The Web Page of Kristopher Linquist

These days, automatically downloading TV shows via BitTorrent technology couldn't be easier.

First, you need a good BitTorrent client that supports RSS feeds. I like uTorrent. Not only is the software great, but their website walks you through every step from learning about the technology to setting it up to downloading. The hardest thing you'll have to figure out is opening up a port on your home router/firewall to allow other clients to communicate to your machine (remember, bittorrent is a peer-to-peer technology).

As far as automatically downloading shows, http://www.eztvefnet.org/ and http://sharetv.org/ both offer listings of torrents for recent shows and RSS feeds for those shows. Here's a tutorial on adding an RSS feed for an eztvefnet.org to uTorrent, allowing your PC to automatically download the show.

Now I know what you're thinking: I don't want to watch these shows on my computer, I want to watch them on my TV!

For this, there's multiple solutions:

If you only download/watch shows occasionally, you can simply buy a Philips DVP5140 or Philips DVP5960 DVD player. These are two of the better, yet very inexpensive, DVD players that will play AVI (DivX) or WMV files that you download directly from the internet. After you download a show (or a number of shows), you can burn them to a CD or a DVD. Most hour-long shows are about the size of a CD (700mb), so you could fit 6 of them on a single DVD.

The second solution is to build a home theater PC. It's not nearly as daunting as it once was - in Windows, you can run Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, or simply Windows XP/Vista with third-party media center software on top of it. Hardware wise, you only need a video card that has S-Video out [SDTV] or HDMI/DVI out [HDTV] (Of course, if you want to use your PC to record from your current cable provider, you'll need the proper encoder card). Software like Beyond Media for Windows will give you a TV-friendly interface with remote control capabilities for playing back your favorite shows. If you don't need HDTV at this point, you could even pick up an old IBM Thinkpad T-series on eBay. They almost all have S-Video out.