to tell the difference between a feed
with no new information and one that isn't working or isn't being read.

> Also note that I want to keep the RSS downloader more generic, meaning
> that it should be usable more anything, not just TV shows. Of course, I
> could add some TV show-specific features that get enabled only if the
> use...