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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2.0b12: 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.