Let me explain, I LOVE Apple products, I wouldn’t say I’m a typical fan boy as I do see the value and arguments from the PC side of things; let’s just call it a preference. iTunes Match sounded like a dream, I could still access the music I love on the go, and for only about $2 a month. Plus it was taken care of by the iTunes server which if you ask me seems pretty damn reliable. You could call it love at first sight. I wasn’t offered quite the extensive library that Spotify could, as I was limited by my own musical offerings but I pretty much only listened to music I was familiar with anyways. Seemed like a match made in heaven. This is when that sweet seductive girl, turned into a raging hormonal crazy bitch.

First of all, I soon found out that iTunes Match doesn’t simply stream the songs from the cloud to your phone, it’s downloading them as you go. It’s kind of double dipping, I was shocked when I discovered that iTunes Match was taking up literally GB’s on my phone.

Secondly, I used about 2-3 times more data with iTunes Match in 2 weeks than I would have with Spotify over a whole month. Now the data wasn’t so much a concern, I’m grandfathered into an Unlimited Plan on AT&T but still I rather not run into a point where they see me as an excessive user and throttle me. I would sincerely be pissed at that point. It’s not a huge scratch on the facade of iTunes Match but enough to raise concern on my end.

And finally, I found even if I had a song downloaded or I wanted to stream it while it downloaded there were times that it just wouldn’t comply on my phone and would not start the song no matter what. However, choosing a different artist I could play their songs without issue.

I know iTunes Match is in its’ infancy at this point and Spotify literally had YEARS in the UK to get the service right (there was a time when I would say Spotify in the UK slipped up and almost killed itself) but I feel as it is an Apple product I expected a far smoother ride. Overall iTunes Match was just a huge disappointment to me, it’s a cool service but I would definitely like to see the ability to turn off downloading to the phone and just have it stream. Because at the end of the day I’d just clear my iTunes Match data and delete all the songs so it’d stream them again tomorrow.

Maybe there will be a day I go back to iTunes Match, but as far as I can see there’s no reason for me to do so right now. I feel Apple was kind of loose lipped as to what iTunes Match was and did. It operated and performed as planned but the baggage it carried with it was kind of like the hot chick you start dating only to come home one night after wining and dining her to find out she’s got a 5 year old vomiting from eating bad fish sticks. I didn’t sign up for this, and I would have liked to be notified up front.

Disclaimer:

You will need to be somewhat knowledgeable in the realm of computers and the point of this is to have a media unit (such as a Boxee Box) to stream these files. This simply automates that process for you.

So how does it all work?

TV Shows 2 monitors your RSS feeds for shows, when a new show gets posted it snags the torrent and put it in one folder. For this whole set up I use only three folders. A TV Show Torrents folder, Rename TV Shows folder, and TV Shows folder. TV Shows 2 downloads the torrent into the TV Show Torrents folder, Transmission monitors the folder and starts the torrent. Once the torrent finishes, Hazel kicks off and uses UnRarX to unpack scene releases and tags the file with a green color label. Then Hazel executes rules to move AVI, MKV, or MPG files only larger than 100 MB into a Rename TV Shows folder, this stops it from moving garbage files. If a file reaches 4 hours of age (garbage files), one last rule executes to delete the files permanently. Once in the Rename TV Shows folder, a rule monitors files that are tagged green, and runs TVNamer to rename the file to Show Name.SXXEXX.Episode Name.ext TVNamer also kicks off and moves it to it’s final destination. Boxee scans the folder and pulls in the new shows so they can be watched.

Let’s Get Started!

First there will be a few programs, scripts, and configuration files you will need which I will provide here. You will need to make changes in some of these programs in order for them to work on your own setup, but I will detail that in the article.

Programs Required:

UnRarX

Transmission

TV Shows 2

TVNamer (You don’t have to download this, we can install it from Terminal.)

Hazel ($21.95)

Files Required:

Hazel Rules

TVNamer Configuration File

I’m going to go through each program individually and detail how they should be set up.

First thing you should do is create yourself the following folders:

A folder named “TV Show Torrents”, you’ll use this folder for TV Shows 2 to download the .torrent files, and where Transmission will download the shows.

