TV RSS Revistied: TED and ShowRSS

We're revisiting TV show RSS feeds because of two people who have made some comments. My good friend John had brought up about a week or so ago that TVSS.net seemed to be down. Of course, this is a big problem to the smoothness of how the setup works, so I started doing some light searching for replacements, but hadn't really found anything.

Then reader Jimbo made a comment post to the blog yesterday. Here is that comment:

Love your blog, as I can relate to your journey into Plex and a cable free life. Check the Plex forums for an App called Episode Linker. It will improve you workflow, byt watching the folder where your TV episodes finished downloads are located, pickup any new file there, fix the naming of the file, or either symlink, hardlink, copy, or move the file to the location of your choice. Finally when it's done, it will trigger a Plex library update. It works like magic: Subscriptions downloaded, naming fixed, filed moved to correct location, Library updated. Your familiy will worship you...You also might want to give TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) instead of your Torrent client's RSS client. Enjoy

JM

I forwarded this to John to see if he knew about this. He responded that he was already investigating a new site as well. So let's take a look at them a little closer.

The two sites are Torrent Episode Downloader (TED) and ShowRSS. TED is a client you download and ShowRSS is web based.

I've played around with the two of them for a little bit now, and my impression is that I think I like TED better so far. TED gives a very nice user interface to the whole process, along with nice graphics, and also something which the RSS feeds don't give you - upcoming show air dates before the season starts. If you look at the screen shots below, you'll see with TED, it shows that 24 has a new episode coming up in September, when the new season starts. ShowRSS, or any RSS for that matter, doesn't give you that information. Granted, you can subscribe and it should start downloading once the show is available, it is still nice to see that, I think - as opposed to getting a "no show, good luck" kind of message.

I've also added the free torrent client Transmission which integrates nicely with TED. You can have TED running in the background and checking for updates as often as you like, or you can just run it when you want TED to check. From there, it automatically finds the shows, opens up transmission, and starts downloading the folder you like. Of course, you can use any torrent client you want, such as Vuze, xTorrent, etc.... I have noticed that Vuze does like to download movie trailers or videos it is pushing even without you requesting - not a lot - just one or two here and there - which can by slightly annoying - but, Vuze does have a lot of good video content all built in. So, if you want a client with video offerings, Vuze is definitely the way to go.

Also, John makes the following observations: "I like the fact that showRSS is not and installed program, but it looks like TED lets you add shows to it, where showRSS has a predefined list (although it seemed to have everything i get)."

I haven't tried out the Episode Linker App for Plex yet as Jimbo mentioned, but as soon as I do, I'll post up thoughts and info. In the meantime, if you want to check it out on your own, you can find it by clicking here.

Click here for the TED Wiki