TVShows 2

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!

2.0b7: TVShows Manual (part 2: Preferences)

In our last post, we explained how subscriptions work, and how you can add, manage or delete subscriptions. Today, we’re explaining the options in the Preferences tab, and some other cool things.

This is the Preferences tab, where you can configure almost everything in TVShows. Under General Settings, you have the option to turn on and off the menu bar icon. This icon gives you direct access to some of TVShows features without having to open the interface (we’ll see that later).

Then we have the Download Preferences. There you can select the frequency you want TVShows to check for new episodes and where you want it to download the torrent files (in the next version, you will be able to make TVShows save each show in its own folder inside this general one!).

We get to two interesting preferences:

• Automatically open each file after download: it isn’t about the video files (remember, TVShows doesn’t download actual videos, only torrents), but the torrent file. This option is enabled by default, and it’s the best way to completely automate the download process: TVShows will open the torrent file with your default torrent manager (we love Transmission, but the choice is all yours). You would only need to disable this option if you don’t usually have a broadband connection (the torrent files are tiny, the videos aren’t) or if you want to choose when you download the videos for any other reason.

• Download HD versions by default: this is the default quality setting, but changing it doesn’t affect shows you’ve already subscribed to (you have to change it show by show in the Subscription window, as we explained in the previous post). It’s just a way to save some clicks if you want most of the shows in HD: when you go to the Add Show window, the HD setting will be enabled or disabled by default depending on the global setting, but you can change it every time you want.

Below you can enable or disable some Growl notifications (there are more in the Growl PrefPane) and check for TVShows updates.

The About tab lists all contributors to the project (thank you everyone!), and it contains links to our website and Twitter account and a donation button.

The “View Logs” button is important for troubleshooting. If you think TVShows is not working as it should, please take a look at the log. If you don’t understand it, don’t worry, you can always send it to us and we’ll take a look. You can manually send an e-mail to support(at)tvshowsapp.com or use the “Submit Feedback” button at the left (in this case, please include your e-mail address so we can reply).

The “Submit Feedback” button and the On/Off slider appear in all tabs. The slider allows you to enable or disable the background process.

And finally, if you just don’t like TVShows (sorry about that! We’d like to hear your thoughts, maybe next version will have that awesome feature you missed in the current version!), you can click the “Uninstall” button. Please be aware that you may need to manually remove the PrefPane after uninstalling. Just go to System Preferences, and if TVShows is still there, right-click it and select “Remove TVShows Preference Pane”.

This is the menubar icon (you can enable or disable it in the Preferences tab). It allows some basic features without having to open TVShows (check for new episodes, see when was the last time the background process checked for new episodes, enable or disable the background process), and it provides quick access to all TVShows tabs and feedback submission.

And that’s it for the 7th beta! We’re soon releasing another beta, we’ll tell you about its new features when it’s out!

2.0b7: TVShows Manual (part 1: Subscriptions)

We think TVShows is the easiest way to download your favorite TV shows automatically in your Mac. Nevertheless, it’s still in a beta state (always improving) and some settings may not be clear enough, so now that we released the 7th beta and that we have a brand new blog, we are publishing a couple of posts going through the interface to see what you can do in each window/tab.

Let’s begin with something simple: how subscriptions work.

This is the first thing you will see after installing TVShows (it comes with no subscriptions, of course), and it allows you to subscribe to new shows or edit your current subscriptions. If you want to add a new show to your list, just click on the “Add Show” button; if you want to change anything in a show you already have in your list (the quality, or even unsubscribe) or manually download a recent episode, then click on the image of the show.

This window will drop down when you click the “Add Show” button in the Subscriptions tab. You can scroll through the whole list of available shows (*) or simply type the name of the show you want in the search box. When you select a show, TVShows will display the list of most recent episodes and a brief summary so you can learn what the show is about. Finally, there’s a checkbox where you can select if you want episodes of this show downloaded in High Definition (720p) or not (this checkbox will be by default selected or not depending on your setting on the Preferences tab… we’ll get to this in the next post). Please keep in mind how HD downloading works.

(*) Update: The list is not managed by TVShows, it’s retrieved from ShowRSS. So if you want to subscribe to a certain show that doesn’t appear in the list, just ask them! (by mail, showrss(at)karmorra.info, or even twitter) When they add it, it will automatically be available in TVShows.

When you click on the “Subscribe” button, the show will automatically appear in your subscriptions list and TVShows will automatically download new episodes as soon as they are released. But what happens if you subscribed to a show that is already on its 5th or 6th episode? Let’s see how you can manually download recent episodes.

This window will drop down when you click on the image of the show in the Subscriptions tab. You can see if the show is still on or if it was cancelled or ended (in this case you should unsubscribe, because TVShows will no longer download episodes… we are working on doing this cleaning task for you), and when was the last time TVShows downloaded an episode (if you just subscribed it will show the current date).

If you subscribed to this show in SD and now you realize you want more quality, this is the place to change it. You can also temporarily disable automatic downloads for this show if you need to. But the most useful thing in this window are the arrow buttons next to each episode. Clicking on those arrows makes TVShows download the torrent files of the corresponding episodes, that way if you missed some episodes before subscribing you can manually download them.

However, not all episodes from a show are available to download, only the most recent ones (usually 10). The goal of TVShows is doing the routine work for you: automatically download new episodes as they are aired. Downloading past episodes is implemented just so you can catch up when you subscribe to a new show with a few episodes already published, TVShows is not aimed at downloading complete shows.

When you have all your subscriptions ready, you can safely close the System Preferences window. TVShows will periodically check for new episodes in background and download them when they are available. This background process requires very little memory, you won’t even notice it when running other apps. And if you reboot your Mac it will automatically run.

And that’s all for today! If you have questions, please post them in the comments section, we’ll be glad to answer.

On the next (and final) post of this series we will explain the Preferences tab, some other useful buttons, and one of the new features of this beta: the menu bar icon. Stay tuned!

Update: here’s the follow-up post.