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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Better yet, Transmission allows you to run the torrent client/daemon on a server and only GUI on your computer (there's even an Android app somewhere). Or you can just go with rTorrent, and control it over ssh.

That way you use bandwidth where it's cheap and don't tax your, often battery-bound, local device.

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If you use rtorrent, check out Transdroid, it's a pretty nice Android frontend. The main advantage is that you can simply open a magnet link with it, and it'll automatically push it to rtorrent, instead of having to copy-paste between the app and your SSH client.

I tried to set up Transdroid on multiple occasions, both with commercial seedboxes and ones that I've set up my self - to no avail every time. Right now I use instead Flud on my phone, Transmission on my laptop, and rtorrent on a DO droplet for when I want to quickly download something (and then stream it over ssh + cat + mplayer).

That DO setup is really interesting. Care to elaborate?

I install rtorrent on the droplet, and open the torrent (which I scp onto the box) or magnet.

  apt-get update
  apt-get install rtorrent
  rtorrent file.torrent // use ctr + q to quit

Then I

  ssh user@host cat movie.mkv | mplayer -

on my laptop. I use an existing droplet most of the time, however you could easily set up a new droplet each time with tugboat for example - you don't need to install anything extra or do any more setup after rtorrent for this to work. Although you should use .rtorrent.rc if you're going to be doing any serious torrenting, you can just get away with running rtorrent in screen if you want to seed for a bit.

This works fine for most usage cases, however you can't go forwards/backwards in my experience, and the stream will fail if you experience network issues - you'll need to download the whole thing from your droplet to your local computer if that happens.

How do you benefit from this over using a seedbox from a dedicated seedbox host? Is it just because you use droplets that you've already spun up and are using for other things?

The cheapest seedbox I've used that was usable was 10$ per month. You're definitely paying for the support and the time they put into making sure everything runs smoothly. With DO I already have droplets that are running well under capacity most time regardless, so there isn't any added cost. Also, if you want to just download a torrent, you can launch a droplet and delete it as soon as you're done - which will cost a couple of cents at most.

Regarding network issues, increasing the mplayer cache can help. I always increase -cache and -cache-min when I'm streaming.

For bettering the mplayer experiences (but quite a bit more involved setup), perhaps one could use a web server like nginx which can server byte range requests. Better to also configure it to only do HTTPS, with some self-signed certificate.

I haven't tested it, but I believe it should work.

I would imagine the steps would be something like this:

1. Create droplet. 2. install rTorrent. 3. Setup any additional services/software you require (i.e. ruTorrent, SSH, etc.). 4. Create snapshot.

I honestly don't see much benefit to this setup other than the fact you can pay for droplets on an hourly basis, and not run the droplet constantly.

Have you followed the tTorrent RPC setup [1]? As long as you have that working, it's just a matter of configuring the hostname/port and authentication in Transdroid.

[1] https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent/wiki/RPC-Setup-XMLRPC

Or you can run a web gui on the server and connect to it's web interface

Yes, transmission-daemon's web interface is the shit. Lets me use my VPS as a mini "seed box".

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