Update: Ember Code has ended the service of TVShows. It is no longer available. More detail here.
Update: Look like someone has taken over the project. It is now call TVShows 2.
Are you one of those people who love watching TV but find it difficult to set your time to match your favorite shows? Then maybe you are also one of those who rely on the internet to catch up with the latest episodes, and watch them at your own convenient time.
Among the many available ways, torrent might be the most popular one. But, no matter what method that you choose, the effort of tracking and downloading TV torrents manually requires quite an endeavor. Luckily, there are some applications that you can use to automate the process. One of the most popular applications is java-based multi-platform TED – even though it’s a bit resource-hungry. But, if you are a Mac user, you can use a native Mac app called TV Shows.
Let The Show Begins
TVShows is a simple app that will let you “subscribe” to TV shows’ torrents. It will use a background process to periodically check the availability of the torrents, so you don’t have to open it all the time. This app will not download the actual files, so you will need a separate torrent client to do that.
When you open the app for the first time, TVShows will update its list. You can manually update the list by clicking the “Update List” button on the menu bar.
There are tons of shows on the list that you can subscribe to. But before going through the subscription process, let’s take a peek at the “Preferences“.
You can see two tabs here. The first tab is “General“. Here’s the place to enable/disable TVShows. You could also set how often the app should check for the availability of new episodes of the shows that you’ve subscribed to.
The “Torrents” tab is where you define the quality of the movies that you want to download and the location where you want to save the torrents. Please note that the higher the quality that you choose, the bigger the size of the movie files. Normal quality is the default choice which gives you good quality movies with acceptable file size.
Subscribing To The Shows
Now let’s continue to the subscribing process. To find the show that you want to subscribe, you can browse the list manually and pick few of the items. But, if you already know what show that you want, the easiest way is to use the search feature. Write down the title of the show and the result will pop up on the list pane. Next, click the “Subscribe” button to start.
The subscription window will open, and you can choose to start your subscription with the next aired episode (perfect choice if you’ve already followed the show manually) or to start from anywhere within the episode list.
If the show that you want is still in the beginning, there’s a chance that you can start from the first episode. But, if the show has gone for some time, you might still need to catch up with the early episodes manually.
Repeat the “Search and Subscribe” process for the other shows that you like.
After that, all the shows that you are subscribed to will also be listed on the main window, along with information about “the last seen episode“. You can also find the “Unsubscribe” button next to it should you want to stop following the show.
When TVShows Meets Transmission
The next step that you need to take is to integrate the subscription system with a torrent client. The most popular choice for Mac users is Transmission.
Setting up Transmission to pick up torrents from TVShows is easy. Open the “Preferences” and go to the “Transfer” tab. Check the “Auto add” box and set the location to watch torrent files to be the same as the location where you save downloaded torrents in TVShows.
After that, you can leave the system to run automatically. Every time there’s a new episode from the show that you are subscribed to, TVShows will download the torrent, and Transmission will pick up the torrent file and download the movie file. But please note that you have to keep Transmission open in order for it to download the movie files.
So far, the system work flawlessly and has saved me a lot of time. But, if you know another system that work best for you, please share them in the comment below.
Jeffry Thurana is a creative writer living in Indonesia. He helps other writers and freelancers to earn more from their crafts. He’s on a quest of learning the art of storytelling, believing that how you tell a story is as important as the story itself. He is also an architect and a designer, and loves traveling and playing classical guitar.
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