Subscribe to TV Shows via BitTorrent

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Submitted by lipflip on 2008, April 22 - 20:51

Every current television show is available on BitTorrent and most of the .torrent's are syndicated via RSS-feeds. TVShows was a great application that hid all the RSS stuff and allowed easy show subscription with some mouse clicks.

Regrettably it doesn't function any longer, as it is blocked by its feeder websitebut I don't know exactly why. For some people -- like me -- it stopped working, for others it's still working fine. .

I wrote an easy tutorial that describes how to restore that functionality with some freely available tools. This article is written for users of OS X Leopard, but it should apply to Linux as well. Read it over at TorrentFreak.com.

PS: In the past this tutorial was hosted here and as a slightly modified version over at TorrentFreak. I think it's a good idea to remove the tutorial from here and just point to torrentfreak.com, so that additional comments, questions and tips pool up in a single place.

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Comments

Subscribe to TV... (not verified)

2008, April 23 - 15:04

[...] blog can be found here Saved in: Tutorial & How To, Tv-Torrents | Tagged [...]

Torsten Curdt (not verified)

2008, April 23 - 16:41

Nice. But I have completely abandoned that workflow and just integrated the tvrss feed into my daily feed reading process. So with tvrss the torrent is only a click away in my feed reader. *shrug*
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lipflip

2008, April 23 - 20:15

yeah. i did this too for quite some time. however tvrss usually publishes multiple .torrents per episode -- which is rather annoying.

Dids (not verified)

2008, April 26 - 12:49

This doesn't seem to work anymore, does it? I'm trying to do this on linux, but all the output I'm getting (with verbose) is: pytvshows 0.2 Loading configuration file... Saving configuration file... While tvrss has multiple feeds, I chose series from the eztv feed (eg. CSI, Numb3rs, multiple ones just to test if it works), but it's a no go.
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lipflip

2008, April 26 - 13:30

Hmm. Strange. It just downloaded a new .torrent to my box. The author of pytvshows [suggested](http://torrentfreak.com/subscribe-to-tv-shows-using-bittorrent-on-osx-080423/comment-page-1/#comment-357414) using the most recent version of pytvshows from svn. A version 0.3 should be released soon. I'll update my tutorial when it is.

Subscribe to T... (not verified)

2008, April 27 - 07:36

[...] Lipflip’s blog can be found here [...]

Bittorrent &amp... (not verified)

2008, May 7 - 11:30

[...] AfterDawn.com: News wrote an interesting post today on [from pht] Subscribe to TV Shows via BitTorrent | lipflip.orgHere’s a quick excerpt bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by pht to tv python shows torrent download script and saved by  others… [...]
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lipflip

2008, May 15 - 11:40

read this if you want to run Transmission (or anything else) when new torrents have arrived. http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1962540&forum_id=726961

Happy birthday ... (not verified)

2008, May 27 - 00:00

[...] 2nd: Subscribe to TV Shows via BitTorrent [...]

corewerkz (not verified)

2008, June 6 - 04:45

what about TVShows.app (free)? cool article, but i can't believe no one has mentioned the free app TV Shows. it lists MAD tv shows and easily and automatically downloads them. for more info, check out this article i wrote about it on corewerkz.com. brian
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lipflip

2008, June 6 - 09:46

Well, as i pointed out in my post, TV Shows has some issues and stopped working for many people. TV Shows was absolutly great. But it stopped downloading torrents and frequently "forgot" my subscribtions.

corewerkz (not verified)

2008, June 6 - 17:39

ahhh... didn't see that at the top upon first reading. personally, i tried TVShows about a year ago.... didn't work right. basically it did what you say, wouldn't download shows randomly, etc. then about 6 months ago I gave it another shot. I don't know if it had been updated or what, but it worked (just about) perfectly. been using it for about 1/2 a year now with shows being downloaded daily (i.e. colbert, house, lost, etc). it seems like finding a fix for tvshows may be easier than these directions, but i guess i just like to stay away from command line stuff in general. peace, brian