Deluge: an interesting experience thus far

So all my torrents reached share ratios where I felt comfortable stopping them, and I closed Azureus and started Deluge installing.

It churned away for a little bit and popped up something about installing GTK 2.12. Can't it see that I already have it installed? I couldn't install GTK from there because Pidgin was still running and using it. It was the exact same version anyway, so I didn't really need to install, and had I tried it would have failed since it would be trying to overwrite files that were in use. So I pressed on without it and the install finished.

After deleting the icon from my desktop that it never bothered to ask me if I wanted, I went to start it up. I really wanted the web ui, but I figured for kicks I'd start the GUI first. No dice, a command prompt window comes up and disappears immediately and nothing happens. Not even a rogue deluge.exe in task manager.

But that doesn't really matter, since all I really wanted was the web ui. So I start that up and visited the url it told me in Firefox. The url by default is ht­tp://localhost:8112/, but you can change the port, and I promptly changed it to 8147. It pops up asking for a password. I go "lol wut", then notice that there's an FAQ link at the top of the page, so I click that and find that the default password is "deluge". So I'm in. Next it asks about its daemon, and I'd noticed a shortcut in its start menu entry for that, so I clicked that shortcut and sure enough deluged.exe popped up in task manager just below deluge.exe. A neat feature of Deluge is the daemon. It handles all the torrent traffic, regardless of the frontend you're using to view the relevant data and tell the daemon to do stuff.

The extra special neat thing is that you could run the daemon and web ui on another computer and just access it remotely, or install the frontend and configure it to act as a thin client. So if you wanted to have all your torrents running on a dedicated box with a lot of hard drive space, maybe running RAID, etc., it's really easy to do with Deluge. It even has a setting for a directory to monitor for torrent files to automatically start up, so you could just have a torrent dropbox network share and add torrents by dropping the file in it. And of course you can configure it to move finished files to a specific directory when it's done, so once again you could have another network share for that on your file server.

I just might do this once I get my shit sorted out and build a file server. I've needed to modularize my computer usage for some time now so I don't have to worry about free hard drive space on the computer I use for general web access and multimedia. Though honestly all the multimedia would probably reside on the fileserver too, and I'd just access it over the network. net use drive: \\remote-server\share-name FTW.

Anyway, enough about Deluge itself. On to the RSS feed plugin for its web ui, called feeder.

Deluge plugins are .egg files, which is once again neat because you just download a single file, plop it in the plugins directory, and restart Deluge to install them. Then in the web ui you go to Plugins, check the one you want to use, and hit Save. Therein lies the problem, however. Feeder doesn't create its configuration tab when you activate it. I don't even think it's loaded. I added the two plugins it came with, Labels and Blocklist, and both of them created config pages and .conf files, but I have neither a config page nor a .conf file for feeder.

A quick trip through feeder's thread on Deluge's forums found me a possible solution: for whatever reason feeder has an external dependency that it doesn't have the common courtesy to tell the user about, so it just silently fails to load, being the exact opposite of helpful. This external dependency is a Python script called feedparser. Deluge is written in Python anyway, so it makes sense. Someone posted saying "I had to do this to get it to work on Windows" so I went and tried to follow their instructions, but the directory they say to put feedparser in doesn't exist on my install.

I really don't want to have to be stuck with Azureus any longer, but as long as I can't get a proper RSS feed scanner working in Deluge, I don't really have a choice. I'd write my own but that would require learning both Python and Deluge's API, and hours upon hours of debugging just to reinvent the wheel and have fewer features than those supposedly offered by feeder. The thread is full of people who have gotten it to work and/or had it Just Work™. I've posted my issue and hopefully soon I can join the ranks of those who have it working.

Deluge verdict: a nice torrent client. A little rough around the edges but overall very usable with neat features for those who need them.

feeder verdict: it'd be less of a steaming pile of crap if I could get it to load.

Overall verdict: for now, back to Azureus :(

Azureus is now annoyware

Nearly every time I download something it pops up a box asking for a donation. There's no way to turn this shit off in the options. They're trying to guilt trip donations out of people. How many times do I have to say "no I'm not fucking donating" before it stops fucking bugging me? There's no option to say "Never ask again", only "ask later".

What was the last version of Azureus to lack this nag dialog and where can I download it?

You seriously think annoying the fuck out of your users is going to get you more donations? That's not how donations work. People have to want to donate. Otherwise it's just extortion.

If another bittorrent client would add a decent rss feed scanner I would switch away in an instant. Seriously, that's the only thing keeping me on this pile of shit. I need regex matching and the ability to tell each filter what feed it should be looking at. I don't want bullshit "oh we try to figure out what season and episode it is" predetermined shitty matching options, I just want straight regular expressions. None of the stuff I download has a season/episode number in any of the expected formats anyway, it's usually just "[group name] series title - episode number (codecs involved)" or something similar.

I'm going to give Deluge a try. It has a few RSS plugins with regex support. One is really wonky with its formatting strings though. Seriously just give me a straight up regex matching the feed entry title. None of this "oh I want episode [0-9]{1,2}." I want to be able to take my existing regexes and paste them into the new thing and have it work. For instance, my Basquash filter is Basquash\! [0-9]{1,2} \[umai\]. Why does it need to be more complex than that? As long as it's case insensitive or can be globally configured to be case insensitive it's all good.