A folder named “Rename TV Shows”, this is where Hazel will move files to be renamed before moving them to their final destination.

OPTIONAL: A folder named “TV Shows” this will be the final resting place of your shows, if you already have such a folder or wish to use another folder by all means use them.

Finally, in your Documents folder create one more called “Scripts”. This is where we’ll place the Hazel Rules and TVNamer Configuration files you should have downloaded.

UnRarX

There’s no need to detail UnRarX as it simply needs to be installed, as long as you’ve done that much everything will work just fine.

Transmission

You can use uTorrent if you wish but I choose to use both applications for different purposes. Once installed and in Transmission open up the Preference Pane and click on Transfers and make sure you’re on the “Adding” tab. Make your settings match below:

Once you have your preferences set up in the “Adding” tab, switch to the “Management” tab and make your settings match below. If you wish you can play with the “Queues” area but I left everything unchecked.

That’s it for setting up Transmission, next you’ll be moving on to TV Shows 2.

TV Shows 2

Install TV Shows 2, it’s not a standalone program (yet, version 3 will be with the ability to extract scene releases built in) it’s actually a Preference Pane in System Preferences. Once open you’ll see the screen below:

Switch over to the “Preferences” tab and make your settings match below. You can choose to download HD versions by default but sadly a lot of shows these days are not available in HD, it will wait out a certain amount of hours before it snags an SD version for you. You can change the default value of how many hours it waits with a Terminal command. If you wish to change it, open up Terminal and use the following command change the value of X for the number of hours you wish to wait:

Please note though a value of less than 3 hours will do nothing, the lowest interval it can wait is 3 hours before searching for SD. If you wanted, you could use a very large value such as 100,000 to stop it from downloading any file other than HD so you could manually download it yourself.

As you can see “Use additional sources for HD is checked (may contain rars)”, a Hazel rule will execute and extract those for us without a problem. You can choose your “Growl Settings” as you wish.

Next you can go back to “Subscriptions” and click “Add Show”. You’ll be presented with the screen below (if you can’t tell I like The Big Bang Theory). Just like TED you can choose “Next Aired Episode” or “This Episode”, based on sources it will present all the available torrents it can find for the show you’ve chosen if you choose “This Episode”. It will also download from the episode you choose to the most recent episode available if you go this route. Once again, I suggest using other sources if you’re more than one episode behind. Also, you will see “Download in HD” if you know a show is constantly available in HD, you can choose this or if you have your own RSS feed you’d like to add in once you choose the show it’s probably a safe bet. It’s much more reliable then TED for this. Once you’ve made these choices, go ahead and hit “Subscribe”.

Once you’ve added the show, you’ll something like the image below.

If you click on the show, you’ll be presented with the following screen.

Here you can enable HD downloading, unsubscribe or click “Edit”. If you click “Edit” you’ll get the following screen, where you can add criteria for the show to follow for downloading. This is where I found the one short fall of TV Shows 2, and that’s it only provides you with one feed initially for a show. (Unless you have use additional sources checked, at which point it’ll fall on those sources if it needs to, they’re just not listed) I suggest adding in a few others just in case. You can do that by clicking the “+” sign below Feed URLs and getting the RSS feed of the show from other sites.

You can now exit out of the pane for TV Shows 2, as it will be running in your status bar.

TVNamer

Installing TVNamer is quite easy, under Utilities open up Terminal. You’re going to type the following command:

It will then prompt you for your password, type it and press return. It will go out to GitHub and grab the source code for you and install it. Once it finishes installing, you can exit out of Terminal.

The next thing you will need to do is open up the “mytvnamerconfig.json” file you should have downloaded and placed in your Scripts folder in TextEdit or the code editor of your choice.

Look for the following line near the bottom of the file:

Change this to the final destination of your TV Shows folder, the code is set to make TV Show folders and Season folders for you if they do not exist. The naming convention for a Season folder is “Season1″ I choose this because if anyone is coming from Windows and using theRenamer, their folders will look like this.

NOTE: If you’re using a NAS, open up the mounted drive, navigate to the folder, right-click and get the /Volumes for your NAS, the afp: will not work.

