Hacksar

If you always seem to miss your favorite TV show, forget to set your DVR, or simply want to watch it on your computer rather than on TV, then here’s the solution.

This program called Torrent Episode Downloader (or TED for short, pretty straightforward name) is easily the best auto-torrent downloader out there. You just add what shows you want, and it will automatically know when the next episode is airing, and scan all the popular torrent sites that day until it finds the torrent. Upon finding it, it’ll send it straight to your BitTorrent client (see our previous post of How To Use BitTorrent if you don’t have BitTorrent set up on your computer or you don’t know what it is).

Best of all, TED has been so reliable that for the past 3 months that I’ve used it, every episode had started downloading 15 minutes after it finished airing realtime. I always get the correct episode (no fakes, etc) and it automatically updates itself to look for the next episode once it finds the current one. That way, you just put in what shows you want once, and let TED be.

Keep reading for the Step-by-step guide.

Here’s a simple guide on how to get and use TED:

1. Download Torrent Episode Downloader (TED) from its website [http://www.ted.nu]
2. Install the program to where ever you desire, and run TED. Once TED has started you can start adding shows right away.
3. To add a show, press the “Add Show” button, or you can go to File -> Add Show.
4. There is a handy search box at the top that you can use to find your favorite show. When you select it, TED will bring up the show’s information (from TV.com) and will automatically have the date, time, and name of the next episode that will air. There is also another option for the last aired episode, if you want to add the show to get an episode after you missed it.
5. Select the show and press the Add button, and it will show up in your TV show list in TED’s window. You can add many different TV shows, and TED will keep track of them all.
6. The Edit menu has various options (such as temporarily disabling an episode, or forcing it to check on a day when the show doesn’t air, etc). I’ve personally never had to touch anything, because TED worked so well straight out of a fresh install.
7. TED will find and automatically send the torrents to your torrent client, so you don’t need to go searching. Just make sure that you have room on your harddrive, otherwise the torrent may not finish downloading, and then you won’t get to watch your TV shows!

Another cool benefit of TED is that it tells you exactly when the next time the episode airs is. I know I always hate finding out that there’s a rerun of some show, so TED is just helpful in yet another way.

Torrent Episode Downloader, aka TED

So you can see how it displays the list of your shows, along with the next airing episode as well as the current downloading status.

As you can probably figure out, the red TV indicate that the show is on hold – the day that it broadcasts still hasn’t come, and so TED won’t waste your internet bandwidth or hog computer resources checking for something that has no chance of being online yet.

On the other hand, the green TV indicates that TED is actively looking for torrents of that specific episode. This screenshot was taken before the actual episode of Lost aired (since TED checks however often you want it to for the whole day and more), so I am not expecting TED to find anything yet. TED is smart in that it knows what to download and what not to. It checks the files for certain tip0ffs that would indicate it’s a fake file (as you can tell, it found 5 torrents already, but knew that they were all fake).

TED Log File

Everything is saved in the logs.

Here, you can see the 5 torrents that TED refused to download for various reasons. Weird file size, compressed files, passworded archives, it checks for so many different things. TED saves you the trouble and hassle of doing any of that.

It’s a really stellar program, especially taking into account that it not only takes up virtually no system resources, but is also free!

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