iTorrent

iTorrent allows you to download BitTorrent podcasts from iTunes. It transforms BitTorrent podcasts so that you can update them just like any other podcast in iTunes. iTorrent also has the ability to smooth out the downloads for non-BitTorrent podcasts as well, so that you do not get frequent timeouts in iTunes when it updates multiple podcasts at once.

Technical Details: iTorrent runs as an RSS proxy on your local machine and will fetch enclosures from a BitTorrent network on behalf of iTunes. The BitTorrent content will then be fed to iTunes via a standard HTTP connection.

Prerequisites:

For Windows users, the only requirement is that you have iTunes installed. For Mac users, iTorrent requires OS X 10.3.9 or greater.

Current Release:

The current release of iTorrent is the "alpha-2" release, which means that it still isn't pretty, but it is much easier to install and run. The alpha-2 release can be downloaded here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=163841&package_id=185388&release_id=415006.

Install:

Download the zip file for your computer and extract it to any directory that you choose. Windows users will see an iTorrent.exe program in the iTorrent-alpha-2 subdirectory. Mac users see an iTorrent application in the iTorrent-alpha-2 subdirectory.

Upgrading:

If you have a previous alpha-1 version of iTorrent installed, you'll need to copy the data directory from your alpha-1 directory to the iTorrent-alpha-2 subdirectory.

Use:

Run the iTorrent program, which will bring up a terminal window. On Mac OS X, it will prompt you for an admin password the first time you run iTorrent. After iTorrent has fully initialized, it will display the following message in the terminal:
```
[INFO] Ready on http://localhost/
```
Subscribe to proxied URLs in iTunes. You only need to do this once for each podcast. A proxied URL is a podcast URL with "http://localhost/" prepended to the beginning. For example, say your podcast's URL is "http://podcast.org/torrents.rss". In iTunes, then, you would subscribe to this proxied URL: "http://localhost/http://podcast.org/torrents.rss".
That's it. iTorrent will take care of the rest. Just remember to start iTorrent before you update your podcasts in iTunes. If you have iTunes configured to update your podcasts automatically, make sure that iTorrent is running whenever iTunes is.
To stop iTorrent, simply close the terminal window.