TVShows 2

2.0 Release Candidate 2: I Hate February

February did not end yet and I already know it will be my less favourite month of the year. Every third party TVShows relies on had some kind of fundamental change or downtime.

First of all, I couldn’t give the attention the app needed because, well, I don’t have a lot of free time now. I have a lot of ideas for TVShows 3 and it seems that I’ll have to wait until the summer to code it.

Secondly, my server had a lot of issues and downtime. I migrated it to Nginx to get better performance (it did), but PHP is not a great fan. I’m trying something new, but it this continues, I’ll have to contemplate other options.

And then The Pirate Bay decides to completely drop .torrent links from their popular torrents, leaving magnets as the only option. We get all our links from them, but TVShows has now another way to get .torrents from the magnet links. So you don’t need to use magnets if you don’t want, in fact, .torrent will continue to be the default.

On top of that, the scene has agreed to change the release format from AVI to MP4. We depend completely on them, so you’ll notice that TVShows will start downloading MP4 files (at least for the most popular shows).

On the good news, TVShows is a little more intelligent than before, by handling some edge situations. When a .torrent file cannot be downloaded, it keeps trying to download it in the successive checks. This means that you can select an external disk or a network disk and it will not fail when the disks are disconnected. Non-episodic shows and custom RSS containing more than one show should now work better.

Finally, a word about our support forum: please use it wisely. Before posting a new discussion, check if another user has reported the same problem, and if you have something useful to say, add it to that discussion. Avoid creating new discussions because we are really nice people and we want to answer everyone, and every minute spent answering you is another minute that we cannot spend improving TVShows. Specially, I want to thank Cristina to keep helping me by answering most of the people.

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2.0 Release Candidate: Almost There!

12 betas have been more than enough.* So it is time for the first Release Candidate of the final stable 2.0 version. Depending on unexpected bugs, the final 2.0 version will be released very shortly, i.e. next week, i.e. before december. That’s a promise. Only bug fixes have been added to this version, so don’t expect to find any cool new feature. It will only work better.

Most of the work this month has focused on the server. For your interest, TVShows feeds are now in our servers, so now we can control sort of everything. That also means we can add almost any show we want. But it also means that we have to tweak the server, and I was fairly busy this month.

About those nasty bugs, I will refer to our release notes. Most of them were regressions, like downloading SD fallbacks, respecting the “use additional sources” option so rars were avoided, fixing Miso check-ins, memory leaks, etc. For advanced users, this behaviour can be customized.

Indeed, the only new thing is the little refresh button added to the shows covers. If you click it, it will re-download the cover. Why? Because sometimes a cover is blank because it wasn’t downloaded correctly, so with that button you may download it again correctly.

On localization news, Korean has been added by Mpstyle, and of course all languages were updated by our awesome translation team. Particularly, the french translation is now much better.

If you keep having problems, please use our newly support forum to report those bugs. You can select if you want to keep the conversation private or public. I recommend you to create it publicly, so that other people with your problem can discover and apply a workaround by themselves.

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* I have nothing against 13. 12+1, I mean.

2.0b12: Magnets (Benvenuto, Italia!) and Bug Fixes

New season has begun and a new beta is needed. There are two important bug fixes in this one: the app didn’t automatically update the show list in the background, and Leopard users suffer from crashes when adding shows. Other minor bugs has also been fixed, so the app will now be more reliable when searching for episodes.

The only new feature is the support for Magnet links, an optional feature for users from countries where The Pirate Bay has been blocked or banned, such as Italy*, Denmark or Malaysia. With these magnets links you can download any of our preset shows (all of them are from TPB), and also any custom RSS that supports it. If you mark this option, please unmark the Use additional sources for HD because that option may need to have access to the TPB.

In other news, the only source that TVShows is using right now is… our website. Given that third party sources were very unreliable, this ensures that, if something goes wrong, at least we can fix it. This approach consists of a cached Yahoo! Pipe fetching The Pirate Bay, something already used for custom RSS but now much more improved and reliable. However, your TVShows may have downloaded unwanted files, but now the system is polished so that should not happen any more.

The very good news is that, now, we can add almost any show we want. This curated list contains currently more than 350 airing shows, but if you want us to add any other show (available in The Pirate Bay) send us an email to support@tvshowsapp.com.

