Downloading Illegal Shit Is Way Easier Than I Thought

Ok, so if you follow me on Twitter, you're already well aware of my TV obsesh (if you don't here's the deal: I'm kinda like Whitney Houston, but instead of crack-n-weed, my vice is Television).

Needless to say, shit has gotten real bad during this winter/holiday/christmas hiatus break while everything is in repeats (and I'm off from work). Yesterday I looked on my tivo's "Now Playing" list and saw the following message:

"Yo, E...I'm bored."

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so after I decided to start watching Dexter on my netflix instant streaming thing we have on Tivo, I got real desperate. See, Dexter Season 1 and Dexter Season 2 were available instantly, but Dexter Season 3 was not. I spent two agonizing days waiting for the actual DVD in the mail (the mail, people!), before I realized I needed a better solution. My solution was vuze.

I've tried the whole bittorrent thing before, and I've never stuck with it because I've always just felt like the whole process was totaly fucking confusing. Download shit here, convert the file here, but wait, if you want to watch on your ipod, you gotta convert the file HERE. Peers...seeds...the whole thing just seemed to be a clusterfuck to me. But recently someone told me about vuze, and though I haven't used a ton of other shit, it's definitely the easiest bittorent client I've ever tried. Like so easy, I've actually managed to figure this mofo out.

I'm not going to go into a whole detailed post about how to vuze it up yourself (check out the following links for more scoop: Vuze Review, How to use vuze, A Beginner's Guide to Bittorent), but rest assured that you can download any TV show, movie, podcast or album known to man....and its all free (and pretty fast), AND in HD. The coolest thing of all is that vuze also allows you to put all this free, illegally downladed shit right on to all of your other devices, like Tivo, PS3, Apple TV, ipods, etc. And you can even "subscribe" to shows that you want Vuze to auto-download for you (like a season pass on Tivo). Also, the interface is kind of itunes-esque, so its easy to figure out, and doesn't feel scary.

Based on my week-long vuze escapade, I have a few tips to share:

• Can't speak to the quality, but for me, .avi files are the quickest ones to download. Vuze categorizes the "quality" of the torrents, with the best ones closer to the top. Don't feel like you always need to choose the top torrent...sometimes I've had better luck with "medium" quality torrents than high. Also, if something is downloading and seems to be going verrrry slow, stop it and try another one.
• Queue up all your stuff to download before you go to sleep at night (just remember that if you have a laptop, you need to leave your screen up/computer on...yes, I'm the moron who put my computer to sleep at the height of my Dexter mania). The queuing thing is especially helpful when you are downloading entire seasons of TV shows.
• The format for TV shows is name_season_episode. So if you are searching for Dexter, Season 3, episode 5, you would type the following into your search field: Dexter S03E04. This will ensure you come up with the most results.
• Pay attention to the sites you are going to download stuff (again, this is all taken care of from within vuze, but in your search results, you can see where shit is coming from. After I had a couple of good experiences on a particular site, I would look for it in the results and try to download stuff from there again.
• Sometimes torrents are sub-titled in other languages. Like if you see FR in the file name, there are french sub-titles. Mrs. Nadel from 11th grade French class, would be pleased to know that I'm keeping up my studies with 2 accidentally downloaded eps of French sub-titled Dexters.
• This shit takes up a LOT of room on your hard drive. Either get yourself an external drive (if you want to keep stuff, or if your computer is already busting at the gut), or delete shit as soon as you are done watching it (I've been doing the latter).

I converted a couple of files for Tivo and get them to show up. However, when I went to play them, there was this screachy audio problem that made the show impossible to watch. To convert files for your devices, you basically just drag and drop stuff into your device folders in your side menu, which will automatically show up in vuze if you have a wireless network. This feature is in beta, and there does not seem to be a ton of info or support for it yet (I tweeted my question to the vuze folks, and heard nothing back; also looked in the forums and there didn't seem to be much there except for some other frustrated people)--so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. It might be that certain file types are not suited for tivo conversion, or maybe there is some setting I'm missing...who the fuck knows. It would be seriously rad to have the option to watch this shit on one of our two tivos, though, so I'm not giving up yet.

In the meantime, I'm just watching eps on my comptuer, which has been totally fine too.

So yeah, vuze has (mostly) been fucking awesome.

I finished up 4 seasons of Dexter (loved the shit out of it!), and have now moved on to Nurse Jackie. Everyone also keeps telling me I gotta watch The Wire and I've had a few Breaking Bad recs as well. Any other suggestions???