RoostWATCH icon
RoostWATCH
macOS
A Torrent app for those who don’t know how to Torrent.
Add a movie or TV series to your list and RoostWATCH will hunt it down, download it, and sort it for you.

No accounts, no web UI, no thinking about it.
Download for Mac
macOS 13 or later · 4.5 MB

Why I made this.

Hunting for torrents can be a big job. Sometimes sites just stop working, or disappear, or are full of pop-up ads. Years ago there was an app that used to do the hunting for you but it stopped being updated in the early 2010s (I assume because they were making bespoke links and that must have been a lot of work).

This app took the most time to make. So many iterations to search properly and not come back with false finds. It turned out beyond my dreams. I love the cleanliness of it. If it exists out there to be shared, RoostWATCH should find it. Should find it with little worry of downloading a virus or any other random, unrelated file.

As with all my apps, the mission statement that drives this is to make something even the least computer savvy user could pick up and understand with very little effort. I hope you find that true.

The RoostWATCH panel

Add a show. Forget about it.

Add the shows you watch, set your preferred quality, and RoostWATCH handles the rest. It checks feeds on a schedule, finds new episodes, and downloads as soon as it sees them.

And like all RoostAPPS, RoostWATCH sits quietly in the menu bar, out of the way and working away.

Picking a series in RoostWATCH with the advanced options open
WatchlistAdd any show by name and choose a quality: 480p, 720p, 1080p, or 4K. Toggle shows on or off without removing them.
Feed checkingPolls public torrent indexes on a configurable schedule. Checks every enabled show, every time.
Auto-sortOnce a download finishes, RoostWATCH moves the file into the right folder automatically: Root / Series / Show Name.Year / Season_NN / filename.
CalendarAny ongoing series will be tracked on the built in week at a glance calendar.

Smart matching.

The RoostWATCH week-at-a-glance calendar of upcoming episodes

RoostWATCH uses multiple trackers to find what you are looking for. If it is out there to be found, RoostWATCH will do its best to get it.

For each show it finds matches, confirms the quality, extracts the episode code, and skips anything it's already grabbed. Episodes are never re-downloaded.

Fuzzy title matchHandles The.Last.of.Us, The-Last-of-Us, and other common naming variations
Quality filterConfirms the quality string is present in the title before sending
Episode trackingExtracts S01E01-style codes and checks against what's already been grabbed
Seeder checkSkips results with no active seeders
Abandoned linksAfter a week of inactivity RoostWATCH will alert you, and give you alternate choices

Always looking out for you.

Sometimes when a season is popular, the copies with the most seeders aren't always copies at all. A fake torrent seeded hard enough climbs to the top of every search, which is exactly how it catches people.

When you aren’t paying attention you can pick the healthiest-looking result and find you just downloaded something malicious.

RoostWATCH doesn't commit to a release until it can see what's in it. It reads the file list first and asks a simple question: is there actually a video in here? If the answer is no, it cancels, deletes what little it has, remembers that release so it's never picked again, and goes looking for another copy. You don't get asked, and nothing lands in your folder.

Two more checks run alongside it. Cam and telesync rips are never grabbed automatically. And anything implausibly small for its claimed resolution is treated as suspect, because a 40 MB "1080p" episode is not a 1080p episode.

What it isn't: an antivirus. RoostWATCH checks that a release contains video before downloading it, but it won’t inspect the video itself.

Check the image here, the two best-seeded copies of this episode were both .exe files — 1093 and 818 seeders. RoostWATCH looked inside, found no video, and cancelled both before downloading. You can sleep well knowing that what lands in your download folder is a video, not something pretending to be one.

RoostWATCH rejecting two fake torrents disguised as an episode, both actually .exe files with 1093 and 818 seeders

A few things worth knowing.

The RoostWATCH main list of tracked shows
Main list
The week-at-a-glance view
At a glance
A show's drawer open on its episode list
Episode drawer
Grabbing a whole series
Grab a series
Picking a film with the advanced options open
Pick a movie
Changing the download resolution
Change resolution
The RoostWATCH activity log
Activity