If you have a fast internet connection you can download episodes in under 10 minutes from some sites and others take about an hour. Downloading files beats the hell out of streaming any day of the week. You don’t need to worry about a bad connection interrupting your programming.

Anyways, without further ado, here are my top five sites for getting quality tv torrent files to watch on my HDTV.

1. EZTV

EZTV is a great website specifically designed for downloading television shows. The interface is easy to use and the torrents are laid out by their air date which makes it really nice to find the show you are looking for. If you are like me you think about television in terms of what night what show is on then EZTV is great.

EZTV seems to be made up of three different groups of uploaders going by the names EZTV, VTV, and MVGroup. These three uploaders all provide high quality content that download fast – especially VTV. The only downside is that there are only three uploaders but as long as they are all providing everything you need, it’s not a problem.

One thing that has been a problem with EZTV is that it can go down for extended periods of time. At the time of writing this article EZTV was down for the past several days. This has made it more necessary to look elsewhere for my TV show torrents.

PROS:

• Easy to use interface
• Logical search results and easy to find what you are looking for
• Always high quality torrents
• Usually really fast download speeds
• Site is specifically devoted to Television Show Torrents

CONS:

• Site can go down for extended periods of time
• Choice of torrents is usually limited to one option from one uploader (not really a problem because the tv show torrents are always top quality

2. XTVi

UPDATE: NO LONGER WORKING
XTVi does a good job of providing tv show torrents and has a listing of torrents uploaded by different users than EZTV. This is good for when EZTV goes down and you need to find a tv show torrent from a different site. XTVi provides all of the torrents you could possibly be looking for especially if the show recently aired.

The downside of XTVi from a practical standpoint is that the site is not laid out well making it a little more difficult to find what you are looking for. They have a feature that lists all of the episodes that have aired for a particular show however it is confusing because the episode listed does not mean that there is a torrent available. There is a button that says “view all torrents for this show” which is the button you want to hit to view all of the torrents listed for the particular show you are interested in. The list returned does not occur in any sort of time order so you need to know the number of the episode you are looking for.

The downside of XTVi from an aesthetic standpoint is that it is an ugly site that is obviously trying to receive income from adsense and whatever other income stream they can. Obviously advertising is the bulk of how to make money with websites but I find that the layout does not incorporate advertising in a pleasing way. Some of the advertising is intrusive to what you are trying to accomplish.

PROS:

• Great for finding TV Show Torrents
• Site is specifically devoted to Television Show Torrents
• Fast Download Speeds
• Great alternative to EZTV for when it goes down

CONS:

• Site is ugly
• Can be challenging to find what you are looking for or know if you have found what you are looking for
• Advertising can be intrusive in places

3. Mininova

UPDATE: NO LONGER WORKING (for what you’re looking for)
Mininova brings a huge list of all kinds of torrent files from across the web. It is made up of many different users who upload torrents to the site. This can be very good for variety but can also be very bad for finding the right torrents. EZTV, and VTV are users on Mininova and you can usually find all of their television show torrents on the Mininova site. You have to search for the specific show you want and then sort the list by Seeders so you know that other people trust it.

Mininova can be a great site for all sorts of torrent files. Some legal some not, to each their own I suppose. The problem with Mininova is the sheer amount of Torrent files that are returned for a search. As long as you know how to sort the torrent search results and choose the proper torrent file you should be fine.

Torrent sites like Mininova are also a problem because of the advertising they have. Mininova is nothing too offensive but the advertising usually asks you if you are interested in young women in your area. Nothing pornographic but not all that tasteful nonetheless.

PROS:

• Lots of choice of Torrents
• More than just Television show torrents

CONS:

• Need to know how to sort search results to get the best possible content
• Advertising isn’t all that tasteful

4. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is structured in the same way as Mininova. If you can’t find what you are looking for on Mininova you may be able to find it at the Pirate Bay. On the reverse side, if you can’t find what you’re looking for at the Pirate Bay you may be able to find on Mininova.

The same sorting practices apply with The Pirate Bay and you should also read the comments. Comments can tell you a lot about whether or not a particular torrent file is worth downloading. The trick is to read through and know when someone is a newbie and complaining because they don’t know what they’re doing or if there is actually something wrong with the file.