And believe it or not, that’s all it takes to set up TVNamer, Hazel will be referencing that configuration file for us so we don’t have to worry about it.

Hazel

Finally, you’ll need to get and install Hazel which runs as a Preference Pane of System Preference, so it’s constantly running. Hazel is probably going to take the longest to set up, but should go fast if you use the rules I predefined for you. First thing you’re going to want to do is add your three folders to the folder sidebar like the image below, “TV Shows” is optional only if you’d like to add the rules to delete files that reach an age of 2 weeks old. If you don’t wish to have those rules, you don’t have to add that folder.

Next, you have two ways to add the rules. You can click on the folder in the the Folder Pane, and then click the cog, and hit Import Rules, and select the Hazel Rules that are named for each folder. They’re going to drop in as unchecked and inactive. The other way is in your Scripts folder, you can double click the rule, it’ll open up in Hazel and allow you to choose the folder you want to apply them to. You’re going to have to relink some of the folders in your rules as they may be different then the ones that the rules have predefined, but before you activate anything that has the ability to delete files, make sure that’s what you want because once you check it, there’s no going back. The shell script that is used is “-frm “$1″ f stands for forced, r is for recursive and m is for medium (7-pass), the $1 references the file in question. So if there’s TV Shows you have not watched or want to keep, I suggest moving them to a safe place until they’re watched if you choose to activate the Delete Old Shows rule.

The rules under “TV Shows” for deleting shows that are were not created within the last 2 weeks, is completely optional. It’s just if you are limited on space or don’t wish to keep the files for a period longer than that time.

So to get started, let’s jump into the “TV Show Torrents” folder rules. The first rule, “Empty Old Files” is to trash all the extra garbage that comes with TV Shows, .nfo, .txt, sample files, folders etc. If you right-click the rule and hit edit, you’ll see the image below. You can change the amount of time if you want, but I did 4 hours just in case for whatever reason a torrent took a long time to download. I also left it at the top of hierarchy because if it’s below the “Subfolders” the shell bin script for deleting files is set to be recursive, and the Subfolders rule will make it apply to folders, not allowing you to delete the highest folder if it was something like a Scene Release.

The next rule for Subfolders can be left alone, it’s just saying if there’s a subfolder in TV Show Torrents, apply all the following rules to those subfolders.

Next is the UnRar files, which can also be left alone it’s just telling Hazel to look for the rar extension and unarchive the file..

The following three rules for Move MKV, MP4, and AVI will have to be slightly changed. The rule looks for the file extension, and if the file is over 100 MB’s move it to Rename TV Shows, once it’s in that folder change the color label to green. I choose 100mb, because this stops Hazel from grabbing possibly sample files or other garbage files you don’t need. For each rule, right-click go to Edit, and just make sure the folder is linked up with your Rename TV Shows folder. If it can’t find the directory it’s supposed to move to, there will be a little yellow exclamation point in between the checkbox and file rule telling you there’s an issue that must be addressed.

In the folder pane, click on the “Rename TV Shows” folder, we only have one rule here to edit. Right-click on “Rename w/TVnamer & Move”, and click edit. Under “Do the following” click the down arrow next to “Edit Script” and make sure you change over “YOURUSERNAME” to what your username is on the computer like below:

As for the folder “TV Shows”, you don’t have to edit any of the rules here, plus they are completely optional. Like I said if you don’t wish to have them clear out files once they reach 2 weeks of age, just don’t even add these in.

Finally, and this is optional but at the top click on the “Trash” tab if you wish you can change your settings to what the image below shows. It’s set to delete files in the trash that reach an age of 1 hour, it keeps the Trash Size under 1GB and the oversized files are deleted immediately. Lastly I have it “securely (shred)” the files, which is the same as doing a “Secure Empty Trash.” App sweep is nifty but I don’t use it, it’s to remove support files and completely gets rid of an app for you.

Once you’re officially set up and ready to go, you can activate the rules in Hazel. Once you’ve done that you can now exit out of the Hazel Preference Pane.

You’re All Finished!

