Tutorial: Automatically Download Your Favorite TV Shows
This is a relatively easy and short tutorial for downloading your favorite shows via bittorrent. When Sophia came along, Heather and I decided to cut back on some expenses. Up to that time we had been using DirecTV and TiVo to record and watch all of our favorite shows. This was about 70 bucks a month. Lo and behold, we could get basic cable for about 15 bucks a month. The main problem was, we couldn't time shift our favorite shows anymore. So I found a free solution. Read on for the details
This tutorial uses the BitTorrent client uTorrent, and the web scraper RSS site tvrss.net. Please note that you can use almost any torrent feed imaginable to supply yourself with television shows. My purchase of an HDTV and Home Theater PC has moved a lot of my feed downloads to a tracker that specializes in high definition content.
First download the uTorrent installer at utorrent.com.
Go ahead and install the program. Open uTorrent. It will default to a screen which will check to see if your ports have been forwarded correctly. Select your type of connection in the drop down box. It will make some default settings compatible with your connection; obviously, you can alter this further. Once this is set, click on "Test if port is forwarded correctly." If the test succeeds you're good to go. If not then you'll need to manually set a port and forward it on your router to the machine running uTorrent.
Go back to the main uTorrent screen and select Options>RSS downloader.
This screen pops up.
Click Add.
Type what you see into the text field. Let me pause and explain what we're doing here. The site tvrss.net uses an html/web scraper that creates an RSS feed to automatically link to Television shows posted on EZTV, VTV, mininova ... etc. To see a list of shows that are being organized and syndicated in the feed go to tvrss.net/shows/. This will have a list of all the shows that have been put through the feed in the past. You can also search tvrss to create your own search based feeds, or check out the different types of standard feeds that are created there.
OK, now, like I said, type "http://tvrss.net/feed/unique/" into the text box, without the quotations. You can name the feed by typing "@@@@@|http://tvrss.net/feed/unique/" where @@@@@ is whatever you want to name the feed, and the | separates name and the URL (We're using this feed because it will automatically only present the first version of whatever torrent is created for that particular episode).
Click on OK. Now, to see what you've done, click on the releases tab.
These are all the shows in the feed. This feed is only for currently airing shows, so it will only have files that are current and less than a day old. If you want to grab old shows I suggest creating a specific search based feed for this via tvrss.net/search.
To get things moving, go to the Favorites tab. You shouldn't have any favorites. Here's an example of what you would type in so uTorrent can parse the RSS feed and grab the download you want.
Following the example above, click add. Type the filter characteristics in. The wildcard characters are * ? and |. Here's some quick examples of what these do: *Colbert Report* will find anything that has the exact phrase "Colbert Report" anywhere in the filename. Colbert Report* would find Colbert Report if it was at the beginning of the filename only, and *Colbert Report would only look for Colbert Report at the end of a filename. *Colbert?Report* will find any files with Colbert Report, Colbert_Report, Colbert.Report, etc ... in the filename (? will include any single character). (Most files are named like this so it's a good idea to use this format. | is an 'or' statement; meaning you can separate a list of conditional searches with |. For example: *Colbert?Report*|*Daily?Show* would look for either Colbert Report or Daily Show in order to start the download.
The Not: field will specifically exclude that phrase. For example:
Filter: *CSI*|*Crime?Scene?Investigation*
Not: *Miami*|*New?York*
This would download the original CSI, and specifically exclude CSI: Miami, and CSI: New York.
Next, select the directory you want it to download to, then select the feed you created ("Mainline Unique" in my case).
Click Close and you're done. There are some other options on there. They exist to further refine what will be downloaded. This comes in handy if you are using a more specialized RSS feed that contains and parses episode and quality information, for the tvrss unique feed, we don't need these options.
Now just wait, and your shows will start downloading after they've aired and had a torrent created for them.
Here's a little example of what mine is set up to download.
Have fun.
Oh if you've followed my other tutorial and modded your xbox, you can watch everything you're downloading on your xbox. If you share the folder you're downloading your TV shows into, you can use xbox media center to watch 'em over the network on your TV rather than your monitor.
