Cancel Your Cable/Satellite Television Today - Part 1

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on how to ditch your cable or satellite subscription and download your television shows for free. I can't wait for IPTV to arrive at least what some would describe what IPTV is too be. Television strait to your TV via an internet connection. I know some of you have an Apple TV and this is a great little devise to do just that. But, some of us out there are looking for something different, or free.

I came up with a two-machine setup. Basically, I have a server that is auto-downloading my TV show and podcast for me. This computer also stores all my other media such as music and ripped movies.

My server PC is a relativity simple setup. I do have a windows system but, you can easily do this with a Linux OS as well. I have installed 2 500gb drives and striped them together using RAID 0. Get a couple of cheap HDD's here:

PriceWatch - 500gb SATA

The reasoning for this is A: it's faster as far as access time and B: it will appear as one large drive. This is done through the Administrative tools in the control panel.

So once we have our formatted drive we need to share it on our network. This is assuming you already have a home network setup. Let's call our home network "HomeNet". This can be done through "System" under the control panel. So make a directory or the entire drive shared as "Media" or a name of your choice. My directory is setup by media types i.e. Videos and Music. Then each show has it's own directory under videos.

Next we need to get the media downloading. First thing we need is software. Because my server is Win XP based, I use uTorrent for most of my downloads and Ted for easy scheduling of torrent downloads. The links to each of these wares is below.

uTorrent

Ted

You can also use uTorrent's RSS downloader to auto download. Instructions can be found through EZTV's website. This is so you can add torrent RSS feeds from podcasts and other internet television sites.

Now we need a set-top box to stream the media to. Stay tuned for part two of this series.