A little over a year ago our beloved founder Corey posted on his personal blog The Cable TV Revolution citing on how he went cable free in an attempt to save money. One thing about Corey that many don’t know is if the guy wants to accomplish something; there’s nothing that’s going to hold him back from achieving success. He’s one of the most knowledgeable Network Specialists’ I know, and probably one of the best guys I’ve known since we were in 5^th grade together. He was kind enough to show me how the configuration works.

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.

This setup is for Windows, you can find the setup for Mac users 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 our torrents that contain compressed Scene Releases for us 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. I did 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 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!