Welcome to Data-drop.com. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I have been fighting Television problems ever since we moved into our new home almost 3 years ago. Cable TV is not available to us. So the next best thing was direct TV. Well let me give you a little insight where we live. The middle of a forest with very limited view to the southern sky. We were able to get TV for 1 year. After that the trees were in the way so much it became a hassle every spring. We would loose signal and have to cancel direct tv until fall once the leaves fell off the trees. So our only option was no TV during the summer and spotty TV in the winter. Everything was okay for us. It really wasnt a big deal. My wife and I didnt watch much TV during the summer anyway.

This spring I was searching for an alternate method via broadband TV or something of the like. I stumbled upon TED, or Torrent Episode Downloader. It already had most of the programs we watched in the available selections. I downloaded TED from here. Ted works with linux, Mac, and Windows. That was just what we needed. I have a torrent download server running all the time. With Utorrent, under options it will automatically download torrents saved in a specific folder. When TED finds a new episode it saves the torrent file in a folder that utorrent picks up and downloads. When completed it copies the new show to my linux server. Then 3 times a day the server rsyncs the shows to both HTPCs in the house. One in the living room and one in the bedroom. Did I mention that there are no comercials. A 1 hour long show is usually 42 minutes long, and 3o minute show is right around 24 minutes. What a difference.

TV is now an enjoyable experiance for me. No more Sat TV bills. In all TED has saved me approximately $60.00 per month or $720 a year. I can replace one HTPC a year for what we would have spent on Direct TV. If you don’t have broadband it might not be a good solution for you. It all depends on how many programs you want to record. All in all I give TED two thumbs up. If you need help configuring your setup let me know.