TVShows

With tvrss.net down now for several days, it would seem that TVShows is dead with it.

I am a ruby developer and would be happy to hack away at pointing it to another feed supplier, but what it comes down to is that tvrss.net's rss feeds were far and above anything else out there. The other options for EZTV feeds generally don't include season and episode information unless you are willing to parse the filename, which can lead you down a slow road to nightmare-land.

I have found what might be a suitable replacement for TVShows though.

showRSS (http://showrss.karmorra.info) is a website that allows you to create a custom RSS feed of your own TV shows.

Automatic (http://codingcurious.com/automatic/index.html) is an app that monitors feeds and downloads files with elegance. Most importantly it's smart enough to recognize season and episode data as well as repacks.

The hole here seems to be deciding where you start downloading. TVShows made it easy to go back a few episodes, or skip episodes you have already seen. This does not. However, once you are up and running you should be good to go.

The only other flaw I can think of is that showRSS doesn't maintain a deep history. If your computer is down for 2 weeks, you'll likely miss some stuff and have to hunt it down on other sites.

Still, it's as automatic as TVShows once it's up, and it's as easy on the system resources as well.

I hope this helps you all.

jereme

Thank you! I started using ShowRSS last week, but I still hadn't figured out how to automatically download torrents. I will try Automatic later at home, I hope it works well... Oh, I just saw it's a PrefPane, so it keeps one of the advantages of TVShows: you configure it, you close it, you forget it and it just works.

Not having the ability to choose the starting episode or going back some episodes is a drawback, but with TVShows dead, at least we have something. Thanks again! ;)

i an trying to develop an application "tvshows" like. you can download it at http://grimpeurscompiegnois.free.fr/Series.zip . it only a version of test for now (bug, french interface ...).

See at "http://ruapps.free.fr/series.html" for more advanced version.

While it's not perfect, there is always TED.

http://www.ted.nu/

TED makes my mini sound like a leaf blower.

@Sturmac:

I downloaded Series... I like the idea, however you'll need to figure out il8n of course.

Also, my show list never populates. Perhaps there's a setting I'm missing since I can't read the pref pane.

I look forward to seeing the progress though!

jereme

@Sturmac:

Okay, I figured out why I couldn't see shows. Now for the il8n! :)

I'm not quite sure what I should expect for behavior.

j

TED is not an option for me, you have to keep the program running (wasting RAM and CPU, also space in the Dock :P) and sometimes it fails to download torrents.

I downloaded Series, but I think it's the same as TED. Also, as I don't understand the preferences, I don't quite know how to use it.

However, I downloaded Automatic and it's right what I need: it's a prefpane, so you don't have to keep any program running, it reads the showRSS feed and downloads everything. It has one advantage over TVShows: as it uses a personalized feed, you don't have to open the prefpane to add a new show, you just go to your showRSS account and add it. So you can even do it remotely, and if you have your Mac on, it will download the available chapters on the feed right away! The drawback is, as you said, it's less configurable on the selection of the starting episode (Automatic has this setting, but it doesn't work), but anyway, that didn't work either in TVShows (it only was able to download the last one).

Thanks again! ;)

Some explication on Serie :
you download the last version on ruapps.free.fr
You open the application

To add a show : you click on the sign "+" at the bottom on the right of the main window and you double click on the name of a show.

To set episode you have already download : you click on a show on the left column . A list of episode appeare on the left side of the window. Now you have 2 solution :
- you double click on each episode you have already download. An "x" must be on the "DL" column.
- you do a right click on the last episode you have downloaded and click on the menu "last donwload episode". A "x" appear for each episode you have already download in the "Dl" column.

To download episodes you don t have : you quit the application. A deamon will be launch who search torrent file, download it and open it.

Sturmac, thank you so much for making Series! The program is great and having the latest version in English is nice. :)

I just used it to subscribe to 2 shows and Series downloaded the torrent files perfectly. I love the fact that you made a daemon program like TVshows has that runs in the background and doesn't take up any memory or CPU power... I tried TED awhile ago and it sucked up over 1/2 of my system resources!

