TiVo for the Economically Unstimulated

TiVo and DVRs in general have brought TV watching a long way. Some of the innovations that have come of it have made the TV experience better.  Commercial skipping is my own personal favorite. But some of the other features are pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding (after you are behind a bit obviously) and finally recording. 

Now, recording live TV is nothing new. People have done it since VCRs were invented, and I’m sure much before then. But the problem, from back in the day, all the way up to the most updated TiVo is that you, the user have to remember to set it up to record, and if you missed an episode, you’re SOL.

In comes torrenting. Usually it’s a bad word on the Internet and on the news, so I will make my disclaimer here. I am not a lawyer, nor do I know the laws surrounding what I am about to describe. Use at your own discretion.

Using your favorite torrent search engine (mine is http://www.scrapetorrent.com/) you can find every episode of every show you could ever imagine, even some of the more obscure ones. However we run into the same problem, you the user have to know when a new episode is out, hunt it down, and download it.

This is where TVRss (http://www.tvrss.net/) shines and makes your life easy. TVRss is a website that serves up RSS feeds for a huge list of shows. You might not find some of the more obscure shows, like you would doing a naked torrent search, but they have most of them.

So where do all the pieces fit together? TVRss + uTorrent (or your favorite RSS supporting torrenting program) + your favorite media server/client of choice and you have a free TiVo killer.

Lifehacker has a tutorial on getting this running working with Democracy: http://lifehacker.com/204057/

I will post screen shot here later