The Ultimate TiVo-ing Experience!
After my previous post rant about SnapStream, you might think that this post would be about a new, different Personal Video Recorder package. In fact, I’m still using SnapStream’s older and more reliable Beyond TV 3.4. But now on some serious steroids.
You see, I read about someone that had finally figured out how to subscribe to RSS feeds of bittorrents of the latest TV shows and download them automatically. If that was gibberish to you, please, stay with me.
I’ll back up:
What I’ve been able to successfully do is to install some software on my PVR computer (the computer running Beyond TV that sits in my living room and is connected to my TV) that watches for new files of my favourite shows that become available to download from the Internet, automatically downloads them, and puts them into a folder where they show up automatically in my PVR software. It’s like Podcasting for TV shows.
These shows arrive in much higher quality than what I can record from my regular cable subscription, in much smaller files as they’ve already been very well compressed – up to 90% smaller – so I can store many more shows without worrying about running out of space, with the commercials already removed, and these files arrive within hours of the original airing of the episodes.
With the commercials already removed. I know – that caught your attention, right?
You see, although nobody wants to freely admit it, the ability to conveniently skip commercials is probably as important a reason for using a PVR as the ability to “timeshift”, or watch shows on your own schedule. We’ve been able to timeshift since the day that VCRs became common, and skip commercials too, but PVRs make both of those things so much easier.
Some may argue that we should not download shows from the internet, but I disagree, in the same way that I feel that it is okay to download music. If I already own a CD, and I *could* create an MP3 of my favourite song off of that CD, why not just download it? I already own it. Well, I believe that logic also holds true in this case. If I was already going to record the show, and I was planning on skipping the commercials (I haven’t watched a commercial in almost a year), why not download the show instead?
If you’re interested in how I did this, stay tuned for my next post.
