bump because I see a lot of people struggling.

Sorry, but as keen as Bluenote is about his so-called TED replacements, the ones suggested here are little of the sort. They are either for Mac's (not PCs) or require switching from torrents to news groups, or are very primitive.

I'd be keen on hearing from PC users that have found a replacement for TED that continues to use torrents.

The RSS downloader that is built into uTorrent seems to be the best replacement I've found...
of course the TV shows aren't already listed nicely for you, and you have to provide the RSS feeds you want to use,
you have to fill the filter in yourself w the name of the show & HD/720 if you want hidef, etc.

...TED is actually very similar to many "built-in" rss downloaders on torrent programs such as uTorrent or Azureus / Vuze. The advantage TED has is that it provides a list of popular TV shows and summary information from 'TV.com', provides auto-generated search-based RSS feeds from a few popular torrent sites, and incorporates online databases of the show schedules from 'Epguides' and 'TVRage' for the automatic show scheduler to prevent downloading fake that are available before the airtime for the show.
Just like the 'keywords' in TED, you fill in the filter for the rss downloader in uTorrent, for example the 'keywords' you would add in TED for HD shows (720p | HD)... the only difference is that TED already included the show name in the RSS filter, and the keywords are any additional filters.
uTorrent's RSS downloader also has a smart episode filter, and a minimum interval (somewhat like a manual show scheduler from TED), which you could set the interval to say, 1 week, and it will know to wait exactly 1 week before attempting to download the show (which would help avoid fakes)

The MAIN drawback that I have found... is the RSS feeds in general... I was looking for a show last night, approximately 3 hours after it had aired. The show was up on many torrent sites... but it wasn't downloading on TED... so I went to a site that had the torrent in the search results and also had an RSS link, and I copied the RSS link for the search results and added it to the feeds for the TV show.
Still, TED wasn't finding the right torrent...
I wanted to look at the RSS feed myself, so I went back to the site (did this with several torrent sites, fyi), I searched for the show name, then opened the RSS link in a new window to see the RSS feed of those same results. What I found was that the RSS feed search results varied greatly from the website search results!!! It was as if the RSS feed was outdated, by at least hours, maybe a day... Their were very few torrent links from the website results that were also appearing in the RSS feed, but even these had different seeder/leecher counts. One torrent link showed 1000+ seeders and ~400 leachers on the website, but the same torrent within the RSS feed listed seeders:2 leechers:1.
I also noticed most of the RSS feed torrents had (-1) listed for the number of seeders.

I'm not an expert on RSS or XML, but it seems like it is much different from the real-time search results that come up on most sites... I'm not sure if it is simply delayed a great deal, or if something else plays a part.... but it isn't a good method for searching... I've seen it used as a live feed that broadcasts every new torrent uploaded - and that works well.... but as far as searching the RSS feed similar to the way you search the torrent websites, it simply doesn't turn up the same results...

This is why I think the NZB/newsgroup/usenet programs are so easy to use... they can easily monitor the files on news servers, and the servers spread new files to other news servers very fast... the programs don't need to use an RSS feed provided by some torrent site - they connect directly to the server for the information. This is also what makes using newsgroups for files so difficult - you must have an ISP that gives you one, or you have to pay for an account on a usenet server... it was designed for news articles, so putting up and downloading multimedia files using TONS of tiny binary files IS complicated and difficult to understand and follow.... However, the programs made for NZB files simplify the entire process for you, and even fix errors in re-compiling the file ---- IF you have figured out how to get a newsgroup server account that supports binaries and are able to sign in to the server.

Personally, I don't want to set up a newsgroup account, so I prefer torrents...

It seems like ShowRSS ( http://showrss.karmorra.info/ ) might help with the problems I'm experiencing with the RSS feeds... You pick your shows and quality type, essentially the same as setting up a filter for TED or an RSS downloader, only instead of the filter being applied to an existing RSS feed, it *seems* that ShowRSS will search for torrent links based on my settings and shows, and then create an RSS feed for me, hopefully by searching the torrent sites and finding the correct show....

I'm going to try ShowRSS soon, so hopefully it works out...

If not, it seems like dealing with http://eztv.it/ and basic torrent search sites is actually easier than trying to set up something automatic =/

Thanks for the info on ShowRSS. I went there and was a little confused at first. Maybe still so. I created a list of shows in step 2 of the setup and then that was all, it never went to step 3. I was running FireFox so maybe that was it.

Do you create one RSS feed for all shows, or do you use "feeds" link and generate one per show?

I was thinking to continue using TED and adding user defined RSS feed.

Comments?
Can you give further details?

