TVShows 2

All sources down: refresh your showlist

One of the first things that I wanted to do with TVShows is adding more sources so it would be more robust. Previous TVShows betas only looked at ShowRSS, a wonderful service but sometimes it was off or not updated. So I added EZRSS, Hamsterpit, and a certain Yahoo! Pipe to the mix, giving a much smoother experience.

This week all four sources became unavailable. EZRSS has been three weeks completely off the grid, Hamsterpit’s service was terminated some days ago (because of the heavy load we caused them), ShowRSS is down since yesterday and Yahoo Pipes received too many requests so they are not accessible anymore.

Great.

Today a solution was needed so in a fresh start I build a quick proxy that connects to Yahoo! Pipes, processes The Pirate Bay searches and caches them so the Yahoo! request limits are respected. This is a temporal solution, but for the time being it is working kind of great and it is transparent to all users. Since only one web is checked, the response time it is much much faster. I am still searching for other alternatives though, like BitSnoop.

However, this does not solve all problems, since the EZTV has not released most of the popular shows aired in the last few days. So if you are waiting like me for Futurama, Suits, Wilfred or Louie you’ll have to wait a little more or download them manually. Other shows released by VTV are available, like Burn Notice. In more good news, Damages is back. If you find a show with no episodes, please contact with us so we can fix it.

You don’t have to do anything to update the show list, your copy of TVShows should automatically refresh the show list in a few days. But if you want this update now go to the “Add Show” window and click on the refresh button (bottom left corner).

2.0b8: New Show List, Custom RSS and Bugfixes

The latest beta polishes a lot of popular itches from the previous versions, but at the same time it adds long requested functionalities. By addressing the weakests points of TVShows, the app has evolved into a much more reliable tool.

This will be the latest beta before getting to the 2.0 final, that will be released in the near future. This means that our efforts will be centered in fixing bugs and not adding new features.

First, the preset show list is rebuilt from the ground up. Instead of only getting shows from ShowRSS, now we maintain a show list that combines releases from ShowRSS, EZRSS, Hamsterspit and the eztv user in The Pirate Bay. This list is curated by us, and it contains almost 50 new shows.

Because of that, now we can remove from the list all the cancelled/ended shows. More importantly, when the application updates the show list, your subscriptions with ended shows will has a nice ribbon to warn you that there is not going to be more episode for that show.

Another desired side effect of that list is that TVShows will find new episodes even if one or two sources are down. And because the application merges the results intelligently, an episode will be downloaded exactly once (in the future we’ll add an option to download repacks as well). Finally, if we want to add new sources we can do it from the server, so there is no need to update the application for this reason any more.

If you look closely at the previous screenshot, you can see that an old feature is back: the ability to automatically download missed episodes when you subscribe to a show. In some cases this is great and it makes sense to support it again. But consider that old episodes may not have a lot of peers.

The second biggest new feature is custom RSS. This means that you can add any RSS that contains links to torrents of TVShows. Do you want to add an RSS from your favorite private tracker? Or a show not included in the preset show list? Now you can.

As with the preset shows, you can add more than one feed per subscription. And you can filter the episodes by name, great if the RSS have releases of multiple shows. Technical limitations forbid us to filter by the real release name, but it is planned for the future.

One useful source for new shows is The Pirate Bay, but unfortunately they dropped the search feeds. If you find an user that regularly releases a show you want, just go to this Yahoo! Pipe, put the show name, the user name and copy the resulting RSS link in TVShows. A tutorial explaining the steps will be released shortly, but it is pretty straightforward.

Afterwards, subscriptions can be edited, even preset shows. This makes more sense when used with the new option to download each show in its own folder. For example, your chosen folder is Movies, inside that subfolders will appear with show names and inside them the episodes for that show will be added. If you want to change the folder name, just change the show name in your subscription.

The other new option is related to the HD functionality added in the previous beta. That was a unique functionality of TVShows that no other app has, and it allowed to download HD torrents that no other similar program will find for you. However, some of those torrents may contain rars, so there is a tradeoff that may hinder automatic setups. For those cases, you can now disable this behaviour if you want to stick with the much more limited HD list released by EZTV.

Minor touches were added in several places to polish the application. For example, you can now see when is the next episode going to be aired, if that information is known.

Thank to our wonderful translation team, we are happy to add four more locales: Afrikaans, Basque, German (Switzerland) and Slovak. Since this is a beta, there may be some things untranslated, but it will be finished in the final version.

Last, but not least, performance and reliability have been greatly improved. Special mention to a wild bug in 32 bits machines (PPC/Intel) that causes a lot of problems everywhere that has been (hopefully) fixed in this eight beta.

Download it from our website now. We hope you enjoy this juicy beta as much as we do!