HOW TO: Setup and Install Pulsar on XBMC/Kodi – An XBMCtorrent Alternative

There are a few options when it comes to streaming torrents on XBMC. One being Stream, another being Pulsar. I’m here to show you how to install and setup a new torrent finding and streaming engine.

Pulsar is built on “providers” that are separate XBMC Plugins that are used to locate media (typically through website APIs). This serves as a huge benefit for being able to scrape many different sources, and allowing many outside contributors to create providers. This also means if there is a change on one of the torrent sites, the whole plugin isn’t broken, that specific provider plugin will just need to be updated.

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More information:

Pulsar is centered around media: it browses media from TheMovieDB and Trakt.TV.
And so, when you decide you want to watch a media (i.e. given an IMDB or TVDB Id), here’s what Pulsar does:

  • Enumerate the installed providers
  • Call each provider to find the media you want to watch (in parallel)
  • Each provider returns a list of BT links they found
  • Collects and de-duplicates all the links
  • Goes on the BitTorrent network to find out the number of seeds and peers in real time (i.e. not provided by the provider)
  • Finds out of which quality are the different links (thanks to their name)
  • Ranks the links by quality and availability (Pulsar privileges quality over availability, but it’s not dumb. However, you can get a full list to choose from manually it you want)
  • Sends the chosen link to the BitTorrent streaming engine (brand new, and completely rewritten)

All of this is done in less than 1 second.

Pulsar is around 95% Go, and thus, it’s fast. Very fast, actually.

The BitTorrent streaming engine was completely wrote from scratch, and is very resilient (or at least it’s designed to be).
It’s built on top of the brand new libtorrent 1.0 (which had special patches for the streaming case). So it’s very optimised, especially for low CPU machines.
I have yet to find a media that doesn’t play with the engine.

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[alert-announce]Note: This is still very much in beta, and might not work 100% on all systems.[/alert-announce]

Download Repo

The first thing we need to do is download a great unofficial repo that has Pulsar as well as a bunch of other providers.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/icanuckxbmcrepo/files/repository.pulsarunofficial-1.0.1.zip/download

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Download the latest version

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rename the ZIP file to ‘repository.pulsarunofficial

Install Pulsar Add-on

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Open up XBMC and go to System > Settings

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Click on Add-ons

 

 

 

 

 

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Click Install From Zip File

 

 

 

 

 

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Navigate to where you saved the Zip file (to your desktop perhaps) and click on it

 

 

 

 

 

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The repository will now install

 

 

 

 

 

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Don’t go anywhere from here, now click Get Add-ons

 

 

 

 

 

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Click on Pulsar Unofficial Repo

 

 

 

 

 

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Click Video Add-ons

 

 

 

 

 

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Then click on Pulsar

 

 

 

 

 

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Then click Install!

 

 

 

 

 

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It will download, and then become Enabled

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Check to confirm it has been enabled

 

 

 

 

 

 

Install Pulsar Providers (Pulsar Add-ons)

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Now, click back and go to Program Add-Ons, we need to install our provider(s)

 

 

 

 

 

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In this example, we will install the “YIFY2 Provider” Add-on by mancuniancol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confirm it has been enabled

Confirm it has been enabled

 

 

 

 

 

 

[alert-warning]Note: You need to enable “Allow programs on other system to control XBMC”. Systems like Openelec require this![/alert-warning]

xbmc-other-programs-control

 

 

 

 

 

[alert-note]Now, at this point you need to exit, and restart XBMC in order to start the Pulsar daemon. Please restart XBMC.[/alert-note]

Once you have restarted XBMC, you need to go to Videos > Addons

Once you have restarted XBMC, you need to go to Videos > Add-ons

 

 

Click Pulsar

Click Pulsar

 

 

 

Now, for example click Popular Movies

Now, for example click Popular Movies

 

 

It may take a while to load, but when it does you can browse the media. Simple choose the file you would like to watch

It may take a while to load, but when it does you can browse the media. Simply choose the file you would like to watch

 

 

The file will start to buffer, and your media will begin shortly!

The file will start to buffer, and your media will begin shortly!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From here you can then start to experiment with new providers. In this example we only covered Movies, but you could install the EZTV provider plugin which would allow you to stream TV shows.

Hope this helped! Leave a comment below if you have any questions, comments, or need any help.

Thanks,
Alex

 


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