We first covered the application in early 2007, and in the years that followed it gathered a healthy user base.

However, the developers decided to quit, for a quite unusual reason; they don’t want people to pirate anymore.

Below is an excerpt of the farewell message from the TVShows coders.

“At first, as you can probably can see, the application seemed harmless and it was a perfect match for our situation. But something changed on September 1, 2010, that has bothered us ever since: Apple had suddenly started releasing 99¢ ad-free TV show rentals. It wasn’t for all shows but it was a start and it was a great one. We could finally legally rent episodes at a price that wouldn’t break our piggy banks.”

“Over the next few months we found ourselves employed and started renting episodes of the shows we missed on TV. In the background, Ember Code began to take a much more legitimate spin and we started producing applications that stopped infringing on the content of other providers. The more we coded on these projects the happier we became and the more we started to dislike spending so much of our time supporting a free application that could potentially hurt other content providers and endager our own futures. It was time to end the development of TVShows.”

“We know a lot of people enjoyed the application, and unfortunately some still won’t be able—or want—to rent episodes from Apple. We understand that not all episodes are rentable yet, and we also know that there will always be piracy of TV show episodes using plenty of other applications that perform the same role TVShows did. We also realize that we won’t be persuading anyone to start paying for episodes they’re already used to pirating, just like no one can persuade us to change our minds about something we feel so strongly about. But we can’t remain part of a scene that we no longer support—a scene that could potentially endanger our own futures and others.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Some people are using TED, which is a Java app running continuously which may cause resource issues for the under-powered computer. Others might choose to use directly the RSS support built into torrent clients, explained in this previous article, or go for software such as Miro.

But for those of you out there who like to get a little more hands-on and aren’t afraid of a basic command line, read on.

TorrentFreak reader Lipflip has come up with an alternative method for OSX and probably Linux users too. He told us that everything TVShows did can be achieved by using some freely available tools like cron and a script pyTVShows that is based on the original TVShows application.

pyTVShows does the actual work by checking tvrss.net for torrents and downloading them if new ones are available. Lipflip has published a simple tutorial on how to setup the different components so that everything is working as expected. Although you don’t have to be an uber-geek to follow the tutorial, Lipflip notes that some basic command line skills are required which should help users to get their shows until the new TVShows is released.

The original TVShows application consists of two parts:

1. A front-end for fetching a list of shows and for subscribing/unsubscribing.
2. A python script in the back-end, that regularly asks tvrss.net if new episodes for the subscribed shows are available.

Luckily TVShows is an open source application, so after the development of TVShows stood still for several months, the back-end forked away as the separate pyTVShows project. We’ll use this to build a system that fetches your favorite television shows automatically.

The installation consists of a few easy steps. Python already ships with Leopard, so you don’t have to hassle around with fink or other ways to bring Python onto your computer.

1. Preparation

Open Terminal.App and create a bin/ directory under your home. You can use this directory to store small scripts or little unix-like applications.

$ mkdir /Users/YOU/bin

Download pyTVShows, unzip it, and put it as pytvshows-0.2 in your bin/ directory.

Download feedparser, unzip it, and install it.

$ cd /Users/YOU/Downloads/feedparser-4/
$ python setup.py install

2. Create a preliminary configuration file

pytvshows settings are stored in /.pytvshows.cfg. Create it and add one or two shows for testing.

$ nano ~/.pytvshows.cfg

The format of the configuration file is pretty simple. The name of the show is enclosed by squared brackets, followed by the last season/episode you have seen.
So the next episode downloaded for Favorite Show from the example below will be Season 1, Episode 2. Try episode = 0 for catching the first episode of a new season.

[Favorite Show]
episode = 1
season = 1

[Another Show]
episode =1
season = 4

See pytvshows’ documentation for further details.

3. Create a little wrapper script

Create a little wrapper script that calls the actual pytvshows, but hides any command line arguments you might want to use. Don’t forget to make it executable.

$ nano ~/bin/tvshows.sh
$ chmod a+x ~/bin/tvshows.sh

A typical tvshows.sh might look like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo -n “tvshows.sh – “; date # log current date & time (cron.log)
/Users/YOU/bin/pytvshows-0.2/pytvshows –output_dir=/Users/YOU/Downloads/

This will call pytvshows and tell it to download new .torrents into Leopard’s Downloads folder. This folder is usually represented as a stack in your dock. You might consider configuring your favorite BitTorrent client to watch this folder for new .torrent files.

Check it for typos by executing the script:

$ ./bin/tvshows.sh

It should download unseen episodes of the shows configured in ./pytvshows.cfg.
If it doesn’t try running pytvshows with the parameter --verbose. The configuration file will be rewritten each time a .torrent was downloaded. So maybe it doesn’t download new episodes because it thinks it already did.

4. Run tvshows.sh periodically

Unix-like systems usually come with a time-based scheduling service called cron. It is driven by rather cryptic looking configuration files called crontabs. In this case we’ll tell cron to run our newly created tvshows.sh twice an hour.

Edit your crontab:

$ crontab -e

If you’re thrown into vi you may try export EDITOR=nano beforehand.

Your crontab should look like this:

# run twice an hour
12,42 * * * * /Users/YOU/bin/tvshows.sh >> $HOME/bin/cron.log 2>&1

This tells cron to call tvshows.sh on 12 resp. 42 minutes past the hour. All output (STDERR and STDOUT) should be send to /Users/YOU/bin/cron.log.
Take a look at man crontab for further information.

It’s strongly suggested to randomize the numbers above. Otherwise too many pytvshows might be querying tvrss.net simultaneously.

5. You’re probably done

Check your configuration by looking at ~/bin/cron.log.

Have fun!

Lipflip’s blog can be found here

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

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.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.