Writing an XBMC addon: how do I add a torrent to my home PC over LAN from RaspBMC?

Question

I'm writing an XBMC addon using the xbmcswift2 framework. Building and navigating the GUI was fairly easy. I also wrote a scraper for vodo.net which will be displaying the available movies in the XBMC interface, so far so good. Here is where I need help:

When I select a movie in RaspBMC, I'd like to begin downloading the movie to a home PC running a BitTorrent application connected via LAN.

How do I communicate between RaspBMC and my home PC's BT application? Which torrent application will let me do this? Do I need an API? Transmission would be nice, but any (Linux) application will do. Googling has led me to mentions of something called "JSON-RPC". What is that and is it what I'm looking for?

If you can even point me in the right direction that would be great!

Answer 1

I use 2 different approach.

1) Dropbox recipe:

• Both 2 nodes (PC and Raspberry) has Dropbox access.
• On Raspberry, downloaded .torrent files uploaded to a Dropbox shared folder (TORRENTS) via shell script.
• On PC, Transmission configured to watch and download the torrent files in the TORRENTS folder which shared via Dropbox.

So, when i download a .torrent file into Raspberry, Transmission find the torrent in folder then download starts automatically.

2) JSON-RPC recipe:

I use PERL script from http://bredsaal.dk/controlling-transmission-using-json-rpc-in-perl

This PERL script watches a folder for .torrent files, then request Transmission's RPC interface and download starts.

Answer 2

As you are using BitTorrent, you may notice there is another great product by the same company which called BitTorrent Sync: https://www.getsync.com/, it can sync files from almost any devices.

In this case, you could create a folder shared with your PC and your raspberry pi, and let BitTorrent watch this folder and auto add tasks.

SyncThing is another option, it does the same thing with BitTorrent Sync, only it is open sourced and more light-weight.