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How To: Turn your pc into a DVR replacement.

Have you ever wished that you could turn your PC into a DVR without all the hassle of messing with a TV tuner, setting up timers to record your favorite show, or worse of all this time of year, having your favorite show interrupted by a local weather warning? If you have answered YES to any of those questions then you are going to love this.

What you need:

1. PC with internet connection
2. Enough hard drive space to store the videos
3. Basic knowledge of how Bittorrent works.
4. Miro (http://www.getmiro.com/download/)

Step 1:

Obviously the first step would be to install Miro. The install is pretty straight forward. You will want to spend a few minutes going through the settings and making sure to set the storage location to the drive you wish to use. As well as setting up any speed limits or port forwarding options. Once you have familiarized yourself with the basics of Miro you are ready to continue to the next step.

Step 2:

You are now ready to add your favorite television show. To do this there are two sites you can use (www.tvrss.net , www.feedmytorrents.com). For the purpose of this tutorial we are going to use tvrss.net. You will need to launch a web browser and open up tvrss.net. Once on the main page select the search option. Input the TV show name (Dollhouse), and the quality (HDTV). I would also suggest using VTV as the release group, this is due to Mininova changing how it formats the torrents in its RSS feed and some have had issues getting them to download properly. Now press the search button. You will now see a list of episodes. You will want to right click on the Search-based Feed link and copy the link location.

Step 3:

Now you are ready to add your show to Miro. At the top of Miro you will want to select Sidebar > Add Feed

You will now see a box pop up. If you had the RSS feed of your favorite show selected already. It should fill that in for you. Make sure to check video and select Create Feed

Once you have created the feed on your side bar you will need to rename and refresh the feed. This can be done by right clicking on the newly created feed. By default Miro will only download the latest file available on the feed. You will have the option to manually download past episodes as well.  As you can see in the following screen shot the latest episode has already been downloaded.

We'll that was easy wasn't it. You can repeat this process for any of your favorite shows. I would also reccomend that you spend a little time digging through the other feeds and features of Miro. There is a lot of great content to be discovered. As always if you have any questions or would like to add to this quick tutorial please leave a comment.