aj’s spinsels

I don’t watch a lot of TV, because I never know when interesting stuff is going to be broadcast. Sure, I could use a TV guide to find out, but I prefer watching at a time I choose. So, sooner or later, a PVR would do the trick for me. Still, the cable company will decide which channels I can watch.

So, for now, here’s a solution, at least for popular TV series like ‘Lost’. Get the video files online, play them on the TV screen that is hooked up to the PC with an S-Video cable.

Here’s a small recap on how I find, get and view video downloads, mostly TV series episodes, because I consider this to be legal (I can use a VCR/PVR too, right?).

A lot of TV series episodes can be found with P2P tools like BitTorrent or WarezP2P. For BitTorrent, you need a client like Azureus or BitComet, and you need sites that provide the lists of torrent links. For TV series, I use BTSeasonPass. This site enables you to make a personalized list of your favorite shows. The Lost episodes I have downloaded so far are from ABC, no subtitles. The quality is great, at least for my 4:3 TV with sound through my HiFi set.I would like to get my torrents to download like a vodcast. That means: get torrent files as RSS enclosures and have them opened automatically by Azureus or BitComet. I haven’t looked for this solution yet, but I’m sure it’s available somewhere. To be continued…

My favourite player is BSPlayer. They have a free version that does everything I need. Still, to play video files you may need a lot of different codecs. Which ones do you need? You can find out which codecs are used in your video file using a small application called ‘GSpot’. You can get it here. I installed the newest version 2.52 beta.

The ‘Lost’ episodes that I downloaded use the XviD codec, which you can get here. So if you get all this stuff and install it, you’re all set. Enjoy!

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