You should look out for viruses if you’re using Windows. That’s why downloading torrents with a Mac is the better option. Both Mininova and the Pirate Bay have a “Thanks” feature that allows users to thank the uploader for the torrent file. If there are relatively many people thanking the uploader you can trust the torrent file and download it.

The advertising on the Pirate Bay is a little more offensive than Mininova but nothing pornographic.

PROS

• Lots of choice of Torrents
• More than just Television show torrents

CONS:

• Need to know how to sort search results to get the best possible content
• Advertising isn’t all that tasteful

5. Kick Ass Torrents

Kick Ass Torrents is structured in the same way as Mininova and the Pirate Bay meaning you have access to wide range of torrent files. This can give you access to ebooks, movies, software, etc but the source and legitimacy of downloading these files is questionable. Because there are so many files, finding the TV Torrent file you are looking for can be a little more difficult.

The search feature is good and when you are looking for TV Show torrents you usually want to sort the list by the date that the file was uploaded starting with the most recent. Look down the list and look for a decent numbers of seeders then download the file accordingly.

The thing I like about Kick Ass Torrents is the nice design of the site. It uses nice colors and typography and I cannot find any advertising on the site!

PROS

• Lots of choice of Torrents
• More than just Television show torrents
• Nice clean design

CONS:

• Need to know how to sort search results to get the best possible content

Hopefully you have found this list useful. If your goal is solely Television shows then I would highly recommend EZTV. If you are looking for other torrent files then I would suggest any of the last three on this list: Mininova, Pirate Bay, and Kick Ass Torrents. It doesn’t really matter where you look first, but if you can’t find what you’re looking for check the other one.

Last resort is always to Google the name of what you are looking for then add the term Torrent at the end. You should come up with a good list of questionable sites and will likely end up visiting one with pornographic advertising and a bunch of pop-up windows that you will have to race to close. Good times. Good Luck. Happy Hunting.

Sometimes some software is just better on Windows because there isn’t a good alternative for Mac…yet. This is the case in this situation. There may be a better way that I have not found yet. If you know what that is leave a comment and I will update this page to show the best and cheapest way to burn .avi files to DVD.

So you have learned how to watch tv shows on your mac computer for free but you are looking for a way to burn those .avi files to dvd so that they can play in standalone dvd player. You would think Mac would be all over this, but after countless hours of searching for a solution to this problem I must say that I have needed to use Windows and Convert X to DVD. This is by far the easiest way to accomplish burning .avi files to dvd that results in top quality playback.

If you are burning these files so that you can watch them in your own home on your HDTV, I would recommend you learn how to hook your mac up to an HDTV in order to save some money and wasted DVD’s. For the cost of one batch of blank DVD’s you can watch anything from your computer on your television.

I have tried using Toast and I have tried using many other video file conversion software but I have not yet figured out how to this on the Mac side of things. I will continue to search for a way and then post an update once I have. In the meantime we need to solve your problem of making dvd’s out of .avi files.

How to Make a DVD from an .avi File

You will first need to run Windows on your Mac. There are several different types of software to do this. Some are free and some are not. I personally use Parallels (not free) but there is also Boot Camp (free), VMWare Fusion (not free), and Q (free). These programs only work for Intel Macs.

Once you have one of these emulators installed you must then install a copy of Windows using this software. I have found you need Windows XP to have a minimum of 15gb of disk space to burn the dvd’s properly. (You can see how the cost is adding up but you may have an old copy of Windows lying around from your pre-Mac era of computing).

Now that you have Windows set up and running on your Mac you will need to install Convert X to DVD which is a Windows program. Install it and launch it.

Now drag the .avi files you want to burn into your Windows so that it gets copied into your Windows Operating System. Once that is done all you have to do is drag those files yet again into the white area of Convert X to DVD.

There are other options to use in Convert X to DVD in terms of adding subtitle channels (if your .avi file came with subtitles which is a separate file with an .srt file extension), or adding menu titles and the number of items to be displayed on the menu. Once this is done press convert and insert your recordable dvd into your disk drive. Wait a few hours and you will have a perfect version of the .avi file you downloaded ready to bring over to your buddy’s house to watch or to give to someone as a gift.

Once that is done you can close Windows and pretend like the whole thing never happened. Now go have a shower.