Download TV Shows Hassle Free with Torrents - An Introduction

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I've been asked many times where to get TV Shows for free online and how. Specially if your old VCR is broke, you cant afford a satellite system or to buy a PVR system or even TIVO. So if you want to know the skinny on how hassle free here it is. This should take you no more than 10min to get you ready.

First things first. It doesnt matter if you have a Mac, PC or running Linux, the main thing here is that you have the appropriate audio/video codecs to play back the TV shows which are usually recorded in DivX /XVid format (AVI files) . If you are running Windows Vista and are not sure about your current video codec support, read my other article to properly enable it first. Win XP users can download the DivX pack from here.

If you are running a Linux Distribution like Ubuntu, you will want to ensure you have installed the Mplayer which will handle DivX playback without problems.

If you are running Mac OS X, you can download and install the DivX Codec from here.

Now assuming you have the appropriate free DivX codecs installed, your ready to watch TV Shows your about to download using a Free Torrent Download Client. For some years now I have been using various BitTorrent client tools to download, the main thing about this client tool is that it be free, with no spyware or viruses, it be stable, and give the performance you would expect. So your next step is to get a Client Tool that allows you to download from torrents, lets look at a few.

For sometime as a Windows user I used Azureus to download, then later found it used more resources and memory than I liked, so I switched to uTorrent. uTorrent is safe, freeware, closed source, BitTorrent client for Windows platforms and is localized for many different languages. It is designed to use minimal computer resources while offering functionality comparable to larger BitTorrent clients.

If you are a Mac user you can download the Azureus client from here.

If you are using Linux you can also download Azureus or in Ubuntu install the available client in there, or download KTorrent. There are many more clients you can download, its to each his own preference.

Ok, so now that you installed the simple small Torrent Download Utility of your choice lets find some TV Shows to watch. Using these tools you will be able to download TV shows when you click on a link to a Torrent file online in your Web Browser.

The Top sites I have found that deliver quality torrent downloads , with no porn, popup ads and hassles, they are pretty clean , and are as follows:
EZTV has updated TV Shows sorted by date, so you can quickly get the lastest show, or search for it.

BT-Chat.com also a great choice for the latest shows.

Mininova.org has always been one of the best sites for TV Shows aswell

You can also get high quality TV shows from Amazon.com here:

Now that you have the tools and the websites , you have the means to getting the TV shows, when you visit these sites and click on a TV Show episode you will usually be presented with the download link to the .torrent file for that TV episode. When the link to that .torrent file is clicked by you it will either ask you what to do with it (open it with your Torrent Client you got earlier) or it may automatically open your Torrent Download Client and then prompt you where you want to save the TV show in its AVI file format on your PC.

So essentially these .torrent files are links to where the actual AVI file for that specific TV show , and it gets it from shared resources online. The shared resources are all those people like yourself that are downloading that same TV Show at the same time. The good thing is that torrents are safe and dont give out any data about you or your PC. Try to stick to downloading from sources as mentioned above in the links. Just remember, you get what you pay for, which in this case its free, so dont expect the quality to be DVD crystal clear quality when viewing, however if you look throught the list of available TV Shows and episodes you will notice that many are now in High Definition widescreen which you can watch on your PC or on a DivX Player which connects to your TV liek a DVD player (which I bought aswell). Then you can burn onto one DVD lots of TV Shows and watch them on your TV all at once. I hope this helps you out a bit, without going into too much detail, this should get you going.
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