How to use rTorrent

rTorrent is a BitTorrent client for the WD TV. It will download torrents any time your WD TV is on, so if you leave it on even when you are not watching TV it will continue downloading torrents in the background.

Installation

As of firmware version 4.2.1, rTorrent is included in the base package. However, you will need to do a few things in order to configure it properly.

Prepare the Torrent Drive

• On the hard drive that you will store your torrents on, create an empty file named '.mnt' in the root of the drive.
• Also in the root of that drive, create a folder called "rtorrent".
• Reboot your WD TV.
• The drive should now be mounted in the directory /tmp/mnt with a name like B0BE-456Y77 - it will be a random combination of capital letters and numbers. Find out what this is by either ssh'ing or telneting into your box and looking for it under /tmp/mnt, or from the file manager in webend look for it in /tmp/mnt. If you have multiple drives connected to your computer, you will see multiple mounted directories. In this case, you will need to look inside each of those folders to determine which one is your hard drive.
• Save this information for the next step.
• telnet or ssh into your WD TV and set the permissions on the rtorrent folder so that it is writable. Do this using the command below. In this example, the drive was mounted at /tmp/mnt/ABC123-XYZ.

 chmod 777 /tmp/mnt/ABC123-XYZ

Editing your configuration

On the USB key that you used to install b-rad's firmware, edit the file S00-custom-options. Make the following changes:

• Uncomment this line:

 config_tool -c RTORRENT=ON

• Uncomment this line:

 config_tool -c RTORRENT_DIR=/tmp/mnt/123ed956-1256-4825-9e79-86fc1e0febaa/

• Change everything after /tmp/mnt to the name of the folder that your drive is mounted on (using the folder name you found in the last step). For example:

 config_tool -c RTORRENT_DIR=/tmp/mnt/ABC123-XYZ

Troubleshooting

Torrents Not Downloading

If your torrents aren't downloading at all, your router may not know how to route traffic to your WD TV properly. If this is the case, you can forward torrent traffic to your WDTV .

Speed Up Torrent Downloads

Many ISPs now slow down torrent traffic to the point of unusability. Specifically, once they see torrent files start to download on your computer, they will drop that connection.

If rTorrent seems to be sending uploads quickly but downloads are very slow, then this is likely the issue. The way to get around this is to encrypt your torrent traffic using the following steps.

• Log into the WDTV web frontend. Click the "rtorrent" link in the left-hand navigation. Click "stop rtorrent".
• On your WDTV, edit the file /conf/rtorrent.rc. You can do this either by logging into the WDTV using SSH or Telnet and editing using vi or Nano, or you can download the file to your computer from the "file manager" in the web frontend, make the changes using a text editor, and re-uploading the file.
• Add the following line to the file:

encryption = allow_incoming,try_outgoing,require,require_RC4,enable_retry

• In the web frontend, click on the "rtorrent" link again. Click "start rtorrent".
• It may take a while for rTorrent to re-check all of your existing downloads (you can tell this is the case if the status of the file in rtorrent is "checking"). After this is done, though, you should see a 10x to 100x improvement in download speeds.