This show is freely available under Creative Commons licensing and is available on archive.org.
Below are pages for each season that contain MPEG2 and MP4 download links for each episode.
I have included wget batch files to automate downloading full seasons for MPEG2 (~1-2gb per episode) and MP4 versions (~200MB per episode).
| Year | Season | WGET scripts | MPEG2 Size | MP4 Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1984 | Season 1 | Season1.rar | 25.4GB | 4.3 GB |
| 1985 | Season 2 | Season2.rar | 17.1GB | ~3 GB |
| 1985-1986 | Season 3 | Season3.rar | 24.6GB | ~4.5 GB |
| 1986-1987 | Season 4 | Season4.rar | 36GB | ~6.5 GB |
| 1987-1988 | Season 5 | Season5.rar | 35.7GB | ~5 GB |
| 1988-1989 | Season 6 | Season6.rar | 27.6GB | ~4.2 GB |
| 1989-1990 | Season 7 | Season7.rar | 29.5GB | ~3.6 GB |
| 1990-1991 | Season 8 | Season8.rar | 30GB | ~5 GB |
| 1991-1992 | Season 9 | Season9.rar | 37.6GB | ~5 GB |
| 1992-1993 | Season 10 | Season10.rar | 25.5GB | ~4.8 GB |
| 1993-1994 | Season 11 | Season11.rar | 31.6GB | ~5.2 GB |
| 1994-1995 | Season 12 | Season12.rar | 26.3GB | ~4.6 GB |
| 1995-1996 | Season 13 | Season13.rar | 29GB | ~4.8 GB |
| 1996-1997 | Season 14 | Season14.rar | 32.3GB | ~4.6 GB |
| 1997-1998 | Season 15 | Season15.rar | 18GB | ~4.4 GB |
| 1998-1999 | Season 16 | Season16.rar | 21.8GB | ~4.4 GB |
| 1999-2000 | Season 17 | Season17.rar | 14.9GB | ~3.8 GB |
| 2000-2001 | Season 18 | Season18.rar | 23.9GB | ~4 GB |
| 2001-2002 | Season 19 | Season19.rar | 18.2GB | ~3.6 GB |
These are all the episodes I could find - unfortunately some episodes are missing or corrupted.
To run the scripts:
- Download and extract the rar for the season desired.
- Go into the folder for the quality desired (MPEG2 or MP4).
- Double click either "wget CC season X mp4.bat" or "wget CC season X.bat" - the files will then download.
- After downloading, run "Rename CC season X mp4.bat" or "Rename CC season X.bat" to convert the files to TVDB naming format (I have also included a script to reverse this renaming).
After downloading and renaming, you can then easily scrape these episodes into a media player like Kodi.
PS: If you have a partially completed episode, you can run the wget again with the -c flag to resume.
Rationale:
The computer chronicles is an excellent show. But Archive.org does not present it well.
- Their naming scheme makes it hard to know what season episodes are from, or in what order they were shown.
- Due to insufficient metadata, searching by season or by year does not give good results.
- Many episodes are missing or have duplicates (possibly because they were re-aired).
- Non-descriptive filenames make scraping in a media player like Kodi difficult.
- Large variability of encoding quality, with errors on some videos (e.g. no sound, sound out of sync, audio tracks missing, some corrupted). Inconsistent size of videos (e.g. with MPEG2 some are 700mb, some 2gb).
- No easy way to download in bulk. There are ~330 episodes.
- Airdates are often confused between when the show was originally aired and when repeats were aired. DD/MM/YY and MM/DD/YY are often mixed up by different contributors.