Automate Your BitTorrent TV Downloads on OS X

Written by enigmax on April 10, 2007 

Downloading your favorite TV show is much easier than it was a few years ago with the help of torrent indexing sites and great software. With the arrival of the open source TVShows application, the whole thing just got even easier.

For those who enjoy watching TV shows but don’t always remember to download them ready to watch, the ‘TVShows’ application may be just what they need - it automatically downloads your favorite TV shows whenever they become available, so they’re ready whenever you are.

Subscriptions to various shows are managed from within the application. Once set, the software runs silently in the background checking to see if .torrent files are available for your chosen shows yet, and if they are it downloads them by triggering an instance of your favorite BitTorrent client and the download begins.

TVSHowsscrn1

TVShows is able to download the correct episode from within a series and offers a choice of video qualities to download - Normal, High and Very High.

TVSHowsscrn1

The open source TVShows 0.2 runs on Mac OS X 10.4+ and is available on SourceForge.

Windows users may like to try Ted, the Torrent Episode Downloader.

Previously: Optimize Vista for BitTorrent, eMule, P2PTV

Next: How To Use Usenet, A Beginners Guide

22 Responses

1 Apr 10, 2007 at 16:28 by Heymbit

Yay! This is just waht I wanted!

2 Apr 10, 2007 at 19:08 by Robert

Is there a linux verison of this. :( Ubuntu anyone?

3 Apr 10, 2007 at 19:25 by Dylan

I just wish it worked with BitMeTV

4 Apr 10, 2007 at 19:34 by madcat

Nice work, it works very smooth.

5 Apr 10, 2007 at 19:49 by Terry

This is THE best thing there is.

6 Apr 10, 2007 at 20:04 by moby

this thing is hawt!! where is the GTK version for linux? even console, and i’d rock it!

7 Apr 10, 2007 at 20:10 by Joe Philipson

I’ve been wanting something like this for some time now.

8 Apr 10, 2007 at 20:16 by InRussetShadows

Man, no Panther version? How unfair! :o Seriously, does it depend on things that are just not available in Panther, or did y’all just have a Tiger box hanging around?

9 Apr 10, 2007 at 21:11 by Joey Joe Joe

This needs to run on Apple TV….

10 Apr 10, 2007 at 21:34 by Jon Maddox

meh, its not getting all hrhd, i’m sure its just talking to tvrss.net, which doesn’t have a very good index of hr.hdtv rips….

11 Apr 10, 2007 at 21:47 by Jon Maddox

it IS tvrss.net, and the app is a big ruby script :)

If you look in the code you can hack your own search query into it.

If anyone has a bitmetv invite, i’ll hack this to work with bitmetv, if they hook me up with one.

Google my name to find contact info

12 Apr 10, 2007 at 22:08 by Adam

Anyone got an idea of what the background process this thing is running is called?

13 Apr 11, 2007 at 03:18 by chris

Hey, TED is java. It works great on Mac too and is free.

14 Apr 11, 2007 at 04:36 by Hello

Can’t you do this already with most torrent apps (I know you can with Azureus and Xtorrent)?

15 Apr 11, 2007 at 10:27 by vincent b.

Windows users may want to use uTorrent instead of Ted… utorrent has much more filters possibilities. After three months of Ted, I gave up, it is mainly getting back facke stuff, bad releases, incomplete torrents.
Utorrent is much more difficult to setup but does a per-fetc job ! ..and actually download the stuf as well.

give it a try, I swear.

16 Apr 11, 2007 at 10:32 by vincent b.

…and still there is a frigging lack of linux applications for torrent! azureus is not a solution as it eats all the system memory, we need utorrent on linux !

17 Apr 11, 2007 at 16:10 by Mike

The biggest problem with programs like this or Ted is that you can’t move the TV programs into it’s separate directory like you can with Azureus and RSSFeed Scanner. (After there finished downloading)

18 Apr 11, 2007 at 23:40 by Ainhoa

This is just what I wanted! But how can I make it work with Transmission instead of with Azureus? It’s just that Azureus is way too slow on my mac…

19 Apr 13, 2007 at 00:08 by Rob

Another vote for Transmission! Best mac bittorrent client.

I have sympathy for Linux users. Someone needs to get on it.

20 Nov 12, 2007 at 22:30 by wildman

хуета!!!, sorry FUCK

21 Jan 11, 2008 at 20:06 by Google

I Think,Ä°t is very nice information…

Hitchhiker Nation

22 Apr 22, 2008 at 17:59 by Philipp

Hi Guys,

Regrettably the excellent “TVShows” is no longer functioning as expected. I found a small tutorial on how to archive the same by using some freely available tools.

http://lipflip.org/blog/lipflip/2008/04/subscribe-to-tv-shows

You need some command line skills, though.

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