As always, we have to thank all our translators for their fantastic job, updating every language and adding full translations in Greek and Slovenian. You can wait for the app to update itself or you can download it right away from our website.

* This feature has nothing to do with my upcoming trip to Italy.

How to use TVShows with Transmission

Although TVShows works with any torrent client, we don’t hide that our favorite is Transmission. It’s a nice piece of software, it’s free, and it has a couple of features that work really well with TVShows. But you need to change some default settings so TVShows can do what it’s meant to do: download your favorite TV shows automatically in your Mac.

This is a screenshot for the “Transfers” tab in Transmission preferences (I outlined the main options we’re going to talk about):

• Default location: you can have Transmission download all your files in a single folder no matter where the torrent originally was. All torrent clients do that. But Transmission has this unique feature (we don’t know any other client that does that): it can download files in the same folder as the torrent file. So if you set TVShows to download torrents in “TVShows Downloads”, for instance, you will have all your shows in that folder, instead of mixed up with all your other (not TV related) downloads.
  We strongly recommend selecting “Same as torrent file” for all users, but it becomes compulsory if you want to use the “Save each show in its own folder” option in TVShows (introduced in 2.0b8). Why? Because with this option enabled, TVShows will create a folder for each show and save each torrent in its corresponding folder… but if Transmission (or any other torrent client, for that matter) downloads all files in one single place, it’s no use having a folder for each show.

• Start transfers when added, and Display a window when opening a torrent file: when it comes to automating the downloading process, these options should be exactly as the screenshot shows, the first one checked and the other one unchecked. But what do they do?
  If you don’t check “Start transfers when added”, when TVShows launches Transmission and opens the torrent it just downloaded, it will be paused. You will need to click the Resume button in order to get the episode downloaded. On the other hand, if you don’t uncheck “Display a window when opening a torrent file”, an annoying options window will pop up every time you (or TVShows) open a torrent with Transmission, and Transmission won’t download a thing until you click the Add button. As you see, this defeats the purpose of TVShows, so please keep these options as we explain.

• Watch for torrent files in [Folder]: this option and the “Automatically open torrent files after downloading” option in TVShows (we talked about it in our TVShows Manual) always cause confusion. You may think they are the same, or that you need to have them both checked, but that’s not true. The one in TVShows is capable of launching your torrent client (Transmission, in this case) and open the torrent it just downloaded. You don’t need to check the option in Transmission.
  The one in Transmission needs you to keep Transmission running in order to watch the selected folder. If you close Transmission and then add a torrent file in that folder, Transmission will not launch. Since we don’t like to keep apps running to do the background work, we implemented our own option, it works much better.

• Other useful options for the sake of tidiness (but they don’t affect how TVShows works) include:

  • Keep incomplete files in [Folder]: this way you won’t have your partially downloaded episodes standing in the way in the destination folder. I particularly like this, because I use my TVShows download folder as an “inbox”, when I see there’s something new in there I know I have a new episode to watch (and when I do, I move it to another folder so my “inbox” is always empty).

  • Trash original torrent files: you usually don’t need torrent files after opening them, why keep them? Transmission can get rid of them for you.

  • Append .part to incomplete files: by default, once Transmission downloads a bit of your file it gives it the final name, so you can’t tell which files are completed and which are still being downloaded by looking at your downloads folder (especially if you keep incomplete files in the destination folder). This option is self-explanatory, right?

If you didn’t use Transmission, we hope you give it a chance after reading this post. We sure love it!

2.0b11: BitSnoop Love

This emergency update brings full BitSnoop compatibility. Indeed, it is so compatible it is used by default in most of the popular shows, as a back-up plan because of the source disaster. This brings support for 19 new shows, including popular realities like Jersey Shore, Army Wives, Britain’s Got Talent, Iron Chef America, etc…

Another change is a (hopefully) fix for when Miso is first enabled, that caused loss of subscriptions in almost every occasion. But the real one that forced this update is the new cache system to be nicer to our sources. This last one was very important to bring to the table because previous betas were overusing our sources.

Localizations are also updated, and we have a new kid in the block: Arabic. I have to thank the effort that our translators put in this hobby, but this time I want to give special props to Khalid Mohammed, that fully translated it to Arabic in record time.

If you are under Lion and have the 9th beta, you’ll need to disable TVShows before being able to manually upgrade. If you have the 10th beta you can safely update without problems, this is the direct link to this latest version.