Engadget has a great article on broadcatching or how to download and watch TV episodes. I’m not as anti-TiVo as Phil Torrone. I like the single purpose box that’s easy to use and requires zero maintenance. However, I really dislike that’s it’s hard to get TiVo-recorded programs on my laptop.
Having said all that, I used Azureus with the RSS Import plugin to download shows to ease the pain of my 9+ hours of Thanksgiving driving. It was excellent. Bittorrent + RSS is like fully distributed, multithreaded TiVo. I don’t have DirecTV, so I can only record one program at a time…big disadvantage. Using Azureus and www.btefnet.net/, I was able to download 10+ shows, 3 at a time. Albeit, the more popular shows download faster because there are more bittorrent seeds.
Anyway, read the article and try it…very cool.