listen to the mass indifference, listen to the monkeys typing

This post should of been entitled “I love RSS” really. It’s also something I’ve been meaning to write for ages. My TV watching habbits now fall into three situations:

1) “Normal” programmes that I watch week-in-week out. Shows like The Big Bang Theory, Chuck, Law & Order, Eureka etc. etc.

2) “Vidcasts” or Internet TV. So things like Diggnation, Totally Rad Show, Cranky Geeks, Car Tech, Tiki Bar TV etc. etc.

3) One off programmes that just happen to be on.

For the top two things for the past year or so I’ve been gradually moving everything to Miro. For the top item, “normal” TV, I’ve been using Miro in conjunction with TvRSS an excellent website that gives RSS feeds of many current and past TV shows with links to BitTorrent downloads. This is awesome for someone like me being a forgetful person as it means that all my downloads happen automagically behind the scenes and all I have to worry about is making sure I have enough time in the week to watch the show before the next episode is out. The best thing about it is that it’s completely free (if you avoid the obvious legal implications) and means that I can watch the TV I want to watch when I want to watch it. It’s also, due to the pure genius nature that is RSS, insanely easy.

First, You go to TvRSS.

You select Shows from the menu at the top.

You select the show that you want to watch, a quick search with Firefox’s CTRL+F is usually best as sometimes they’re not listed under the correct letter or the name is not fully correct to what it is. Remember, this does rely on humans to index and add shows :p

When there it will give you a list of the previous few episodes on the feed, then you can copy the link Search-based RSS feed to the clipboard.

Switch to the awesome Miro and click Channels > Add New Channel

It should of automatically grabbed the URL from the clipboard and just click OK. It’ll add it to the sidebar and start downloading the latest episode. When new episodes are available it will automatically start downloading them and you’ll see it appear in the “Downloading” tab.

Once they’ve downloaded and ready to watch it’ll pop a little green bubble by the programme with the amount of episodes that are ready to watch.

You can then just click on the video and sit back, crack open the popcorn and watch. It’ll also automatically delete the video 2 days after you’ve watched it so that it frees up your hard drive space, although you can set it to not do that with the “Keep” option.

One other cool feature of Miro is the Miro guide, a user edited and ever expanding list of videos available on the Internets. It’ll recommend you new stuff or let you search by category or title for something you might like.. Even something as mundane as knitting..

I love the Internets, I do.

making life easier since 1908
B