how do i search for episodes of tv shows that i missed on tv? i know people that do that with kazaa on a pc but i'm a mac os x user and use lime wire. does anyone know if this is possible and if so, how to do it?

Although some do exist, very few TV shows are released onto the gnutella network by their owners - all in all they make more money by allowing the broadcast companies to show them once every few years. If you're very sure that the show are are after has been put in the public domain by its owner, select the 'video' option on limewire's 'search' tab and enter its name in the 'title' field. Once done, click on the 'search' button. If no results have appeared within a few minutes, you may want to contact the owners of the TV series and suggest they make it available on gnutella in addition to their current distribution method (ie a web site or ftp server).

Eh?

Why should they do this? Do you really think they will install a Gnutella client on their server? There is no advantage - people who are interested in their shows will sure find them through google...

Morgwen

The main reason there's not more good-quality mainstream video content available for free on the web is bandwidth cost. A TV series of 12 one-hour episodes compresses down to about 6GB at moderate quality, perhaps four times that for good quality. 6GB of server bandwith (bought in bulk) costs about USD0.6 today, so 100 downloads a day would cost them $2000-$8000 dollars/year. For one 12-hour series. Philanthropy's fine but the owners probably aren't willing to spend that sort of money to 'give away' their no-longer-commericial material.

However, the P2P file-sharing model changes this. People 'pay' for receiving content by in turn sharing files they have found worthwhile themselves, donating whatever bandwith they can to allow other people to download the file from them. So, in the above scenario, the owner of the material can make their video available for a small fraction of the cost of putting it on a web server. They can even put magnet links on their web-site to 'link' to the files extant on the gnet.

If you know there's material out there that people would like to share but can't afford to, suggesting to them that they make use of somethign like Gnutella's a service to them, the file-sharing community, and the Internet in general.