A while ago when my wife and I received our android phones, we did away with the high taxes and very little used home phone line and went to Vonage, which after that was taxed to almost $30/mo. We now use a $5/mo phone number parking service for our original home number which just emails us received voicemails (which thanks to our fancy phones, we can return those calls almost instantly) (http://www.family-phone.com/ for those interested).
A LOOONG while ago (almost 5 years now) we did away with satellite because we just weren't watching enough tv to justify the cost. I was transfixed by a certain online game (which I haven't touched in almost 6 months now) and my wife usually fell asleep at 8pm. We tried Tivo + Antenna, but slowly the house was filled with old Xbox's running XBMC (http://xbmc.org/). The main TV bounced from media center to Tivo to media center a few times. Recently as part of my recovery from said game I occupied my time by solidifying what was going to go in our main room. I first tried a WDTV Live, and while it was well worth the price, I still needed the ability to view live tv for sports, news and weather. I decided to dust off some of my now several year old media center hardware, slap a lower end graphics card in it capable of 1080p decoding, and a shiny brand new antenna card. After a little trial and error I was sold on the new version of Media Center for Windows 7 that comes with most versions. It picked up the hardware decoding, a few easy hacks and codec packages and viola, it was a thing of beauty.
Here are the pluses:
- Built in antenna card support, recording, live tv pausing, channel guide, etc. Extremely easy setup compared to some of the other linux/windows TV capturing packages, especially the channel guide.
- It is part of Windows 7, probably already running on your machine and you just don't know it.
- One of the better Netflix integration packages out there.
- Just plain pretty, the interface is amazing and wife friendly.
Here were my largest cons:
- No Pandora, or other assortment of services (but it did have Netflix, which is a tough one to find for free).
- No good RSS video updating services. A few built in but they never seemed to update on time.
- Out of the box menu layout. Once you are in a function, it is perfect, but before that getting around wasn't obvious.
- Source material. Antenna alone is limiting.
So while I had already trumped most of these issues, Friday I finally sat down to get this tool perfected, and I found 4 solutions (all free):
Media Center Studio (http://www.adventmediacenter.com/):
This tool allowed me to do a few key things. First is customizing the menu labels and showing/hiding items I never used. Lastly it allowed me to seamlessly link outside programs to Media Center (namely XBMC, Boxee and HULU Desktop). As you can see from the graphic at the top of this post, now the menus are much cleaner, narrowed down and personalized to just my needs. When I select Boxee, Windows Media Center closes, Boxee fires up, when I exit Boxee, Windows Media Center returns full screen. This gives me access to great Boxee apps, but mainly, Pandora. Solved #1 and #3
Hide Menu Strips (http://mikinho.com/wmc/start-menu-plus/):
This tool allowed me to hide certain menu strips the above mentioned program would not. You have to run it as an administrator, but it is very straight forward. Solved #3
Juice is simply a RSS reader and downloader. I placed all my Revision 3 and Twit shows I know and love into this and presto, it sits in the background and saves dated shows to a folder Windows Media Center can see. Solved #2
Vuze + Status Mailer + Custom code (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=azstatusmailer):
For the source material you can find many sites out there that cover this well. I was just after TV having a Netflix account to keep the more illicit activities at bay. And I am sure even grabbing TV this way is leaving "gray area" and entering the red zone (something the Vikings couldn't do today), but for now, this works. If you are wondering which service, I wanted to get TV TORRENTS, you should be able to figure it out from there. Either way I had a few issues. The site I used allowed me to manage my favorite shows and get an RSS feed of those shows as they were posted. However that feed contained both nicely compressed copies I could play on my old Xbox+XBMC hardware anywhere in my house that looked great and were a third the size, and the huge HD uncompressed MKV files of the exact same show. So if I were to simply sick Vuze on the RSS feed, I would be grabbing 2 versions of the same show AND all "full season" torrents that get posted to that list as well, not acceptable. Here is where a little custom code, local web server, and visual studio 2010 come in, but here is also where a lot of people probably will still have a problem not having the ability to execute this, although, everything I mentioned is still free, and I can provide you with the code if asked nicely (would have posted it, but blogger isn't a fan of the elusive code block, looks like that requires some tinkering also). The code basically sucks in the RSS from said service, checks the enclosure size and file format, and eliminates all mkv and files over 800mb, then spits out a cleaned RSS I can use in Vuze.
Next comes Status Mailer. A nice Vuze plugin I can use to email me when a show is downloaded from the service via email, which having my phone next to me at all times I can be notified while mucking about the house when a show is ready for my viewing pleasure. I use my gmail's SMTP settings to do the heavy lifting, send a message from me to me on their servers.
Finally I set Vuze to auto-download this code cleaned feed, and I have a system that outshines anything Tivo or anybody else for that matter has to offer. All files are downloaded and saved to a central media server that can be viewed from any TV in the house, just in time for the Fall seasons to begin.
This has been a several year project, I won't lie. It shouldn't be that hard to get setup since others can avoid the trial and error, but it honestly is where TV should be by now. I actually miss ads a little, and I do wish broadcasters would get their head out of their respective ends and offer a service that is ala-cart and fee based, but the nice part about this setup is it is very cheap, and highly adaptable as things come around.
I also finished tweaking a home power monitoring setup and wrote another program to sort and backup all my pictures to Picasa, but I will save those for another day.
Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc. (yes I know nobody reads these, I am not delusional, well....)
Next comes Status Mailer. A nice Vuze plugin I can use to email me when a show is downloaded from the service via email, which having my phone next to me at all times I can be notified while mucking about the house when a show is ready for my viewing pleasure. I use my gmail's SMTP settings to do the heavy lifting, send a message from me to me on their servers.
Finally I set Vuze to auto-download this code cleaned feed, and I have a system that outshines anything Tivo or anybody else for that matter has to offer. All files are downloaded and saved to a central media server that can be viewed from any TV in the house, just in time for the Fall seasons to begin.
This has been a several year project, I won't lie. It shouldn't be that hard to get setup since others can avoid the trial and error, but it honestly is where TV should be by now. I actually miss ads a little, and I do wish broadcasters would get their head out of their respective ends and offer a service that is ala-cart and fee based, but the nice part about this setup is it is very cheap, and highly adaptable as things come around.
I also finished tweaking a home power monitoring setup and wrote another program to sort and backup all my pictures to Picasa, but I will save those for another day.
Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc. (yes I know nobody reads these, I am not delusional, well....)
No comments:
Post a Comment