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This article, describes software for Mac and Windows to download TV shows as soon as they are posted.

I tried popcorn time, but it doesn't have the episodes I want and I cannot choose what torrent source to download from.

My local TV stations doesn't show the latest seasons of the TV shows I follow, NetFlix isn't available in my country.

I want a similar one that is able to

  • Grab a torrent from a source that I choose and keep updating episodes regularly. For instance, I grab the latest episodes of 24 from EZTV, I don't like the other torrents, either too big or too crappy.
  • Grab entire seasons of TV shows and download them from a given source. I want for instance to download the entire season of top gear and the mentalist.
  • Work natively on Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit
  • Free, not necessarily open source
  • Big plus, if I can stream without downloading anything
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  • Downloading is out, watching torrents is in. Why do you need to download things you probably never watch?
    – Smit Johnth
    Oct 5, 2014 at 18:53
  • 1
    @SmitJohnth because my connection is slow and because i get to add subtitles, and because i get to watch some episode twice or share it with friends, without having to stream it twice. But how would you stream torrents without downloading them? any website that i don't know?
    – Lynob
    Oct 5, 2014 at 18:56
  • Is your connection slower as video bitrate? Do you want to watch all episodes twice? As for the software - unfortunately I can't remember any. There was some kind of torrent -> http proxy written in Go language I'm searching for softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/…, I forgot the name. There are some clients which allow watching on the fly with seek support, but they are Windows only and combine a client and media player (Acestream, Zona), but I want to use a hardware media player.
    – Smit Johnth
    Oct 5, 2014 at 19:05
  • Ideal would be such a software with cache function which automatically converts fully downloaded files from internal format if it is used. Currently I use clients with continuous file download softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/10966/… but even they don't work properly. So download before viewing is outdated, but software doesn't allow to do something better, especially thanking to people who wrote this shit wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad
    – Smit Johnth
    Oct 5, 2014 at 19:11
  • @SmitJohnth if you receive answers to your questions, let me know
    – Lynob
    Oct 5, 2014 at 19:14

2 Answers 2

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Transmission (a bitorrent client) has a command line option (transmission-cli), and EZTV from the looks of it has an RSS feed. You could write a brief BASH script to add those containing the name of the show you'd like to download. I'm not sure how well versed you are in shell scripts, etc. If you're not too well-versed, add a comment and I can always knock one out for you...

#!/bin/bash

# Adding the -p (parent) flag is a little hack to supress an error if the directory exists already
# Note: $USER is the current user (ie. you)
mkdir -p /home/$USER/torrents

cd /home/$USER/torrents/

# This example is using Game of Thrones and EZTV's RSS feed
curl "https://ezrss.it/search/index.php?simple&show_name=Game+of+Thrones&mode=rss" | grep -o '<enclosure url="[^"]*' | grep -o '[^"]*$' | xargs wget -c
rtorrent /home/$USER/torrents/*.torrent
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5
  • This won't stream though unfortunately..
    – Elliot Reed
    Jun 12, 2014 at 11:47
  • streaming is only a bonus, not so important, could you please show me a snippet, I'm not that good in bash scripting, thanks in advance
    – Lynob
    Jun 12, 2014 at 15:31
  • Have a look at that (not tested, can't get on EZTV here as the Government is trying to be China). Rtorrent instead of transmission might be better for this (more naturally geared towards terminal usage). You can use EZTV's RSS feed for specific programmes
    – Elliot Reed
    Jun 13, 2014 at 9:19
  • thank you so much, I didn't know about ezrss.it, I failed to find rss on kickasstorrent main site. what about the other torrents? where to find kickasstorrent rss?
    – Lynob
    Jun 14, 2014 at 13:52
  • Unfortunately I don't know to be honest, but you could always replace the feed URL with a page URL and change the '<enclosure url="[^"]*' to something like '<a href="[^"]*' to get the torrent links for a page without an RSS feed (you'd probably need to play around with it a bit, have a look at regular expressions in Bash
    – Elliot Reed
    Jun 16, 2014 at 8:05
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I like http://showrss.info/ , a free subscription service where you create a custom RSS feed for whatever you wish, setting parameters on each as needed. (720p only, prefer REPACK/PROPER, etc.)

Once you've got your custom RSS feed, you can plug it into whatever client you wish using their supported method. (I use Azureus plus the RSS Feed Scanner plugin. Everything is fully automated that way, new items just show up in the output directory without my having to lift a finger.)

ShowRSS offers a lot, though it can be a bit slow to pick up new stuff. You can't choose your sources, but they seem really good about getting "the best ones" from wherever so it's actually kind of a relief not to have to bother with all that. It's also current-release, and single-item only; there's no support for going back farther than a month or two, or for collections, so that'd have to be tackled separately.

It's not a complete solution. (I don't tend to believe in complete solutions, there are always tradeoffs.) But, for me it cover most of my needs (probably 80% or more), and it's by far the simplest and most effective. I just fill in the rest via other means.

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