I'm just curious, how does the program select what quality of video to download? Everything I've gotten so far is the standard format thats around 300mb.. which is great for me 'cause my computer can't handle the HD stuff..

I'm thinking people might want an option to download the HD stuff though?

Again, thank you soooo much! I can go back to watching way to much tv! lol

Awesome, I'll try some of these options at home.

With the relaunch of EZTV they have released a new site called ezrss.it. The crafted it so that it was the same setup as tvrss.net, to the point that TVShows works with it just fine, provided that the ruby code inside of TVShows is modified to use ezrss.it instead.

I'll see about packaging up my changes to TVShows if someone wants to continue using it.

I would be really interested in that. I tried making the changes myself, but kept getting zero byte torrents and errors in the TVShows log about invalid URIs. I'm new to Ruby (but not other programming), but I'm not really sure what the problem is.

I've put my copy up on my site here:

http://source.xaren.net/Applications

I may update it again so that it calls my server for update checks instead of here so that any new changes are distributed cleanly.

Changes of note from 0.3.4:

- I changed the user agent to appear to be Safari. For some reason, both tvrss.net and ezrss.it both restrict the user agent "TVShows" to only one RSS listing instead of the usual 10 or 20.

- There's a problem with encoding that I haven't worked out completely in regards to the Torrent url. When calling open() in ruby and the URL has unencoded characters like [ and ], it causes the call to open() to throw an error. Replacing [ and ] with %5b and %5c respectively fixed the issue in my case. If there are other characters, though, the problem will persist.

- It shouldn't need to be said, but all references to tvrss.net have been changed to ezrss.it

- The quality setting of [WS has been added to index 0. This fixed the downloading of Top Gear and Fifth Gear because instead of showing up with [PDTV, they were showing up as [WS - PDTV


If there are obvious problems, respond back here in the forum.

Adam.

Also, when installing my modified version, make sure you run uninstall.sh before you load it up. If you don't do this, the old TVShows code will be run instead of the new code. This is because TVShows caches the ruby code in your Library/Application Support folder. Perplexing, really.

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for trying to keep this wonderful app going. I'm not comfortable with code but I'm hoping to find a way to keep TVShows working. I downloaded both files from the link :
http://source.xaren.net/Applications
And I followed the instructions running uninstall.sh before adding the new version. But when I open TVShows it gets stuck on updating the show list and asks if I'm connected to the internet. I did open terminal and ran some of the commands from the EZTVDownloader file - managed to get it to list the shows. I'm guessing that I could work this in the terminal and somehow...but is there a way to get the TVShows GUI to work? How do I do it? I'm running an Intel MacBook Pro with 10.5.8 and Transmission as my torrent client. I'm sorry if non-programmers aren't supposed to be here but I really would appreciate any help anyone could offer.

Uh, okay, too many things going on here. If you want to use the GUI downloader you are going to use the TVShows.app that's in the eztvshows.tar.bz2 archive. If you want to use the non-GUI, command-line scraper then you need to use the files in the EZTVDownloader.zip (wonder why I made it a ZIP file...).

Anyway, it sounds like you want the TVShows.app GUI, so ditch the EZTVDownloader if you have it. Next, delete the TVShows.app that you might have in your Applications folder, or wherever you might have put it. Then open the Terminal app in the /Utilities folder and drag the uninstaller.sh file into it. This will paste the path to that file into the terminal. If everything goes correctly, hit return and it should show some messages ending with "it's safe to move the TVShows application to the trash" or some such. Alternatley you can rename uninstaller.sh to uninstaller.command and it'll do all that for you when you double click it.

If all the above worked, copy the TVShows.app in the eztvshows folder into your Applications folder, then run it. It should try to sync shows and ultimately give you a list. At that point you should be back to your regular scheduled torrenting :)

I'm going to repackage the eztvshows.tar.bz2 so that the uninstaller.sh is uninstaller.command to make things easier.