Your automated TV Show Schedule system for Mac OS X should now be fully ready to go. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. If you need in-depth help don’t be afraid to contact me on Skype. My Skype name is JacobRyan. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

You will need to be somewhat knowledgeable in the realm of computers and the point of this is to have a media unit (such as a Boxee Box) to stream these files. This simply automates that process for you.

This setup is for Windows, I did figure out a set up for Mac OS X which you can find here.

So how does it all work?

TED monitors your RSS feeds of TV Shows you added to the list, when a new episode is uploaded TED snatches the torrent that best matches the criteria you set forth and downloads it. You have your copy of uTorrent monitoring the folder TED downloaded the torrent file into and auto-starts it. When uTorrent starts the torrent for the show it trashes the Torrent file. Once uTorrent finishes downloading the file it moves it to your New TV Show directory.

At the point it finishes, EventGhost kicks of SCRU to extract it if it’s a compressed Scene Release. Also EventGhost kicks off a batch script to wait 10 minutes for the torrent to finish seeding 1%. Once the 10 minutes are up, EventGhost kicks off theRenamer to properly rename the file, and theRenamer moves it to its’ final resting place. At this point the process still isn’t 100% complete, EventGhost then kicks off Belvedere to clean up all the extra little files you don’t need, images, nfo, txt files, etc. At the very end, EventGhost executes the Remove Empty Folders batch script, to clear the folder and await your next TV Show download.

Let’s Get Started!

First there will be a few programs, scripts, and configuration files you will need which I will provide here. You will need to make changes in some of these programs in order for them to work on your own setup, but I will detail that in the article.

Programs Required:

uTorrent

TED

SCRU

EventGhost

Belvedere

theRenamer

Files Required:

Remove Extra Files Batch Script

Wait Ten Minutes Batch Script

EventGhost Workflow (Right-Click and Save As…)

I’m going to go through each program individually on how to set them up.

First thing you want to do is create a few folders wherever you feel they are best fit on your computer. You will need a TV Torrents folder, New TV Shows folder, and TV Shows folder. If you already have the last folder created for your media unit to monitor, then skip making the last folder and we’ll set our programs to move files there.

uTorrent

If you only plan on using uTorrent to download TV Shows and not other files, then you can skip this next step. Otherwise, you’re going to need to run two instances of uTorrent at once which I will detail here. First install uTorrent, and we’ll go from there.

Once it’s installed go to your Program Files on your computer and make a new folder and name it something like “uTorrentTV”. Go into the original uTorrent folder and copy the uTorrent.exe file and paste it into your new uTorrentTV folder.

Next for Windows 7, go to Start, Run and type:

For Windows XP, go to Start, Run and type:

Once in here select all the .dat and .dat.old files, copy them and paste them into the “uTorrentTV” folder and the original “uTorrent” folder. After you do this, right click the uTorrent.exe file and create two shortcuts and drag them both to your desktop. Name each shortcut whatever you want, you can name one just “uTorrent” and the other “uTorrentTV”. Right-Click on one and select “Properties,” once the screen comes up change the “Target” area to original uTorrent install:

Copy the quotes and all. If you’re on 32-Bit Windows remove (x86). Do the same for the second shortcut except have the “Target” area set to your uTorrentTV folder:

Now open your copies of uTorrent, go into Options > Preferences and make sure “Start uTorrent on Windows Startup” is UNCHECKED.

In the instance of uTorrent that you’re going to use for TV shows. Go into Options > Preferences. From here navigate to the Directories tab on the side. Check the box for “Move completed downloads to:” and set the directory to your “New TV Shows” folder. In this same screen check the boxes for, “Automatically load .torrents from:” and “Delete loaded .torrents” set this directory to your “TV Torrents Folder”. Your screen should look like what I have below:

Next in uTorrent go to the “Queueing” tab on the side. For “Queue Settings” you can make those what you wish, if you plan on downloading a lot of shows at once you may want to increase the number of active torrents and downloads. For “Seeding Goal” set your “Minimum Ratio (%)” to 1, “Minimum seeding time (minutes)” to 1, and “Minimum number of available seeds” to 0. Under “When uTorrent reaches the Seeding Goal” check the box for “Limit the Upload rate to (kB/s)” and set the value to 0. Your screen should look like what I have below:

