Here on our end of the planet it’s sometimes hard work to keep up with your favorite TV shows.

From keeping track of when they’re on, to managing your download quota, to actually getting to watch them before you see spoilers on the interwebs, it can sometimes seem like more trouble than it’s worth. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just sit down on the couch and start watching, like regular TV?

Well, you can! There’s two ways to do it: you can pay someone to come into your house while you’re at work, start your downloads, wait for them to finish, then convert them into some format you can watch in your living room, and hope that they’re not raiding your fridge and stealing your stuff. Or alternatively, you can automate the whole process so that you never again need to lift a finger.

Assuming you have chosen option B, you will need:

A Mac (duh)

ted

Transmission

An AppleTV

atvusb-creator

A USB stick (Minimum 512MB)

An AppleTV update .dmg

A boxee account

Optional:

Hazel

Step 1: Set up ted.

ted stands for torrent episode downloader, and is the best way I’ve found to automate TV downloads. (There’s also TVShows.app, but it seems to be an abandoned project and no longer works as well as it once did.) Download ted from here and install.

To set up ted, you’ll need to go through and enter all the shows you want to watch. It’s done through a simple interface that has dozens of running shows preloaded, or lets you enter custom data for other shows. ted even pulls data from epguides.com to work out when your next episode airs, so that it doesn’t waste time checking trackers for a show that isn’t on today. There’s a default set of trackers loaded, or you can enter your own.

You’ll need to set the preferences to download .torrent files to a specific folder, and you can even set it to open your torrent client. (However, this isn’t necessary if you set your torrent client to watch that directory for new .torrents, as we’ll do in just a minute.)

Result of step 1: a folder full of .torrent files.

Step 2: Set up Transmission.

You can do all this with just about any torrent client, but I like Transmission. Download it here and install.

If you’ve been on the internet for longer than ten minutes you know how to set up a torrent client, so I won’t go into it in much detail. But there’s a couple of important steps here. First, you need to set Transmission to keep incomplete downloads in a different folder (1), to uncheck the “Display ‘adding transfer’ options window” option (2), and to watch for new .torrent files in the same folder where ted is saving them (3).

The first is needed so that Transmission starts the download automagically, the second is so that it doesn’t hang waiting for user input before the download starts, and the third so that Hazel doesn’t move incomplete files.

An optional fourth step is to set the Speed Limit to download only in your offpeak hours, if you have them.

Result of step 2: one folder of incomplete/in progress downloads, and another folder of complete, unsorted downloads, which we’ll call the Download folder.

Step 2a: Set up Hazel.

This is optional, particularly as it’s not free. But it will make things a lot easier, and not just for downloading.

Hazel monitors one or more folders you designate and carries out actions based on rules you set. It’s one of those apps that seems kinda interesting when you first hear about it, but once you use it you wonder how you lived without it. In this instance we’re going to set it up to organize the files you’ve downloaded.

First, download Hazel and install. (You get a free 14-day trial, during which there are no limitations, after which it’ll cost you $21.95 USD. My recommendation is to try it as described here for the first 14 days – if you don’t see the value in it, then you have two weeks to Google for other ways to accomplish this specific workflow.)

Next, set up one additional folder in Finder. Call it Unsorted TV, but make sure it is not inside the Download folder you set up in step 2. You can optionally set up another one called Movies (or use ~/Movies).

In Hazel, go into the Folders tab and add your Download folder – this tells Hazel to monitor it and run the associated rules.

Next, set up these three rules in this order: (Click to embiggen!)

The first rule deletes any empty folders. It won’t find any on the first run through, but after your file has been moved and sorted it might leave behind an empty folder, which this rule will delete on the next pass. The second rule tells Hazel to look inside any subfolders it finds and apply any succeeding rules to the contents of that folder. (This is why your Unsorted TV folder shouldn’t be inside your Download folder.) And the third rule copies anything with an .avi extension (and without a red label) to Unsorted TV, then applies a red label to it (so that it leaves a copy to seed, but only copies the file once). This leaves any non-video downloads safely in your Download folder where you can do whatever you like with them, and your downloads seeding like a good citizen. Note that Hazel also has iLife media support, so you could add a rule to load any .mp3 files into iTunes or images into iPhoto; you could also add a rule to look for any .avi files with a red label more than a week old and move them to the trash.

So at this point you have a new folder that’s just .avi files. The slightly painful part now is to separate them into different TV shows.

In the Folders tab in Hazel, add the Unsorted TV folder to the list on the left. For each show you download, create a folder in Finder with that show’s name, then set up a rule that will match the downloads for that show and move it to that folder – see example at right. (You need to either add a rule that matches the file extension, or state “Kind is not folder” – otherwise Hazel tries to move the folder into itself.)