Thank-you so much for the quick reply randalla. You're right I don't want to deal with the EZTVDownloader if I don't need to - it's gone. I also followed your instructions (several times) and uninstalled and reinstalled the TVShows app. Changed the .sh to .command and ran uninstaller, then added TVShows to the Application folder and ran it. Unfortunately, I'm still getting the
"Alert: Could not download the show list. Are you connected to the internet ?" - it takes forever for that to come up too.
Obviously, I am cause I'm browsing while it tries to update. What could I be doing wrong? I've tried deleting many times - restarting before installing? Again - any and all help is appreciated. I love, love, love TVShows and can't understand while developer abandoned it - I would have paid for it. I really want to get this up and working.

What I'm guessing is that you are actually having troubles getting to ezrss.it. Looking at the ruby code it's trying to connect to port 80 (standard HTTP) for the http://www.ezrss.it domain. If that's not working then it throws the error you are seeing.

What happens when you go here in your browser:

http://ezrss.it/shows/

Where is the computer that you are running this from. I'd assume home, or are you in a dormitory or other similar place? It's possible that ezrss.it could be blocked by your ISP for whatever reason, such as it's a foreign site.

That may be the problem. I am at home in Canada and I can't get anything but a spinning wheel when I try to go to that site. I also have a brand new Airport Extreme router (literally got it yesterday) so it probably doesn't have all the ports it needs opened either. I just added Personal Web Sharing to Port Mapping (that uses port 80), but it didn't help. Any suggestions would really help - I don't know as much as I should to even be on this site. But I really, really want TVShows. Thanks

From what you are saying, it sounds like the ezrss.it site is being blocked. Playing with the firewall on your computer, or your Airport Extreme (which is what I have here at my house as well) won't actually fix accessing the ezrss.it server. The reason for this is that those measures are there to block or grant access from the outside world (aka the internet) from accessing your computer on your home network. Because you can access sites like Google and sourceforge.net here tells me you should also be able to access ezrss.it without fail.

What this also tells me is that your ISP might actually be filtering your web requests and denying you access to accessing sites they consider questionable. I've seen ISPs deny all access to foreign countries just to keep a lid on spam, malware and viruses from infecting clients on their network. It's also possible that they are trying to block clients from accessing what they may consider to be piracy related (like the thepireatebay.org, etc).

You can call up your ISP and see if they are in fact blocking your upstream access to the ezrss.it site, or you may just ask if they are doing any blocking of sites as a policy. An alternate, albeit more technical, is to use a proxy to get around whatever blocking is happening. A proxy is used to re-route traffic around a block. It works like this: You can't talk to server A (ezrss.it) but you can talk to server B, which is a proxy server. Server B is able to talk to server A, so what you do is ask server B to send your request to server A, and then return to you the results it gets back. The trick is that when you are asking server B about server A, your ISP only sees you talking to server B.

Best of luck figuring this out :/

I have this same problem, it tells that need to check internet connection.
I am 100% sure that I dont have any blocks to any webpage.

I check and uninstall.sh:
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.tvshows.plist
rm ~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.tvshows.plist
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/TVShows
I cannot find any files like that on those locations...
I am using newest leopard with macbook pro...

any ideas ?

doing the same thing for me. I get get to http://ezrss.it/shows/ in my browser, but it takes a while to load. I ran the uninstaller.sh a couple of times, it did get the list of shows once, but then wouldn't get the list of episodes for a show, then it wouldn't get the list of shows again. maybe a time out issue?

I'm seeing the timeouts now from my home location as well. From the release notes on ezrss.it it seems that they only have one server set up for hosting that site. They added that if too much load happens on that machine they will add more in the future. I think that is what's happening. or there are other technical issues at hand with the new site.

Here's what I'm referring to:

http://eztv.it/forum/12420/welcome-back/

"Another new feature to eztv is ezrss ( http://ezrss.it/ ) With tvrss.net going down, we thought we would also develop a rss feed for people to use. We have tried to mimick how tvrss worked so that transition to this will be little to none. if you notice any bugs please let us know. It is currently running off one server and we plan to put in another server to help with the load if it becomes used heavily."

If you wish to use it, the alternate that I've written, the EZDownloader, does work better right now since it's hitting the far more reliable eztv.it site. There is no GUI, but it does work pretty well once you get used to managing from the terminal. I wish I had the time to learn to make OS X application to be the underlying interface for the EZDownloader. Sorry for that.