Posted by Doug Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:37:00 GMT
A while back I posted I was Officially Cable TV Free. We’re getting our TV content pretty much only from bittorrent. I personally think it’s going pretty well. My wife has one complaint: the time it takes me to get new shows loaded into iTunes so she can watch them through FrontRow. The solution involves some nitty-gritty details of ffmpeg and some fun use of Hpricot to automatically parse TV.com.
Read more...Posted by Doug Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
Posted by Doug Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:55:15 GMT
I haven’t looked into the details of this Hack a Day article on How-To Automatically download and convert TV for your iPod, but I’m very interested in the topic. Throwing quickies like this into my blog seems like a good way to “remember” pages like this.
I don’t have (and probably won’t for quite a while) an iPod Video; however, I’m traveling a lot right now and would like to be able to download TV to my Mac. The idea isn’t new to me, but I’ve thought for a while that BitTorrent could make a pretty good backend for a PVR.
These are interesting times!
BTW, I found this link from The Unofficial Apple Weblog
My name is Doug Alcorn. I'm a 30-something husband, dad, Christian, and hacker living in Cincinnati, OH. When I'm not on my computer or being a dad, I'm usually shooting photos or out in the woods.
Copyright 2001 - 2005 by Lathi.net and Doug Alcorn