There are a couple of shows that you will need to treat carefully – shows where your keywords are fairly common as part of other show names or in episode titles (e.g House or Life). You can get around this by putting the rules for these shows last. Hazel runs the rules in order and stops looking once it finds a match, so if the rule is right at the end then only files that don’t match any of your other rules will even get that far. In the very last spot you can optionally set a rule that says anything over 500MB (or whatever other limit you like) gets moved to your Movies folder.

If you download a lot of TV this can take a while. However, you will be glad you did it because it really helps to keep boxee organized as you’ll see later.

Result of step 2a: a series of folders, one for each TV show you download (and optionally one for movies).

Step 3: Set up AppleTV.

The AppleTV is a great addition to your living room straight out of the box, but it’s just a little bit handier with some third party goodness. First, download the atv-usb creator and install.

The patchstick creator also needs an AppleTV update .dmg – you can find more information on this here.

All right, now we’re ready to do this. With your USB stick mounted, run the atv-usb creator and choose your installation options. One note here: be very sure you’re choosing the correct USB drive – you might want to unplug any USB hard drives you have connected to be sure. Once you start running the process, the contents of your selected drive are gone – so it’s worth taking the time to double-check.

Once the install is complete, eject your USB key and take it over to your AppleTV. Remove the power cord from the back and insert your new patchstick. Then reinsert the power cord, and if all goes according to plan you’ll have a bunch of ugly/scary text on your TV, ending with the following about five lines up from the bottom:

Please unplug your Apple TV to reboot/reset the device

If you don’t see this, you will need to do a factory restore on your AppleTV and try again with a different USB key. The former is because running two consecutive patchstick attempts will non-permanently bork your AppleTV (a factory restore will fix it though); the latter because some USB keys are not compatible with atv-usb creator. Nobody knows why – it’s one of those mysteries of the cosmos. If you do a factory restore, make sure you input all your network and sync settings again before you start step 4.

Assuming you did get that message, the hard part is done. Remove the power cord, remove the USB key, replace the power cord and go get yourself a frosty Coopers.

Result of step 3: a gently hacked AppleTV.

Step 4: Set up boxee.

On your AppleTV, you’ll see a new menu. Depending on the patchstick version it might say XBMC/Boxee, or maybe Launcher. Select that one, and then select Downloads on the submenu. From this menu, select Launcher – you’ll need to update this utility as it controls all the other updates. Once the Launcher update is downloaded, your AppleTV will restart. Go back to the Downloads submenu and select Boxee to download the newest version (it might take a while). After the restart, launch Boxee.

Hit left on your remote a couple of times until the left-side menu pops up and select Settings > Media Sources > Network Sources. Next, select Add New Source and navigate to the Unsorted TV folder on your Mac (or, if you did step 2a, the one which encloses your individual TV show folders). Select this one and designate the content type as Video and save. If you have a Movies folder, do the same again for that.

Almost there. You should be just about finished that beer by now, so go get yourself another while Boxee indexes your content.

After a while, depending on how much content you have, go back out to the main menu and select Video > Movies from the left-side menu. If all has gone according to plan, you should see a bunch of movies with automatically retrieved poster art, titles and descriptions.

Something tagged incorrectly? It’s easily fixed. Select the offending item, then choose Read More from the following menu. On the next screen, navigate across to Wrong Item and select. You’ll be asked for the type of video (Movies or TV Shows) and the name. (This is where the free Boxee Remote app for iPhone/iPod touch comes in handy – Boxee’s onscreen keyboard does the job but isn’t terribly speedy to use.) Boxee will then search the IMDB and present you with a list of matches – pick the correct one and your movie will be automagically updated.

Go back out to the main menu and select Video > TV. Your TV shows should be there in all their glory, separated by show and then by season. But wait, Boxee has wrongly indicated your beloved Battlestar Galactica (angels? really?) as the original series! Man, it is going to be a huge pain in the ass to retag four seasons worth of content one episode at a time, right?

Well, if you did step 2a then it’s easily and quickly fixed. Select any episode, then choose Read More > Wrong Item. Enter TV Shows as the content type, then enter the show name as it appears in the TVDB followed by the season number and episode number (e.g Battlestar Galactica 2003,1,1). Boxee will retrieve matches from the TVDB and once you select one it will then ask if you want to apply that show to the whole folder. If you’ve done step 2a, this will retag all of your BSG episodes to the correct series. If you haven’t, don’t choose this option as it will retag all of your TV content to BSG.

And that’s all there is to it. Now when you get home from work/school/building your MacTalk media empire, you can just sit down and turn on your TV, and you’ll have brand-new content downloaded, indexed, beautifully organized and waiting for you – all without lifting a finger.