The only decent looking RSS-with-regex plugin for Deluge is for its webui. That might actually work out better, if I just ran off of a web ui and could access all my running torrents from my web browser. Less taskbar clutter and all.

I can't switch immediately because I have three torrents going (with a fourth destined to come in just as soon as the next episode of Basquash is released), but once I can afford to close Azureus and free up the port it's using, it's go time. I'll probably post a review of Deluge once I get it going and set it up the way I want it and all.

bittorrent bullshit

I'm thinking of switching bittorrent clients. Wikipedia has a comparison of them that's kind of hard to use as it's approximately five million tables on a page and you have to determine the relation of a row of data from one table to the next.

Anyway, here's my story. I currently use Azureus (now called Vuze, whatever) in the classic UI. It has a ton of features, including several which I just don't see the point of.

I've used uTorrent before, and I don't feel inclined to go back to it. Especially not since it sold out to the MAFIAA. There are other, more operational reasons as to why I'm not going back to it. First off, it seemed to blatantly ignore the upload cap I had set. Second, its RSS feed reading/automatic downloading feature only supports simple wildcards as opposed to regular expressions. Regular expressions are approximately 9001% more powerful than simple wildcards and offer much more fine-tuned matching of releases. Perhaps I'll go into the difference at another time.

I will say this now: The RSS bit I mentioned above is really the only thing keeping me on Azureus. After having set it up, I have come to depend on it automatically downloading things for me. It's a pretty nice feeling to wake up, get on the computer, and discover that it's downloaded the latest episode of whatever series I'm watching. To quote Ron Popeil, it's "Set it, and forget it!"

I've been looking at alternatives, but it's tough to find something that fits my basic criteria:

• Open source (i.e. not uTorrent)
• Has to play nice in swarms (i.e. not BitComet/BitLord)
• Freeware (shareware/adware sucks)
• Available for Windows (otherwise I'd just use rtorrent)
  
• Light on resources (number one complaint about Azureus, however Firefox uses way more resources than Azureus does)
  
• RSS downloading with regular expression matching is a must
• Must have the ability to cap upload (most clients do these days)
• Protocol encryption (most clients have this)
• Having an indicator of whether or not I've got my NAT set up right would be neat too, but not required.
• Needs to close when I click the Close button in the upper right corner. None of this "minimize to tray on close" bullshit.
• Could show time left to a configurable seeding goal
• Ability to disable automatically updating the client, "anonymous" usage statistics, or other bullshit
  

Things I don't need:

• Glitzy user interfaces (i.e. not Vuze)
• Torrent "labels" (what are these even for? is figuring out what you're downloading by looking at its name really that difficult?)
  
• Chat (I've got IRC and Pidgin for that)
• Built in features that aren't removable such as most of Azureus' plugins (why are they plugins if they're required?)
• Torrent search engine (I've got google for that)

Of everything I've looked at so far, Deluge appears to be one of the best candidates. Halite looked neat but lacks the critical RSS feed feature (at least, they don't mention it in their feature list). I'm not using the official bittorrent client for obvious reasons (spoiler, it's uTorrent reskinned).

I'm not all that motivated to switch, as Azureus is still 100% functional, and if it ain't broke don't fix it. Yet at the same time I'd like to know what else I could switch to and still use in the way I've become accustomed to using Azureus.

I'm a moron

Last night before going to bed, I changed my configuration for Minami-ke Okawari in Azureus' RSS Feed Scanner, to look at the feed coming directly from scarywater instead of the one coming from animesuki. When I get up, I notice it's downloaded episodes 7-9. I go "wtf, I already have those" and tell it to delete, then immediately facepalm as I realize I just deleted episodes 7-9 off of my hard drive. So now they're re-downloading.

Otherwise, I'm just surfing the internet and listening to Guns and Roses. I found FLAC of four of their albums (Appetite for Destruction, Lies, and Use Your Illusion I and II) a while back. They're in that weird .cue+.flac format, but I don't really care seeing as how Foobar2000 can read the .cue and burnatonce can be made to burn a proper audio CD if I ever need one.

So this new season of anime is interesting. I've watched the first episodes of two shows now, Sekirei and Strike Witches. Strike Witches apparently had an OAV a while back, but whatever. Sekirei is one of those "master and servant, battle royale" series like Fate/Stay Night. Strike Witches, well, none of the females seem to wear anything below the waist, they can use magic, and when they do so they sprout ears and tail. I'm kinda used to ears and tail from watching Kanokon, but it still surprised me. There's this whole post-apocalyptic thing going on, where a mysterious enemy came in and went "RAWWWWR YOU DIE". The only way they can be defeated is through these mechanical combat suits that amplify the wearer's magic, and of course the only people who wear them are female. Oddly reminiscent of Mai-Otome in a way, except I'm guessing there'll be less yuri.

Still up to watch are the first two episodes of Telepathy Shoujo Ran and the first episode of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora. Long title is long.

Also, I wish Doremi would release Mnemosyne 5. I know, you're like "eww, Doremi, a Chinese speed-subber?" Here's the story. I downloaded A-E/Ureshii's release of episode 5 just so I could watch it, but their video quality is atrocious (also xvid, this is probably why). Doremi's subs are getting better and better, and their video quality was awesome (though it was divx 5, so... better encoder settings I guess. It would be truly orgasmic if they'd JUST FUCKING USE H.264). Also, why did they have to make both episode 4 and 5 of Mnemosyne end on cliffhangers? Regardless, eagerly awaiting episode 6.