How to never miss an episode with BitTorrent and RSS

In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again. This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent [7] and RSS [8].

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova [9] and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

The how-to:

1. You will need to use Azureus [10]. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.
2. You will also need the RSS Import [11] plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.
3. In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.
4. Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.
5. Enter <code>http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php</code> as the RSS Channel to import.
6. In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page [12]. For The West Wing, for example, I put in <code>west.wing.*hdtv</code> — which means download any file that include the letters <code>west</code>, followed by any single character, followed by the letters <code>wing</code>, followed by number of characters, followed by the letters <code>hdtv</code>, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so <code>west.wing.*hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv</code> would download The West Wing and Enterprise.
7. Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.
8. And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. You should have it in your downloads folder the next day.

And now you never have to worry about re-runs again