New version of Transmission is out and looks nice.

I'll be downloading the update and checking it out...

Transmission 1.8 released, now featuring support for magnet links


Transmission, the venerable BitTorrent client for Mac, has just received an overhaul in the form of a "huge listen-to-the-users release." From the release notes the following enhancements are included:

Added support for magnet links
Added support for trackerless torrents
Redesigned tracker inspector tab
Quick Look restored for Snow Leopard users
According to the release notes there are over 100 changes that have been sourced from the users. Transmission is free and open source and can be downloaded here.

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).

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