How to get and watch free TV
Please note: This post was written some time ago (18 years ago). My perspectives, knowledge, and opinions may have evolved significantly since then. While the content might still offer valuable insights, I encourage readers to consider it in the context of its publication date.
So I canceled directTV awhile back and have been struggling to figure out how to easily download the shows I want to watch. I would love to do it legally. I have looked into the itunes solution - but they don’t have all I need/want. And it won’t work for hiromi - in japan. So I needed something that wasn’t region specific and something that wasn’t hard.
With these requirements I poked around quite a bit. Having looked into azaurus and bittorrent with RSS. It was a pain and I couldn’t possibly use it regularly. I also have terrible luck over time with azaurus. It rules when I have time - but when I leave for a week and comeback to it - I have no idea what’s going on. So - I then looked into DDL sites. They were lame and too much work. So annoying.
I had great hope in the allsimps.com site. But it was taken down. weird I know.
Finally after looking and looking - I found what I was looking for in a video client that I had already looked into. I had originally downloaded and played with the Democracy video client years ago. It wasn’t very intuitive. Or maybe I wasn’t into it. But regardless - I left it installed and then stopped using it. Then a week ago I read the lifehacker article about using Democracy and TV RSS feeds to stay updated on torrents of your favorite TV shows. All seamlessly. it is pretty dope.
This is what I have done (it is outlined in much greater detail in the lifehacker article):
I was taking about 30min to download each show - with some taking much longer. It seemed that it was reasonably fast - especially when ran at night. I now just have to remember to watch the shows. Luckily democracy will delete old and watched shows after a specific duration.
- Download and install the democracy client
- Find your favorite TV shows at tvRSS
- Add the RSS feed from the TV show listing to democracy
- Hang out for a minute (go outside and juggle)
- Watch your shows
So now I can watch TV on any of my laptops. I do wish I could throttle the Democracy player a bit more. It seems that having it run only at night would be a good plan. The coolest part about the player is how it is a bittorrent client as well as a player - so the problem of people closing their clients after they are done downloading an episode is a bit diminished. woot.
I guess the next step is trying to get this integrated into a MythTV box. I think that would be excellent. And after hacking the Tivo to all its ends - I think its time to roll my own PVR. heh.