rss

There are dozens of ways to find out what's on TV tonight. You could check the TV listings in your local paper, or in TV Guide. But honestly, I don't know anybody who actually does that anymore. There are hundreds of web sites with TV listings as well. But mytvrss provides one of the simplest web-based solutions for keeping track of new episodes.

When you visit the mytvrss web page, you're presented with a list of a few dozen popular TV shows. If a show you watch isn't listed, just contact the site and they might add your show to the list. All you have to do is click the check boxes next to the shows you want to follow and mytvrss will create a custom RSS feed for yu. Pop it into your RSS reader, and you'll receive an update every time there's a new episode of one of your shows.

You don't get a ton of information in your RSS reader, just the series and episode titles and an episode number. But there's also a link on each item that you can click to receive episode summaries.

[via MakeUseOf]

As expected, TiVo has rolled out a new version of TiVo Desktop with support for any online video accessible through an RSS feed. TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 for Windows uses will automatically download videos from any feed you subscribe to, and convert them from H.264, Quicktime, or MP4 into TiVo-compatible MPEG-2 files.

TiVo has a list of RSS feeds that you can choose from. If you want to watch videos that aren't available from the TiVo interface, you'll need to download your videos using a separate client like iTunes or Miro. You can then tell TiVo Dekstop to monitor your download folder for new files which will be transcoded.

TiVo Desktop Plus features proprietary codec support, so you'll have to pay $24.95 for a license. The basic TiVo Desktop software is free.

TiVo is preparing to release TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6, which includes enhanced features for downloading podcasts and web video and transferring it to your TiVo. In essence, you can use subscribe to a "Season Pass" of any web content with an RSS feed.

The TiVo Desktop software will download audio and video content from your feeds, save it on your computer, and automatically transcode it and copy it to your TiVo for viewing. You can also make a Season Pass recording from folders on your PC where you save home movies and downloaded video. The software will regularly scan those folders for changes and transfer media to your set top box.

TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 will be available in March for $24.95. Current TiVo Desktop Plus users will be able to upgrade for free.

If you've been beta testing Big Screen Headlines 2, you may have noticed that the program stopped working on August 1st. So far, no new beta has been released, so the best RSS/podcast application for Windows Media Center has been unavailable for most of the month.

It looks like developer Nial Ginsbourg is putting the finishing touches on the next version of of Big Screen Headlines and expects to push out a new beta within the next week or so. Here are a few of the new features you can expect:

• New menu system with 4-way navigation
• Support for displaying thumbnails, comments, and other extensions
• More options for sorting/filtering/viewing feeds including forward/reverse ordering and the ability to change text size
• Support for dynamic OPML 2.0

It looks like the full version of Big Screen Headlines 2 should be out soon. So if you've gotten used to having a free RSS reader, you might need to dig into your wallet and find $15-25. No beta lasts forever. Well, except perhaps for Gmail.

[via Ian Dixon]

One of the first things I noticed when I set up my home theater PC running Vista Media Center is that there are some pretty cool online features. You can watch a huge library of music video's MTV's Overdrive interface for MCE, or watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central's Motherload page.

There are also a ton of obvious online features missing. For example, no built in weather forecast application? What's up with that? Luckily there are plugins for pretty much anything you could ever need (including weather forecasts).

But what about podcasts and video blogs? Surely there must be an easy way to download and enjoy online media from Media Center's 10-foot interface. Well, there kind of is. You can subscribe to feeds and automatically download enclosures with Internet Explorer 7 or the podcatcher of your choice. Then you can tell Windows Media Center to monitor your download folder and your files will show up in your My Videos and My Music folders. This is hardly an elegant solution, so here's a few better options for you:

The AppleTV is turning out to be the little box that could. It could be an internet TV platform, it could be a full fledged computer, and it could even be a video game console.

In the short time since the AppleTV began shipping, we've seen hackers:

• Run the internet TV program Joost
• Add a larger hard drive
• Extract the AppleTV OS as a disc image

But that was just the beginning.

Sure, TiVo lets you share home movies with your friends and even to download movies from Amazon Unbox. But what if you want to really push your TiVo to the limits? Like Doug Swallow, (who developed an application that you actually purchase Unbox movies from your couch) many users have written programs to add functionality to Series2 and Series3 TiVo's.

TiVo Blog has gone and posted a pretty decent roundup of these applications, including applications that:

• Let you view your NetFlix queue
• Show you live traffic cam data
• Stream media from your PC to your TV
  
• View Flickr photos
• Rent movies from Blockbuster Online
• Read RSS feeds

The list will be regularly updated, so it might be worth bookmarking.