Eeyores sadness

VCRs are ok. The bad thing about them, however, is they only record what is on tv, and not what is not on tv. Now, that's not news. What is news, however, that the moaning days are over. At least for a part.
I'm a scifi-fan, and most good series only broadcast in the US. Even worse, there's no way I can subscribe to scifichannel (or HBO for that matter) in Europe. Luckily, however, there are quite some nice americans who tape series on their harddrive and make a torrent out of it. Out of that, other nice people make rss-feeds. And again others create handy software called torrent-vcr (or even better, µtorrent).
What is all that, you ask? Well, torrent is a peer to peer protocol (think napster or kazaa) without the need of a centralised fileserver or a centralised database. Not being centralised has great advantadges (not-so-easy target for copyright claims, no shutting down the whole system at once). The downside is the searchability. You have to search for the torrent files yourself and dont forget to check the health of them. Nobody providing the file means nobody to download from. Read more about torrents here
So what's that got to do with PCzapper? Well, imagine, we get our tv-series-downloads going using rss and autodownload (it's all available in both torrentvcr as well as in utorrent) and download in a PCzapper-dynamic-directory, we'd zap through everything that's available on RSSfeeds on our TV.
Now, all we gotta do is hack together a plugin or script to rule one of these apps and we'd be choosing our own downloads right from our telly!
So, what't the deal? You find your rss-feeds (for example 10mbit's TV tracker. You setup your rss-catcher, for instance torrent-vcr. Specify the torrentclient, download dirs, update timer etc.
Now import the feeds into the catcher, define criteria (follow the examples provided in the software) or import the list first, find a series you'd like to watch, rightclick and start from there. Add the download directory to your pczapper configuration Remember, only supported file extentions show up in your pczapper directories.. Your torrent client is able to put .bt! or !ut or whatever to uncompleted downloads, so if the torrent contains unzipped/unrarred avi or mpg files you are done. If not, you have to tell your torrent client to run additional programs (for instance unzip) with the completed download in order to automate everything nicely.
Questions? None? Great. Have fun!

Other clients:
Upside of the µtorrent software is it has an implemented rss reader to do the above. Downside of it is it doesn't support all the formats used for rss feeds yet. Hopefully they read this blog too and make some changes in the next edition. Azureus apparently has better rss support through plugins, but that is a java client and a heavy one indeed. Eats up most of your ram/cpu but does the job nicely.
If anybody stumbles across a better broadcatcher as appears to be the official name for this kind of software, I'd be delighted to hear about it.