Torrent-Fu

I just finished up the 2 major new features of Torrent-fu: Custom searches and new barcode lookups.  The first by request, the second out of necessity.

I posted before that the barcode lookup service currently in use by Torrent-fu will be shutting the app out. After searching for a new service to no avail, I began compiling resources from around the web in to my own barcode database. It is far from complete, but works pretty good. You can help make it better though. When the new version of Torrent-fu fails to find a barcode you will see the following prompt, where you can enter a name to associate with the barcode, which will go in to the Torrent-fu UPC/EAN database. The next time someone scans that barcode the product name you entered will be used. Torrent-fu will also search for the term you enter too. Hopefully the database will grow to include most items people search for (the current item count is around a million).

Now on to the good stuff: Custom searches.

The new custom search feature uses RSS. I chose the RSS format for a few reasons:

1. most torrent search sites provide RSS

2. RSS feeds are (for the most part) standardized

3. to keep the complexity of adding providers to a minimum (everyone likes things that are easy.) There are 2 required items and one optional item needed to add a provider: a name, a URL (with a token that gets replaced by the search term) and an optional item to specify a non standard tag name to get the torrent url from (usually not needed)

Some pitfalls I found in RSS were:

1. Not all RSS feeds provide a link to the actual torrent, some provide a url to a page where the torrent can be downloaded. If no direct link to a file is provided, Torrent-fu will send you to the page where you can download the torrent, then using the browser integration send the file to your torrent client. If a direct link is provided, it will be treated like the built in providers (isohunt, mininova, and the newest adidtion torrentmonkeys)  for a more seemless experience.

2. I haven’t come up with an easy method to allow users to specify parsing of seeds/leechers/sizes. Until (and if) I do, torrents from custom search providers will not show those details in the search results screen. Torrents that can be downloaded seemlessly will look like this:

And Search results that will open in the browser will look like this:

If anyone would like to beta the new features, comment here or send me an email (you can find my email in the Android Market) and I’ll send you an .apk within the next 2 days.

Hello all. I know that there hasn’t been an update to torrent-fu in a while, here’s why:

It came to my attention that the current barcode lookup provider would be shutting the app down soon (meaning all barcode lookups will return ” “), so I have been spending a lot of time collecting barcodes and compiling a database here so that there will be no need for 3rd party lookups,  terms,  and excess data. The database is a simple UPC/EAN lookup with only keyword info (like title) from products. I will be releasing an update soon that hooks in to this new database and would like to ask anyone who scans a barcode and gets the message that a product was not found to submit a title (directly through torrent-fu) of what it is so that the community as a whole can help each other out by expanding the database. I have found some files on line that have large numbers of CDs/DVDs and their respective barcodes that I am integrating to my data, so hopefully a lot of what you scan will be found. The new data has worked far better on my dvd collection so far

I am working hard to finish the RSS features for adding new sites to the search. If I can I will add them in the release, if not, it will come shortly after.

I’d like input on letting you (the community) enter product names for barcodes that aren’t found. Do you think that is a good feature? Would you yourself use it? Let me know in the comments.