Downloading television episodes via the internet is something that continues to grow and grow. TV networks had found their audiences are preferring to record their favourite programmes on their DVR’s and watch them back at more suitable times, this has seen some of the more internet savvy users take to harnessing the power of Bittorrent to grab the new episodes as soon as they become available.

When you want to download a TV episode, it’s as easy as visiting your favourite Bittorrent website, performing a search and then clicking download. This brings with it a little sense of repetition and it can be tiresome if you follow quite a few different television series and have to perform numerous searches to download each episode.

One way to automate the download process is to take advantage of RSS, many Bittorrent websites provide RSS feeds to allow syndication of their listings to different Bittorrent applications that support it. This article will show you how to add RSS feeds to uTorrent and configure it to download each television episode as soon as it’s available.

Step One – Find The RSS Feed

There are a few sites that provide reliable TV torrents, the one I use was called TVRSS but has since renamed to ezRSS.

If you click the above link, you will be presented with a search box. Here you need to enter the name of your chosen TV series and click search. For the purposes of this article, we will use True Blood as an example.

Once you have performed the search, you will [hopefully] be presented with a complete listing of all of the episodes and seasons of your chosen search. Below you will find the listings for both seasons of True Blood:

What you need to do here is to click click the link at the top of the table entitled Search-based RSS Feed and then copy the link location:

This is the link you will add to uTorrent. Make sure you paste this somewhere so you don’t lose it.

Step Two – Add The RSS Feed To uTorrent

Adding the RSS feed to uTorrent is really simple and requires you to click the big orange RSS logo on the top toolbar.

Paste your RSS feed into the Feed URL box and then select Custom Alias. Here you can call your feed something that works for you. There is the option to download the items in the feed automatically but this gives you no control over what episodes from what seasons you may want to start from.

You will now have a new feed in the left hand panel, in my case called True Blood:

You can download these episodes individually by double clicking them but of course, you want automatic downloads!

Step Three – Configuring The RSS Downloader

The last part is configuring the RSS Downloader to recognise the episodes you want to download. Here you can specify what season of the series you wish to download and only download the newest files when they are released.

Inside uTorrent, right click the RSS panel and then select RSS Downloader from the resulting menu:

The RSS Downloader will simply ask you to define the criteria of the episodes you wish to download. You will need to add a new filter, renaming it to a name that works for you.

Inside the Filter Settings, the Filter field needs to be the name of the episode listed in the RSS Feed. You then define where you would like the episode to be downloaded to and then under Feed, select the RSS feed you added in Step Two.

The most important part is Episode Number, this is how the downloader will know what episode from what season to download. For example, if I wanted to download the entire second season of True Blood, I would put the following in the box: 2×1-24. This tells the downloader that it’s the second season and will expect there to be 24 episodes. Say you had already download the first five episodes and wanted uTorrent to download the sixth episode onwards, you could use 2×6-24.

Finally, tick the Smart ep. filter check box and you should all be set. To help, the settings I have for True Blood are listed below:

Clicking close will save your settings.

To add more RSS feeds, all you have to do is follow the exact same process as the one listed here. I have around ten shows listed and all download automatically, you just need to make sure uTorrent is running when you computer starts up otherwise they will not download. uTorrent needs to be open for all torrents to process and download.