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Stream Torrents Instantly From XBMC

forum.xbmc.org

184 pointssteeve41 comments

Also important to note that you can send magnet links from Chrome to it (a-la Chromecast) via the Play-to-XBMC Chrome extension.

Supported platforms are:

- Windows x86 x64

- OS X x64

- Linux x86 x64 (XBMCbuntu)

- Raspberry Pi (Raspbian, OpenELEC, Raspbmc, Xbian)

- Android 4.0+ ARM

Slightly offtopic, what is considered the best RPI distro for xmbc?

I tried both Raspbmc and OpenElec. I didn't see a significant difference in performance. Using Raspbmc now. Unless they made some significant changes to OpenElec the past 3-4 months they are more or less the same.

I pretty much did the same, I started with OpenElec because my pi shipped with it, changed to raspbmc because I liked the fact it was debian-based. There really doesn't seem to be much performance difference.

Having tried them all. I went with XBian in the end, their latest updated made it faster imo.

I myself am on OpenELEC, works nice

I tried the three main XBMC distro: raspbmc, openelec and raspbian.

I early dismissed raspbian because of the lack of updates.

I liked raspbmc because it's a debian and it's easy to add more features to the PI but I dislike and used to fear the monthly update. It would often break my installation (the dreaded endless reboot loop).

I like openelec. It feels lighter but it's hard to add anything to it because it's a custom-tailored linux distribution at its core.

Can't see any differences between the three of them xbmc-feature wise. Most kinks (audio gap when playing songs, etc.) have been ironed out now.

I now use raspbmc with auto-update turned off.

I'll just throw my vote in for OpenElec. But by the replies you've already gotten, there really doesn't seem to be a clear winner.

I actually have two RPIs, Raspbmc seems to corrupt more on one of them. I stuck with OpenElec because it works great on both. In fact, to prevent corruption of the SD card, I followed a tutorial and have the data on a USB stick, so the SD card just holds the system, only gets written to on a system update.

How do you install it to RaspBMC using the XMBC interface directly?

Also. what port does it use so that I can set the appropriate firewall rules?

Additional links also relevant for this crowd:

https://github.com/steeve/torrent2http - turns magnet links into sequential HTTP downloads

https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go - Go bindings for libtorrent-rasterbar

http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libtorrent/ - 'efficient, easy' torrent library

I'm also hosting an up-to-date mirror of libttorrent at https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent

Also worth the look:

https://github.com/jackpal/Taipei-Torrent - Taipei-Torrent, a working pure go bittorrent application

Disclaimer: I participated in it.

Cool. How mature is it ?

"It works" in the sense that you can use it as a cli tool to download/share a torrent, much like aria2 would do. It implements many standard features ((multi) tracker, extensions, dht, magnet, ...), with the following notable exceptions:

- no peer choking - no throttling - no LPD/LSD - no PEX

also, its output is quite verbose. All things considered, a very pleasing experience with Go that works. Not used a lot though I'm afraid.

I rigged up Azureus to do this kind of sequential downloading a long time ago once, and it was quite neat, but I didn't share the patch because I reckoned it would be bad for torrent health if everyone started doing this. Isn't that still true, and with Popcorn and this popping up now, isn't it just a question of time before seeders start recognising and penalising sequential downloaders?

You are right, but there's a lot more to it (time randomization, hot spots which are also the most shared etc..).

That's also why the addon is using libtorrent-rasterbar (as opposed to peerflix), and tries very hard to do the right thing as to minimaly hurt the swarm (it does, but it tries to make up for it).

Honestly, I feel this comes a little too late.

It would have been nice with RaspBMC, but I've recently switch to using Put.io + Chromecast. The fact that Put.io has almost instantaneous access to entire torrents is kind of a dealbreaker.

How legal is that anyway, since they're acting like a sort of proxy server for torrent data.

I think they're getting around it by being a strict torrenting service - i.e. when you add a torrent that is already there, you get one single seed for the entire file, and the person who originally brought it in is liable for sharing it, not put.io

That seems like a great idea, but I can't help but think it'll go the way of Mega*.

We'll pay for a year+ subscription, and then the feds will raid them.

Well, it was first released in October ;)

Disclaimer: I am the author of the channel.

Would like to mention SS Plex[1]. It doesn't use torrents, nor XBMC really, but it allows you to stream and download content to a wider variety of devices.

I say "wider variety" because Plex runs on everything XBMC runs on (via PleXBMC), and transcodes files into a format the client supports.

[1]: http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/

I've recently switched from XBMC on a hacked ATV1 to Plex on a MacMini and been really happy with it so far. Having the Plex app on my Samsung TV and then on iPhone and iPad is a great bonus meaning it's trivial to pick up where I left off.

I always thought the "keep watching from a different device" thing was such a gimmick, but I'll go from watching a movie on the TV, then to watching a few minutes more in bed before sleeping then another few minutes over breakfast.

If my 18mo old is lazing in bed with us, I can pull up a TV show he likes, give him some headphones and snooze for a bit longer.

I've been using this for 2-3 months already. The fact you can send magnet links from chrome is what sold me on its usefulness. Thank you dev.

Why can't I find it from inside XBMC ?

Because it's not in the official repo

Of course I know.

My other comment is a hint to the developer ;)

How is this different from the popcorn time app that was posted here a couple days ago? Any reason this is better?

XBMC is probably the biggest media centre software package in the world. It has a huge audience and is incredibly expandible via plug-ins.

Disclaimer: I'm the author

Well, apart from the fact that it existed way before, it also serves a different purpose:

- Last version has 8 providers (as opposed to 1)

- Appart from Win/Mac/Linux, it works on Android and Raspberry Pi

- Tailored for TV (because XBMC)

- You can send "magnets" to it via Chrome (see FAQ in post)

- Leverages a better bittorrent library (enhancing the swarm healthiness)

Would it be very hard to make this work with MediaPortal? I know that the two packages started out quite similar but have forked rather drastically over time. I only ask because despite trying to change over to XBMC a number of times (almost every major revision) I've never been able to make it do what I need it to do and MePo has a much higher WAF when setup well.

Anyone know what the XBMC theme is in those screenshots? It's somewhat more appealing than Confluence..

Looks like Xperience1080+: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=150116

FYI, XMBC works great as a media server running on a Raspberry PI

My dreams have come true. (Commenting to save for later)

Does it provide PeerBlock (http://www.peerblock.com/) style protection? Or can it be integrated into it?

It doesn't, but it could

Peerblock is effectively useless. There's no reason to waste time implementing it.

Why is it useless?

Because it is trivial for anyone who wants to sample a swarm to get a new IP address.

care to share why? I've been using it for a couple years now.

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