TED

Install TED and launch it, you’ll be making some changes here and I’ll show you how to add TV shows. Go to Extra > Preferences and stay on the General tab. Here you will just be changing a couple values. Under “Search for new episodes every” you can set this value to whatever you want, I leave mine at 60 minutes. Next under “When ted finds a torrent… Save it to” navigate to the TV Torrents directory you created.  Make sure “Open it in your default bittorent client” and “Download torrents for each show in its own folder” are unchecked.  Your screen should look like what I have below:

Under the “Advanced” tab make sure you uncheck  “Do not download files with these extensions” SCRU will take care of unpacking your torrents that contain compressed Scene Releases for you later on down the line. Your screen should look like what I have below:

Now you’re going to add a TV Show, it’s simple enough click “Add Show” at the top, and a screen will pop up. You can select one from the list or if there’s a specific one that you want that isn’t listed and you know an RSS feed for it, you can add it yourself. When you choose a show, on the right it’ll display the name, information, and below “Next Episode”, “Last Aired Episode”, and “Custom Episode”. If you are getting into a show by the second episode of the season you can choose “Last Aired” and it will snag it.

Otherwise you can choose Custom Episode and go to the first episode of the season and it will snag Episode 1 to the latest episode. However, it may not always find the earlier episodes if you go too far back (especially if you go back to previous seasons) so just use this at your own risk as it’s not 100%. I personally suggest if you’re more than an episode behind to obtain them through one of your other sources. In this area you will also see a check box for “Download in HD Quality,” do not use this. The reason being is it auto adjusts the tags you’re looking for to be “HD” and “720p”, however when it comes to TV show torrents they’re generally tagged as “HDTV”. You’ll be better off adding in your own tags, which I’ll show you how to do. Once you decide the route you’d like to go with the show, Last Aired or Next Episode click “Add”.

Once it’s added you can click the show and hit “Edit Show” at the top or Right-Click the show and choose Edit Show. Here you can make edits to the way you want to filter the show, the RSS feeds it searches, etc.

Under Filters, you will see six predefined feeds that TED is searching. At the bottom you can click add, and it will give you a list of pre-generated feeds to use. Some of them will take you to the websites RSS feeds for TV shows where you can grab the URL for the TV show you want and paste it in. These are considered “User-Defined.”

Navigate to the “Filters” tab and here you can narrow the results and quality of torrents you find. You should do a bit of research for each show, as far as general size for a straight 720p vs. HDTV. This will help you make your decision on how you want to filter the torrents. Under “Size” for a half hour show a maximum size of 750MB is generally a safe bet but should be increased accordingly for longer shows, a minimum of 10 seeders, and searching for 720p OR HDTV tags. TED uses & , |, and ! to determine how you want to search tags. The & represents “AND” and the |represents “OR”, and the “!” to NOT search for something. Here are a few tag examples for you.

This is saying search for 720p OR HDTV

This is saying search for 720p AND HDTV

This is saying search for iPod AND xvid OR HDTV AND 720p.

This is saying DO NOT search for French OR Czech.

theRenamer

Go ahead and install the Renamer and launch it, there’s some settings you have to change to get it to execute correctly and cleanly for Boxee or your media streamer to grab it without issues. Click on “Settings” in the upper right hand corner.

On the first page you’re only going to be editing the area under “Fetch Folder” and “TV Shows Archive.” Under Fetch Folder, set the destination as the area you have uTorrent moving files to (New TV Shows directory). Also make sure “Include Sub Folders” is checked. Then hit “Save.” Under TV Shows Archive, set this destination as the final resting place of your TV Shows and hit Save. This would be your TV Shows folder. theRenamer will automatically create TV Show and season folders for you. If you’re going to be adding to a pre-existing TV Show folder, just make sure it’s 100% accurately named what that TV show is, so that theRenamer can just add to it. Also if you have season folders pre-created, make sure they’re named as “Season1” NOT as “Season 1”.

On the second page you can see there are a bunch of keywords listed here, if you find some shows not renaming properly once the system is in place. You can add keywords for theRenamer to search for and remove.

