New TV Season upon us - Torrents Revisited

With the new Fall TV season just getting started, I thought it a good time to review and update my downloading system. If you've been following for a while, or been reading the older posts, you know I originally was using Vuze as my torrent client and TVRss.net as the subscription center for the feeds into Vuze. Well, TVRss.net went down earlier this year, and has not yet come back up. That led me to look into other options like TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) and moving over to Transmission as a client (smaller footprint in the system and less resource use the Vuze).

After using it for a couple of months over the summer, and really now much more with new shows popping up, I'm just not happy with TED. For example, last night I opened it up to see what was new and Top Chef had apparently started weeks ago, so there were 4 episodes ready for download. Of the 4 episodes, TED downloaded one, and reported torrent problems with the other 3. Not good.

All this led me back to looking for feeds. I decided to go back and really look at ShowRSS, which is an alternative to TVRss.net - which also offer RSS feeds to most popular shows. That also led me back to using Vuze, because Transmission doesn't natively offer RSS subscriptions (apparently there are work arounds, but it seemed like too much of a hassle), and Vuze had been working fine for me.

I have to say, I LOVE ShowRSS.net. I popped in Top Chef, it brought up all the episodes, and Vuze downloaded all 4 in about an hour and a half. Then I really started looking into it. Here's the thing to do, which you're gonna love.

1. Make a free account with ShowRSS.
2. Select all the shows you want to download from the drop down.
3. Under "FEEDS", leave the options as set to default - this will download the highest quality available (so if there is a 720 version and a SD version, you'll get the 720 - unless you just want to select one specific version)
4. Click "Get my Feed address"

You now have one RSS address for ALL your shows! Just go into Vuze, click the "+" sign next to Subscriptions and paste in the RSS feed you copied and Vuze will populate ALL the shows. Don't forget to check the "auto download" in the top right corner of Vuze.

I think this is so nice. You can then go back to ShowRSS and add or remove shows and not have to update Vuze.

In Vuze, under preferences, set it up so your torrents files go one place (like the downloads folder, for ex.) but all your actual avi files end up in your public shared folder, or wherever you have set up for Plex to find them. This will keep things nice and neat.

I hope this works out well for everyone, and if you have thoughts or suggestions, please post in the comments section.

UPDATE 9/13/09: Several comments have pointed out another really good quality app which you should also check out. Automatic looks like a great, low resource app which can use transmission and get shows. I think between the ShowRSS site/Vuze combo or the Automatic / Transmission combo, getting your shows this season should be a piece of cake.

(Screen shots are current shots as of today, so you can see real time results).