Watching TV Shows Online
Even though most television programs are viewable for free to anyone who owns a TV set, it’s also useful to know where you can find TV shows online. That way, in the event you happen to miss an episode of your favorite program or, even worse, you suddenly find yourself somewhere without a television you can still catch up on what you missed.
Most people who have been using the Internet for a while would have already heard of different file-sharing venues and peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading sites where you can get virtually any MP3 or audio file that you can think of. The fact that these music downloads are available is pretty common knowledge, however, what is perhaps less commonly known, is that you can also find a significant number of TV shows online as well.
Downloading television programs is pretty much the same as downloading other kinds of files. First, you need to find a website that contains links to TV shows online, and then you have to make sure that you have some kind of file-sharing client that will allow you to access the files (often called “torrents” after the name of one of the most popular clients out there). Television program files contain both audio and video components, so they are much larger than music files and can often take several hours to download a single file.
There are a couple of different ways you can watch the files you’ve downloaded. The most common way to watch TV shows online is to simply view the downloaded file in a media player, such as the Windows Media Player that comes built in to Microsoft Windows. If you prefer not to use Windows Media Player there are several different options that are available for free, just run a search and choose the one that you think will suit you the best. You’ll also have to download the appropriate codecs so that you can both see the video and hear the audio of the television program files. Again, a few minutes spent with your favorite search engine can point you in the right direction as far as codecs go.
If you’re a bit more comfortable with your computer and know what you’re doing, there’s another way to watch TV shows online. You can burn the MPEG files you download to a CD-ROM (creating a VCD), which you can then watch on your regular DVD player. You should be aware that this extra step takes much longer and that not all DVD players are capable of handling VCDs. The end result is definitely worth it though, so give VCDs a shot.