Find Torrents Of Your Favorite TV Shows With TED
I don’t know about you guys, but I can never keep up with all the TV shows that I’d like to follow. I just can’t find the time to religiously watch a show week after week for months at a time. That and the fact that most shows running locally are a season or two behind, are the reasons I often turn to online resources to get my fix.
On one such journey across the web, I came across this wonderful utility called TED – Torrent Episode Downloader, which promises to solve this very problem that I’ve been having.
TED is basically a tool which scours the internet for torrents of TV shows that you ask it to and then lets you download them using a torrent client. TED does not download the files itself, nor does it host the files. It only searches for them. In a way, it’s an alternative tool to torrent clients that can automatically download latest episodes using RSS feed for that TV show (see tvRSS).
There are separate versions of TED available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and the Windows version is the one that I tried.
Once you have TED up and running, click on the “Add show” button and you will be presented with a list of shows that have been filled in by the creators of TED. The list is quite long and includes most famous shows running right now on TV. You should definitely be able to find the show that you’re looking for in this list.
Click on the name of the show, or search for it using the search box at the top of the window, and TED will give you some nice details about the the show, including the time it last aired and the time it is expected to air next.
Click on the “Add” button and this show will be added to the list of shows that TED will continuously watch the internet for. TED resides in the Windows taskbar and runs in the background all the time, checking back every hour till it has found the shows in its list and has the torrent ready for you. The hourly interval can be be adjusted using the Preferences menu item under the Edit menu.
Once TED finds a particular show, all it does is launch your default torrent client and hand over the actual downloading to that client, and then goes back to quietly looking for more downloads from the list of shows.
If you’re looking for an episode that has already been shown, right click on the show’s name and click Edit. From this window, you can tell TED to download a particular show by letting it know the season and the episode that you’re looking for.
Even though TED comes with a pretty exhaustive list of shows, if you still find that your favorite show is not on the list, its easy to add it to the list. Just go to the “Add Show” window and click on the “Add a custom show” button. Enter the show’s name and click on “Select from available episodes”. Now, sit back and relax while TED does its thing.
If the show is out there, TED will probably be able to get it for you.
I’m sure you will all love this awesome utility. How do you guys catch up with your daily TV viewing ?
(By) Sharninder is a programmer, blogger and a geek making a living writing software to change the world. Join him on his travels around the tech 'o' sphere at Geeky Ninja
TED really does work fantastically. Every once and a while it will grab the wrong show (rarely), or not be able to find an episode, but overall it works great and is extremely easy to use. Before I started using private torrent sites + RSS, I used TED to keep up with shows and it really did work great.
Just a note, if you’re trying to start up with a new show I wouldn’t recommend using TED. It’s a lot easier to just find a “season 1″ torrent. I was using TED in this way for a while until I realized it wasn’t a very good solution.
@sean: Yes, TED is the most useful if you’re trying to get shows that are already in their list. For adding new shows, you have to rely on the search engines that it uses.
I used TED for awhile until I learned how to setup an RSS feed inside uTorrent. I subscribed to EZTV’s RSS feed and setup favorites for all my shows. No extra programs to run and EZTV usually has the first good quality version of each show.
I’m more of a fan of RSS combined with Torrents instead of using a separate program for searching alone. Alongside the well known tvrss.net there is now also feedmytorrents.com (which was covered today on Lifehacker) worth checking out!