RSSTV: Syndication for your PVR

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RSSTV: Syndication for your PVR

Andrew Grumet, who earlier posted code to read RSS feeds on his TiVo, has announced a new proposal for sharing your recordings with others, using RSS as the xml data format.

It's a really compelling solution to a classic problem: I have five friends with TiVos and I'd love to know what they are taping and I'd be happy to show them what I like (just like Amazon's friend features that show purchases and reviews by your pals). Currently I get this done via conversations in person or email, but it'd be great if there was an automatic way to accomplish this within our TiVos themselves.

With the recent hoopla around social software, it'd be great to see this project get some legs and get adopted by TiVo for a future OS. I can't see any reason to block this adoption, it's not about sharing files with others, just sharing playlist of your to-do lists and recorded programs among friends. If anything, this would cause me to watch more TV and I'd be happier with my TiVo since I'd be finding new compelling programs.

by Matt Haughey February 11, 2004 in News

Comments

Well, that leaves you only one step from hosting bit-torrents.
It would be such a trivial addition that it seems inevitable to me.

I don't have a tivo, but I use xmltv, xawtv and a bit-o-perl in my own diy-pvr.

Posted by: glenn at Feb 11, 2004 7:27:14 PM

i'm not a technical guy at all, but i think something like this is already going on. via lukwam's tivo todo list i found this link to hit-or-miss: TiVoWeb Scripts which seems to have a script for doing something simliar to what's mentioned above.

because the last thing i ever programmed was on a commodore 64 and it involved something like "30 goto line 20" i'm certainly missing out on all the finer points of this discussion, but maybe there are some common ideas the parties involved can exchange to make everything really cool for the future.

Posted by: marc b. at Feb 11, 2004 8:12:40 PM

It's not an elegant XML solution, but I've got a full TiVo listing on my blog.

Basically I'm running TiVoWeb, and have a perl script that polls the new showing page once an hour on my local network and uploads it to my blog.

It was written by a friend of mine, and works perfectly.

Posted by: jason at Feb 12, 2004 7:28:13 AM

Yeah, there are ways to get your TiVo's stuff up on a web server, but this proposal could get the info into your tivo itself. Imagine a new top-level item marked "friends" that has a choice of "view friends' to do lists" making it easy to record the shows they list.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Feb 12, 2004 8:40:27 AM

matt - thanks for the quick explanation, i thought i was missing a key part of the idea and it turns out i was.

Posted by: marc at Feb 12, 2004 9:14:03 AM

I've started hacking at lukwam's code on my tivo recently. I modified his tivoweb itcl add-in's to output in xml. Then I created a couple of stylesheets to render into html and rss.

Here is my todo in xml : http://albro.org:7070/~jerry/todo.xml

Here is my todo in html :
http://albro.org:7070/~jerry/todo.php

Here is my todo in rss :
http://albro.org:7070/~jerry/todo-rss.php

I will be happy to show the php scripts and xsl style sheets for this to anyone who asks, and it will be posted on my web server when it's all a little bit neater.

- Jerry

Posted by: jerry at Feb 12, 2004 12:01:09 PM

How about a system that downloads video from the net, either via your desktop mahine, or directly by the TiVo, and then inserts it into the Now Playing queue just like a regular TiVo show?

Posted by: Jack Hodgson at Feb 12, 2004 11:05:32 PM

When is Metafilter going back up?

Posted by: MyPrecious at Feb 13, 2004 7:45:13 AM

TiVo hates the poopli people.

www.poopli.com

Posted by: Slack at Feb 16, 2004 11:21:00 AM

It's a disgrace that all the limitations Tivo puts on it's service practically eliminate the experimentation and innovation.

Someone desperately needs to put out cheap hardware that can run Freevo or MythTV (which both need some work to get them up to par with Tivo).

Posted by: pb at Feb 16, 2004 6:11:32 PM

Just go out and buy a Replay tv and junk the TiVO and you CAN have all of these features. We share playlists and SHOWS all day long here!

www.poopli.com

Posted by: Replayer at Mar 1, 2004 4:45:53 PM

RSSTV: Syndication for your PVR

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