Starting bittorrent downloads remotely from the iPhone

Filed under: Hardware, Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, Internet Tools, Open Source, iPhone

I like Mac OS X Hints a lot, although I will admit that most of the hints they post just aren't for me-- either they're for things that I just don't have a need to do, or they're for things I already figured out a solution for on my own. But lately, I've been trying to figure out if there was a way to start up bittorrent downloads from my iPhone (we've already been able to control clients remotely, but getting the torrent file was the hard part). And so I was ecstatic to see this tip from Whosawhatsis-- with just a little tweaking, you can install a bookmarklet on the iPhone and a script on a PHP server that will send a URL from the iPhone to the server, and then download that URL directly into a folder that a bittorrent client (Transmission is used in the example) will monitor to download the torrent.

Pretty slick. Whosa runs this on a separate server, but while I'd have to read up on exactly how to do it (or maybe our commenters could jump in with suggestions), I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to enable a Mac to run a PHP script when asked remotely. Get that running, make the necessary modifications in Who's script, and bingo, you should be able to click the bookmark and then the link on your iPhone, and have the torrent file show up in your Mac, ready for a bittorrent client to grab it immediately.

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