iTunes has been pissing me off lately– when you download the HD version of something it forces you to download the SD version also to play on an iPod. There is no getting around this other than to let it download. It’s also getting slow and clunky and I’m done buying video episodes off of it.
I tried using an app called ted to automatically download torrents, but it needed constant tinkering and ultimately wasn’t worth the hassle. So yesterday between 9:01am and 9:11am I hacked out a python script to fetch me the Daily Show and Colbert Report off of mininova. To use the script you need python and a torrent client that can watch a directory for incoming torrents; I use Transmission.
To use the script, download it and edit it to put torrents where you want them. Configure your client to watch the same directory, and run the script. I recommend you schedule the script to run every morning using launchd. Notice that the script has no error handling whatsoever and might totally not work for you. It’s worked the past two days for me, so, you know, it works on my machine.
oh, I should point out that this could be much, much prettier (at the very least use timediff and url libraries to do things the right way), but I wanted to see if I could write it in the ten minutes before I left for work.