Torrent Episode Downloader simplifies the process of locating and downloading torrents of your favourite TV shows to a great extent. All you have to do is launch the application and hit the “New show” button. Once you choose which show you want to subscribe to, Ted will go out and grab the torrents of the latest episodes and drop them in a folder of your choice. I have it set to download the torrents to my Desktop.
Once a torrent is downloaded, Ted will automatically launch it in your default BitTorrent client, in my case, Transmission. If your BitTorrent client has the option to delete the original torrent once it has been imported, the whole process can be made very clean, with no traces or files left behind.
The simplicity of Ted is reminiscent of LimeWire, the P2P application that made downloading mp3s easier than surfing the web. The only problem is that you need to have a BitTorrent client installed. I’m guessing that the Opera browser with its built-in BitTorrent functionality would do. Ubuntu users might have it the best, since the OS comes with a version of the mainline client pre-installed.
Ted is not yet perfect, and still needs some work. Something funny I noticed was that while setting it up, it asked me whether I wanted it to start minimised in the system tray. Mac OS X doesn’t have a system tray! It’s quite obvious that Ted was originally written for Windows.
Torrent Episode Downloader (Ted) is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded from the official site.
