Last night I got caught up in something else and didn’t notice the the TiVo had prioritized Desperate Housewives over Survivor, the season finale (Who’s gona win?). A similar situation happened about a month ago when ER was mismarked as a rerun when it was a new episode. These things are extremely annoying, but what do ya do? Wait for the rerun, oh that’s right Survivor doesn’t rerun and ER may take months. Here’s another one. There was a National Geographic channel show about the Gospel of Judas I wanted so see. It’s not worth the trouble ordering a channel for one episode of one show. Oh wait, you can’t order one channel you have to order 20, in a pack.
Increasingly, I’ve taken to the internet for TV shows. The ones I miss or the ones I can’t get. The quality isn’t as good as TV or DVD and you might have to wait a couple of days and it’s pretty spotty about whether you can it watch on TV(through TiVo). On the plus side, it’s free and it’s the only way.
The way it works is a little involved. Using TiVo, the method is find the show, download the show, wait, wait, convert to TiVo, upload to TiVo, and watch the show. You need a couple of programs Azureus and Videora. The website I use the most is the Pirate Bay. They are in a country that refuses to prosecute them for copyright violation. Find a show you want. TV shows are usually number according to season and episode. For example E1205 or 12E05 is season 12 episode 5.
The file that downloads is tiny, set Azureus as the default to open this kind of file. Azureus will come up and ask where to save the download. Then it starts. Many people have the file and each one will send a piece to your computer and you will send pieces to them. Out of politeness, you should keep Azureus running even after you get your file. I share the file at least once, before deleting it.
Open Videora and Convert the file with One-Click Transcode. TiVo uses a wierd video format and several people came together to write this program for free to load internet files into TiVo. After the transcoding, this may take several minutes or a few hours. One note here is that multi-core processors like the X2 or Core Duo make this go much faster than old ones. Then go to TiVo and watch the file from your computer on TiVo. It will be copied to TiVo, but as usual you can watch it while it transfers. Not every show is convertable. If a 20 minute show takes 1 second, somethings wrong. Also, the video/audio can be out of sync when it plays or the video may be squashed flat or thin.
Give it a try. If you want more instructions I can make some.