If you use Torrents, you can't pass up SHOWRSS
Thanks to the forum, I entered shows in this one, 10x easier to use than Ted, can do auto download to uTorrent and gives you next download date with all your shows listed to be downloaded. ABSOLUTELY EASY, BETTER INTERPHASE
Thanks all
Goodbye to TED and The Ted Forum

+1 for using sickbeard and sabnzbd as a replacement. Yes, I have to pay to attach to a decent newsgroup server, but in the last 6 months, I've had ZERO fake episodes, ZERO missed episodes, on over 40 shows. AND, I installed couchpotato which also works with newsgroups, and have had zero misfires with it also.

I loved TED when it worked right!

I let myself be intimidated by learning about newsgroups and nzb's and such for quite a long time, but now that I've put in the effort to change over I just can't tell you guys how much better it is for a tv show/movie setup... I'm telling you, you owe it to yourself to try it out, and if your ISP doesn't provide some kind of basic newsgroup access, many of the big names offer free trials,
so at least you can check it out and see if its worth it.

I used to spend anywhere from 1 hour to MANY hours a week maintaining my tv show setup, even when ted was working well. Nowadays I don't spend *any* time maintaining my tv setup, and just a few minutes to put the latest movies on my wishlist with couch potato. That's all the interaction that's necessary until they show up *automatically* in XBMC. No manual renaming, no screwing around copying to different directories, nothing.

If you need a decent reference for usenet services for block or monthly accounts, check out
http://www.sharpenyourpencil.info/category/usenet

The other added bonus is, nobody gets cease and desist letters or gets sued for downloading nzb's. Torrents generally get people on the fact that you must make the file available as you download it, even if its a slow upload speed, so at that point even if your use is fair use, you are breaking the law by providing it to somebody else. At least, that's my amateur take on the matter.

Anyways, just can't say enough about it. Its only a matter of time before ted is completely dead since it is not and hasn't been actively developed for a real long time now, and even if it isn't, no new features are going to be forthcoming.

hmm when Ted started being "quirky" I started writing a replacement of my own, rss feeds in utorrent doesn't quite do what i want and I used to use newsgroups many moons ago but its been awhile I don't think theres an ISP here that has the alt.bin groups anymore.

Heres a screenshot of the app I wrote, it works differently to TED, in that it has no built in list, you add a TV show and the Season/Episode lists are pulled in, it will then download a season or individual shows, the Episodes that are not released will be downloaded the day after being Aired. The Green episodes are downloaded, Red are needed so appear in the download list and grey are yet to be aired.


So far I have everything working except checking the number of seeders, I have my routines written for this to check http and udp trackers and ignore trackers that do not support scrape. I am pretty sure the code is messy (I aint a dev) but its functional and works for me. I am going to implement an auto tv list built from my XBMC share, but to use this would require following my own structure of Show\Season\episode.

If I ever finish it I will post it up somewhere and people can try it out.

need tester let me know

How are you doing with your replacement project? I'm interested as well, is there a version we can try?

TED has done pretty well for me though not 100%. There are some bugs that have bothered me but none have been as detrimental as what some others have posted. (My time is coming, I guess...)

The primary feature I'm missing in TED, is to require a single file torrent, or at least prefer a single file torrent over those containing multiple files. That option would help me avoid some of the torrents that TED selects today, that I don't want. I'd also like to have a separate keyword string box that is applied to filename(s) inside the torrent file, if the torrent file has passed all the other criteria and is opened.

In my torrent client I also have a feed from ShowRSS (http://showrss.karmorra.info/) and a feed from Daily TV Torrents (http://www.dailytvtorrents.org). Between the three sources -- TED and the two RSS feeds -- I will have the episodes I want fairly timely. I've not gotten any fakes from either of the RSS feeds, but sometimes it is a day or two before they have the shows in the feed. That's the primary reason I'm still using TED, it gets the show a lot sooner though sometimes I have to contend with having gotten a fake and ask TED to try again (usually the fakes have been removed by then).

There's one other reason I'm still using TED -- it can run on an independent machine from the torrent client machine, depositing files to a shared directory. This works very well in my particular configuration.

I wish I knew how to debug and recompile TED's source, I'd try to fix at least some of the bugs I've seen as well as add a filecount feature. If someone can tell me how to do this I'll give it a shot -- I've got Eclipse installed and I've downloaded TED's source from SVN, but I'm not experienced with Eclipse or Java so I'm stopped there. I don't know how to even recompile the source as-is, nevermind debug a running TED or make changes... (I've been through the TED Wiki but no joy.)

Any more suggestions for a torrent-file based replacement for TED? I'm not able to go the newsgroup route, unfortunately.

: why not put it up on github and let people help with it? Code is never ever "finished". It's only "not so awful that you'd not want to show it to other people".