If you upload torrents, you will have noticed a lot of high level trackers require two important pieces of information to accompany your torrent file. These are media info and screenshots. Their aim is to provide users with details of a video's encoding properties and quality.

Problem is, if you share torrents from one tracker to another on your seedbox, you may have come across the problem of having to download the files to your computer to gather mediainfo and screenshots. Well, in addition to being able to create .torrent files, rutorrent, with the help of two helpful plugins can produce mediainfo and screenshots, making your life a lot easier.

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This particular tutorial will cover the Command Line method while another tutorial here will cover the WEBGUI method.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one suits you better.

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1) For Windows users you will need a program called PuTTY, if you don't already have it you can download it from here. For Mac users you will need to run a pre-installed application called Terminal.

2) Launch the required application and SSH into your seedbox by following your particular seedbox's instructions for inputting the required information (e.g. host name, port, username, password). This will be slightly different between OS.

Once you have logged in, you will be greeted with a welcome message to your shell with a list of commands.

Hi, welcome to your shell

Please use this shell for simple tasks and if you want to use rtorrent via
command line. Note that you are not permitted to compile or run additional
programs not included with your shell already. Any actions that violate
our acceptable use policy will result in your account being terminated.

We have added a few shell commands for your convenience:

command - what it does
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quota - Shows your used disk space
rtorrent-status - Shows you if rtorrent is running
start-rtorrent - Starts the rtorrent daemon
stop-rtorrent - Stops the rtorrent daemon
resume-rtorrent - Go to the running rtorrent screen. Note that when you
finish you will have to detach your screen with Ctrl-A-D
or rtorrent will not continue to run in the background!
start-deluged - Start the Deluge Daemon
stop-deluged - Stop the Deluge Daemon
start-delugeweb - Start the Deluge Web Interface
stop-delugeweb - Stop the Deluge Web Interface
start-irssi - Starts the irssi daemon
stop-irssi - Stops the irssi daemon


intro - Prints this info

3) Now that you have connected to your seedbox via SSH, you will need to navigate to your download directory or wherever your particular video file is located. Remember to use the autocomplete feature to make things easier, all you have to do is type the first few letters and press 'TAB'. The below code is an example, it may be different for your seedbox.

Code:

cd torrents/downloads

If done correctly, you should get something that looks like this.

user@server:~/torrents/downloads$

user@server will be replaced with your own username and server name.

3) To prepare MediaInfo, use the following code. This will generate a .txt file in your current directory which you can then http/ftp download to your computer.

Code:

mediainfo filename.mkv > mediainfo.txt

Replace filename.mkv with your video file name.
Replace mediainfo.txt with an output file name of your choosing.

4) To prepare screenshots, use the following code. This will generate 3 .png files in your current directory which you can then http/ftp download to your computer.

Code:

ffmpeg -ss 600 -t 1 -i filename.mkv -vcodec png -vframes 1 image.png
ffmpeg -ss 900 -t 1 -i filename.mkv -vcodec png -vframes 1 image1.png
ffmpeg -ss 1200 -t 1 -i filename.mkv -vcodec png -vframes 1 image2.png

Replace filename.mkv with your video file name.
Replace image.png with a output file name of your choosing.
You can change the numbers (600, 900, 1200) which represent when the screenshots will be taken in seconds.

Notes:
1) Remember to always use autocomplete by typing a couple of letters and pressing 'TAB' as this will make your life a lot easier.
2) The screenshot portion of this tutorial will not work for ISO/BDMV m2ts video formats.

And your done! All that’s left to do is upload your screenshots to a web host and paste the URLs into your desired tracker.

Hope this tutorial helped someone out there and as usual, if you find any errors or have any suggestions please let me know.