For the unfamiliar TVShows is a fantastic (and more importantly free) application that does a wonderful job of monitoring a series of RSS feeds and downloading the latest torrent for your beloved TV shows.

Up until recently TVShows would run in the background checking tvRSS.net for new torrents at a predetermined interval, downloading a new episode’s torrent if there was one to collect. Unfortunately that was until about a month or two ago when all of a sudden it seemed that nothing was being retrieved anymore even though it was sitting there plain as day on tvRSS.net.

Not knowing what was going on, and not having a clue when it comes to Ruby programming I jumped into the SourceForge forum and found that I wasn’t the only one having the problem. It seems (although it’s not confirmed) that tvRSS.net has decided to block the application from connecting to the site and scanning it for new episode information. Fortunately, and full credit goes to the forum here, those wiley geeks have found a way around this and will have you downloading torrents again faster than you can say “sesquipedalian“.

Here’s how you do it…

1. Open up the main guts of TVShows in your favourite text editor. The file you want is:
   “/Users/[your username]/Library/Application\ Support/TVShows/TVShowsScript/TVShows.rb”
2. At line 172 you’ll see: (this is all on 1 line, just in case your browser has wrapped it)
   rawEpisodes = SimpleRSS.parse(open(FEED % @exactName,”User-Agent”=>”TVShows/#{@preferences['PREFS_SCRIPTVERSION']}”))
   Change this to:
   rawEpisodes = SimpleRSS.parse(open(FEED % @exactName,”User-Agent”=>”Apple-PubSub/65.1″))
3. Save the file and you’re done. You might have to reboot to restart the daemon but I didn’t.

To give you a quick explanation of what’s actually being changed (as far as I can tell) is that we’re simply telling the tvRSS.net webserver that we’re actually using a Safari RSS reader instead of another application. Simple.