I've been a huge fan of Usenet for a long time. My friends and family have been hooked on everything from Napster to IRC to Kazaa to eMule to BitTorrents but I've stayed faithful to my good old friend, NNTP. Until I moved over to a Mac, I've even been faithful to GrabIt, my beloved newsgroup downloader, for over 7 years.
That might have all changed today. That's because I met tvRSS. And then Democracy.
One of the painful things about Usenet (it's the first thing that my friends and family usually point out to me) is that it's really just a big bulletin board. And every 3 or 4 days somebody comes along and cleans up all of the old bulletins. My friends and family would complain to me that it Usenet never had anything on it that was useful. "You just have to be patient" is what I would say.
For those of you that don't know Usenet, saying this probably makes me look like a bit of an idiot. But Usenet has one might fine trick up its sleeve that will bail me out of looking foolish - it's DAMN FAST.
While I'll admit that those peer-to-peer applications have a huge library of content that's available, you're usually lucky if you can get 10 kb/s for a transfer speed. With Usenet, the data is coming right from my ISP so I'm getting 400 kb/s. Not a bad trump card, eh?
Anyways, I need to start getting to my point.
Lately, my wife has been wanting to watch some new show called Dirt. Since we don't get the channel that Dirt is on, I went to my good friend Usenet to see if I could find it. I couldn't. I tried the next day and still got nothing. After a subsequent day of fruitless searches, I knew that I had to turn to the dark side. I checked out TorrentSpy to see if I could find a torrent for Dirt. And what do you know...I did.
So I fired up Transmission and downloaded the video. My wife was happy and life moved on. I remembered to download the next episode the next week and the week after that. But then I forgot. And so did she. When I finally remembered (i.e. she reminded me), I decided that there had to be a better way. And there is.
First of all, check out tvRSS. It provides a quick RSS feed for most of the TV shows out there that have torrents set up for them. Basically, it will save you a trip to TorrentSpy. But it seems to add more value than that. For example, the TorrentSpy listing for "dirt" had a ton of hits. The feed from tvRSS is a lot cleaner and only contains one torrent per episode.
Finding an RSS feed was one step. Now I needed an automatic way to download the torrents.
Democracy is an application that can do that. According to their website, Democracy can "subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog". Sounds good to me.
After downloading Democracy for the Mac (there are also Windows and Linux versions), I fired it up and added my feed for Dirt from tvRSS. It's currently downloading as we speak. And it will continue to download new videos as the RSS feed gets updated. Democracy also supports YouTube, Google Video and other internet video sites.
I don't know if that's enough for me to completely split up from Usenet but it's definitely enough for me to justify something different on the side. :)
Download Democracy today and add some tvRSS feeds to it. You won't regret it.