Keep track of television shows with epCheck

There are lots of TV databases out there on the Internet that you can use to track your favorite TV shows online, or get information about new and upcoming shows that sound interesting.

One of the issues that you may run into is that it is not always that easy to navigate those sites, or find TV shows that you are interested in fast using the site's search feature.

The free portable application epCheck for Windows offers an alternative. You can use it to keep track of TV shows locally on your system.

The program does not ship with a list of shows when you first start it. In fact, it is using an online database provided by TheTVDB.com for its data. While that requires an Internet connection for some activities, like searching for shows or retrieving episode and season information, it also means that you get access to many foreign TV shows as well as the database is not limited to U.S. shows only.

To add a show click on the Series Search button in the interface or switch to the options tab. Here you can type the name -- or part -- of the show that you are interested in. It takes a second or so before the results are displayed, with each show displayed with its name, date it first aired, and network it aired on. If available, aliases are displayed here as well.

A click on the add series button adds it to the program's database, and downloads all episode and show information to the system.

Each show is then listed under Series on the front page of the app. A click on a show displays all of its episodes in raw numbers, as seasonal bits, with its title, and past, present or future air dates.

For some shows, you find an episode summary here as well which you may find useful. Another interesting feature of the program is the ability to extract data to csv files, which may come handy if you plan to use it in another application or for printing.

If you switch to weekly, you see a list of all past (last two days) and future (next seven days) shows. You can change the parameters in the options, for instance to show the next 30 days instead of just the next seven days.

Each show is listed with its name, episode, title, and data it will air. What you do not get here is the time it will air.

If you open the options once again, you can make a couple of other modifications here. You can change the episode display format from s01e01 to another, configure the program to always load the weekly tab instead of the series tab, and configure the update interval in days (default is every third day).

Closing Words

The program is really easy to use, and could come in handy if you want to track when TV shows air the next time, or to simply get a list of all episodes of a show that no longer airs. It may be ideal if you want to track foreign TV shows.

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