January 17, 2009 by sharky
Scene-release torrents getting you down? Looking for a simple solution to tackle all those troublesome archived RAR files in µTorrent? AutoExtractor takes all of the hard work out of having to manually unpack multiple RAR files. Finished torrents are automatically extracted - by default to the same path - and the original RAR files are left intact, so that the torrent happily continues to seed as though nothing happened. What could be more clever?
AutoExtractor is a tiny, lightweight application that works by monitoring uTorrent for newly added & completed torrents. When a torrent finishes downloading, AutoExtractor does it’s job by scanning new folders (in uTorrent’s download path) for individual RARs and RAR sets (r00, r01 etc), and then automatically extracts the contained files. The torrents remain untouched, and the original files are not removed or modified in any way, thus the torrent keeps seeding - it’s business as usual for uTorrent. Works with any version of uTorrent (we tested both 1.8.0 and 1.8.1).
Why uTorrent?
"At the moment uTorrent doesn’t support the ability to run a program when a torrent completes (you have to set it manually for each torrent), so this program attempts to bridge the gap. Unlike any other unpacker that I have come across, this one doesn’t constantly thrash your disk hashing rar files to see if they are 100% (and all present) before blindly trying to unpack them. It only tries to extract files when it knows for sure they are finished. This makes it as easy on your system as possible. The only way to know for sure if a file is 100% complete without doing any sort of hashing is to check the program that is creating the file. So therefore this program looks at utorrent’s session data (aka - resume.dat) and works out which files have just finished and can be extracted."
AutoExtractor - What You’ll Need:
AutoExtractor runs on Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista (32bit). You’ll need:
— µTorrent - www.utorrent.com
— AutoExtractor v1.2 - http://autoextractor.enpts.com
— WinRAR - http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm (v3.80 works great).
Installation / Configuration:
Launch uTorrent. Install AutoExtractor, and run.
AutoExtractor should automatically locate your installed WinRAR.exe program, assuming you installed WinRAR to the default location [C:\Program Files\WinRAR\]. It should also auto-locate your "%appdata%\uTorrent" directory - more specifically, uTorrent’s resume.dat file. If needed, go to Options > Preferences to view and customize the settings:
1. — The path to uTorrent’s ‘resume.dat‘. Click the [ ... ] button to change.
2. — The path to WinRAR.exe. Version number (i.e. - 3.80) should also be displayed upon proper path discovery.
3. — By default, the unrar’d files are extracted to the same directory as the source RAR files (aka "Same folder as archive"). Thus in uTorrent, right-click on a completed torrent in the list and select "Open Containing Folder" - extracted files will be contained therein. Additionally, you can change the path of extraction to a customized location by selecting "Other (user specified)" and browse to the location of your choosing.
Notes / Troubleshooting:
If you run into problems where torrents aren’t updating, the log message at the bottom of AutoExtractor may display this:
Possibly corrupt session data (Type mismatch)
Getting torrent state data failed.
Definitively, we don’t know the exact cause of the problem, but we know that it possibly has something to do with torrents that contain .ZIP files. Try removing the offending torrent (in uTorrent), close uTorrent and AutoExtractor, and then restart uTorrent and then restart AutoExtractor. AE is meant as a TV/Movie utility, not for scene-software releases which often contain ZIP files.
Credits for this great utility go out to twiglet at TorrentBytes. The discussion thread can be found in TBy’s forums here.
Feeling energetic? There’s a cool (albeit sophisticated) app called SCRU - The ‘Scene Release Unpacker’ brought to us by CodeBytes - worthy of checking out!
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