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!
