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Automating Bittorrent in Media Center

February 19, 2007

TorrentFreak has a sneak peak of Aufero, a new (and apparently open source) project to nicely integrate bittorrents into Vista Media Center, including managing media, and creating automatically downloading wishlists, etc.

Sounds nice (or it would if I was running Vista MC, anyway), but even though the author appears to be giving quite a bit of thought to solving them, I think there are some huge challenges ahead for anybody that wants to build that kind of wishlist technology today.

There is a really severe lack of standardization in how most video torrents are labeled and classified — often times, the title isn’t even spelled correctly, let alone anything else.

Maybe standardizing on URLs to services like IMDB would help that (at least for movies), but then there’s all the other stuff -

What’s the video format? I don’t wanna watch iPod encoded video on a large flatscreen display.

What was the source? Keep your cammed, telesync’d, r5line’d stuff to yourself, please. Likewise, if there was an HD source available I don’t want to see some letterboxed SD episode of whatever.

Got subtitles? In English? What format?

One disc or two?

…and the list goes on. Beggars and bittorrenters can be choosers, but today pretty much only by actually reading the post that accompanies the torrent — or sometimes even the comments.

Or that’s what I hear, anyway. Not that I’d know anything from personal experience or anything, etc…

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Written by User ImageChuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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