Oh yeah, the easiest way to delete the shows, once you've watched them, is to highlight what you want to delete on the main uTorrent screen, right click and select Remove and >Delete .torrent + Data.
This tutorial uses the BitTorrent client uTorrent, and the web scraper RSS site tvrss.net. Please note that you can use almost any torrent feed imaginable to supply yourself with television shows. My purchase of an HDTV and Home Theater PC has moved a lot of my feed downloads to a tracker that specializes in high definition content.
First download the uTorrent installer at utorrent.com.
Go ahead and install the program. Open uTorrent. It will default to a screen which will check to see if your ports have been forwarded correctly. Select your type of connection in the drop down box. It will make some default settings compatible with your connection; obviously, you can alter this further. Once this is set, click on "Test if port is forwarded correctly." If the test succeeds you're good to go. If not then you'll need to manually set a port and forward it on your router to the machine running uTorrent.
Go back to the main uTorrent screen and select Options>RSS downloader.
This screen pops up.
Click Add.
Type what you see into the text field. Let me pause and explain what we're doing here. The site tvrss.net uses an html/web scraper that creates an RSS feed to automatically link to Television shows posted on EZTV, VTV, mininova ... etc. To see a list of shows that are being organized and syndicated in the feed go to tvrss.net/shows/. This will have a list of all the shows that have been put through the feed in the past. You can also search tvrss to create your own search based feeds, or check out the different types of standard feeds that are created there.
OK, now, like I said, type "http://tvrss.net/feed/unique/" into the text box, without the quotations. You can name the feed by typing "@@@@@|http://tvrss.net/feed/unique/" where @@@@@ is whatever you want to name the feed, and the | separates name and the URL (We're using this feed because it will automatically only present the first version of whatever torrent is created for that particular episode).
Click on OK. Now, to see what you've done, click on the releases tab.
These are all the shows in the feed. This feed is only for currently airing shows, so it will only have files that are current and less than a day old. If you want to grab old shows I suggest creating a specific search based feed for this via tvrss.net/search.
To get things moving, go to the Favorites tab. You shouldn't have any favorites. Here's an example of what you would type in so uTorrent can parse the RSS feed and grab the download you want.
Following the example above, click add. Type the filter characteristics in. The wildcard characters are * ? and |. Here's some quick examples of what these do: *Colbert Report* will find anything that has the exact phrase "Colbert Report" anywhere in the filename. Colbert Report* would find Colbert Report if it was at the beginning of the filename only, and *Colbert Report would only look for Colbert Report at the end of a filename. *Colbert?Report* will find any files with Colbert Report, Colbert_Report, Colbert.Report, etc ... in the filename (? will include any single character). (Most files are named like this so it's a good idea to use this format. | is an 'or' statement; meaning you can separate a list of conditional searches with |. For example: *Colbert?Report*|*Daily?Show* would look for either Colbert Report or Daily Show in order to start the download.
The Not: field will specifically exclude that phrase. For example:
Filter: *CSI*|*Crime?Scene?Investigation*
Not: *Miami*|*New?York*
This would download the original CSI, and specifically exclude CSI: Miami, and CSI: New York.
Next, select the directory you want it to download to, then select the feed you created ("Mainline Unique" in my case).
Click Close and you're done. There are some other options on there. They exist to further refine what will be downloaded. This comes in handy if you are using a more specialized RSS feed that contains and parses episode and quality information, for the tvrss unique feed, we don't need these options.
Now just wait, and your shows will start downloading after they've aired and had a torrent created for them.
Here's a little example of what mine is set up to download.
Have fun.
Oh if you've followed my other tutorial and modded your xbox, you can watch everything you're downloading on your xbox. If you share the folder you're downloading your TV shows into, you can use xbox media center to watch 'em over the network on your TV rather than your monitor.
Oh yeah, the easiest way to delete the shows, once you've watched them, is to highlight what you want to delete on the main uTorrent screen, right click and select Remove and >Delete .torrent + Data.
Thanks for the tutorial! Now I have a feeling that my poor bandwidth will never be the same.
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