This site allows easy download and renaming (TVDB format) for all available episodes of the classic PBS computer show  "The Computer Chronicles".

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).


YearSeasonWGET scriptsMPEG2 SizeMP4 Size
1984Season 1Season1.rar25.4GB 4.3 GB
1985Season 2Season2.rar17.1GB ~3 GB
1985-1986Season 3Season3.rar24.6GB ~4.5 GB
1986-1987Season 4Season4.rar36GB ~6.5 GB
1987-1988Season 5Season5.rar35.7GB ~5 GB
1988-1989Season 6Season6.rar27.6GB ~4.2 GB
1989-1990Season 7Season7.rar29.5GB ~3.6 GB
1990-1991Season 8Season8.rar30GB ~5 GB
1991-1992Season 9Season9.rar37.6GB ~5 GB
1992-1993Season 10Season10.rar25.5GB ~4.8 GB
1993-1994Season 11Season11.rar31.6GB ~5.2 GB
1994-1995Season 12Season12.rar26.3GB ~4.6 GB
1995-1996Season 13Season13.rar29GB ~4.8 GB
1996-1997Season 14Season14.rar32.3GB ~4.6 GB
1997-1998Season 15Season15.rar18GB ~4.4 GB
1998-1999Season 16Season16.rar21.8GB ~4.4 GB
1999-2000Season 17 Season17.rar14.9GB ~3.8 GB
2000-2001Season 18Season18.rar23.9GB ~4 GB
2001-2002Season 19Season19.rar18.2GB ~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.