Visual Nomads

I figured since I was changing the theme of the page I might as well start with a post about how I started with HTPC type stuff. One of the main things I wanted when I moved to Kuwait was to be able to watch my favorite shows instead of being limited to AFN. There are lots of sites out there have tutorials on this type of thing, many of which you will see are pretty much the same. This is just a starting point for me and a place where I can easily write more blogs expanding on the subject.

After many trials and revisions, this method is what has worked best for me over the last couple years.

First, if you don’t already have a copy, go download uTorrent. It is a free bittorrent client that consumes very little resources yet has a ton of features. Once installed, create a directory where you want your files to download. For example, I have all of my files download to D:\New Downloads\. I also have a directory where all my files that are currently downloading are located (D:\New Downloads\processing\). I personally made this a hidden folder because I never open it. Below is a snapshot of how I have my directories setup in Options:

There are several things I want to point out on this screen.

• Put New Downloads In: This is where your downloads will be kept while they are downloading.
• Always Show Dialog on Manual Add: Uncheck this or you will be prompted where to save files every time you download a torrent from a site.
• Move Completed Downloads To: Once a file finishes downloading it will be moved to this folder.
• Append the Torrent’s Label: This is a great feature if you have RSS feeds or multiple types of files downloading. It will move finished downloads to a folder named after the file’s label. I will explain more later.
• Store .torrents in: I personally like to keep my torrent files in my processing folder until they finish.
• Move .torrents for finished jobs to: You can move them anywhere. I will probably make a hidden folder in my New Downloads folder later just to keep it organized.
• Automatically load .torrents from: Right now I have this going to one of my Dropbox folders. I will post another article on this later.

There are many other settings you can adjust in the options, but these are the only ones pertaining to this article. Browse around and change whatever you want to get the best experience out of uTorrent. It’s quite a powerful program.

Now that we have our folder structure setup, lets get a list of the most recent TV shows. For this we will be using RSS feeds. We will start simple for now and get more advanced in future articles. There are several options when it comes to content distribution… you could use the ever popular TVRSS feed, my personal favorites feed (which is also conveniently located to the right), or just use the most popular distributor’s feed from Mininova. For a long time I used the TVRSS feed which worked great, but recently they started using bt-chat.com for some of their sources (which is blocked in Kuwait). I’m sure it’s a great site, but it was driving me crazy when my favorite shows weren’t downloading. In a search to find an alternate means of getting my daily dose of the boob tube I found the same shows were released on Mininova by the same distributors. Now I just filter EZTV‘s feed from Mininova, which is what we will be using here.

Go to EZTV’s recent releases and copy the link location for the RSS feed. Open uTorrent and click on the RSS icon on the toolbar. Your feed should automatically be populated in the dialog box. Give it a clever label such as EZTV. This is what it should look like:

Key points of this dialog:

• If you checked the Append the Torrent’s Label option above these shows will download to <download directory>\EZTV\.
• I have Do not automatically download items selected. This is because I don’t want to download every show that is released. We will setup custom filters next.

When you select OK in the RSS dialog an RSS feed on the left will be added with the label you gave it. Select it and you should see a list of all the recent shows. You can now double click any of these shows and start downloading them.

In my next article I will cover how to create custom filters to automatically download your favorite shows.