You can hit close on the settings, and at the top you can see “Force Showname,” this isn’t necessary but if you wish you can have TV Shows forced to be renamed something else. CSI Crime Scene Investigation is the full name of the show,  you can force it to be JUST “CSI”.

Belvedere

Install Belvedere and launch it, make sure you are under the “Folders” tab. At the bottom, click the left most + sign. And set the folder as your “New TV Shows” folder. Next click the + tab by the second window to add a rule. Name it “Folder Clean Up” and make it match the image below. To add a second condition like in the image below, hit the + arrow to the right of the box. In the first condition enter this for the list:

There’s just one more rule to add, if you look at the image below the second part is optional. The first portion of the rule is because sometimes theRenamer will properly rename a .nfo, .txt, .sfv to the proper name of the show and it gets moved to your TV Shows folder. The second portion if you choose to add it, will delete TV Shows that have a creation date of 2 weeks or older. This will allow you to get rid of shows you already watched without having to manually remove them.

What you will want to do is set the folder to your TV Shows folder, make sure the rule is Enabled and Recursive. Make the rule match the image below, remember the second part is optional.

Once you have these rules created, you can save them and exit Belvedere fully; since EventGhost will launch Belvedere for us.

SCRU

Unpack SCRU and make a folder in your Program Files (x86) folder named SCRU (just Program Files if you’re on 32-bit), and drop all the files in the folder. Launch the program, you only need to make one edit to SCRU. Go to the “Settings” tab at the top, and under “Default Output Directory” set it to your “New TV Shows” directory that uTorrent moves completed torrent files to. You can now actually exit this program and forget about it. EventGhost will take care of the rest and run it from the command line for you.

EventGhost

Install EventGhost and launch it, you’re on the home stretch now of bringing it all together. This is where you’ll need the EventGhost Tree file, I suggest going into your Program Files (x86) folder (just Program Files if you’re on 32-Bit) and creating a scripts folder in your EventGhost directory. In their place the “EventGhostWorkflow.xml” file, “Remove Empty Folders” batch file, and the “Wait” batch file.

First in EventGhost, go to File > Options and make the settings match below.

Now go to File > Open, and navigate to the scripts folder you just created and open the EventGhostWorkflow.xml file. The dirty work is pretty much done for you, you’ll just have to make a few edits now. First under Autostart you’ll see “Plugin: Directory Watcher” Right-Click on it and click “Configure Item” set your Watch Path to the New TV Shows directory you have uTorrent moving files into. Also make sure “Watch subdirectories also” is checked, then hit “OK”.

Next Right-Click on “Extract Archives” and choose “Configure Item” in the “Executable” area, navigate to the folder directory you dropped SCRU in and select “SCRU.exe”. Under command line options edit the directory to be that of your “New TV Shows” folder. It should read as follows:

Click “OK”.

Next Right-Click on “Wait 10 Minutes” and choose “Configure Item” in the “Executable” area, navigate to the EventGhost scripts directory you put the XML and Batch files in and select “Wait.bat”, then hit “OK”.

Next Right-Click on “Rename & Move TV Shows” and choose “Configure Item” in the “Executable” area, navigate to the directory theRenamer is installed and select “theRenamer.exe”. Make sure the “Command line options” reads:

Click “OK”.

Next Right-Click on “Clean Up Unnecessary Files” and choose “Configure Item” in the “Executable” area, navigate to the directory Belvedere is installed and select “Belvedere.exe”. Make sure the “Command line options” reads:

Click “OK”.

Next Right-Click on “Delete Empty Folders” and choose “Configure Item” in the “Executable” area, navigate to your EventGhost scripts directory and select “Remove Empty Folders.bat”. Change the “Working Directory” to your “New TV Shows” folder and click “OK”.

You’re All Finished!

If you leave TED, EventGhost, and your copy of uTorrentTV running in the background on your computer, your automated system will never fail. If you ever need to restart just make sure these applications are running and you’ll be good to go! Just make your media streamer scan the final destination of your newly downloaded TV Shows and they’ll be ready to go within minutes to downloading. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. If you need in-depth help don’t be afraid to contact me on Skype. My Skype name is JacobRyan. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!