My Torrent Setup for TV Series

I still have an old MacMini at home and I really like it but it is not really doing a lot. Thanks to a few wonderful tools out there I now have a wonderful machine to deal with my downloading pleasure. I am always looking for ways to use the systems I have here and this has turned out to be something where I think the TV world can or needs to go to.

So what’s the setup?

First of all I have Transmission running at all times, and it is configured to watch a special directory for torrent files and start downloading whenever it finds something in that directory (deleting the torrent file while it is at it). That folder actually resides on my DropBox account, so I can always push stuff into that directory from where I might be at the time. This comes in handy when somebody suggests a movie, which I might add directly or just create a task in Remember The Milk to do so.

Next up is the Series part. Here I am currently trying out FeedMyTorrents just to see how it works and it is working like a charm. What that does is uses an app called “Automatic” for OS X where I can add RSS Feeds and it automatically downloads the enclosures into a given directory.

Next up is running a little script that takes any series and converts it to iPod High format via the Elgato Turbo.264, which does that in really wonderful speed and without making the fan of the mac mini run at 150% ;) Also I need to find a solution to really get TV series running here in Germany into the system. Currently I am recording them live on TV with a hard disk video recorder, but what I really would like to have is just Boxee down in the living room having all those movies/series via Bittorrent automatically. I do not _need_ to see them live and that might be easier than making Boxee record live TV.

So what do you do to automate your television pleasures? I know I am just starting to see the pieces fall together in real life, not just in my head.