TimVo
From DigitalSoup
Contents |
About
My senior year of college I moved off campus where I was too poor to afford cable and too far away to use a simple rabbit ear antenna. However, after living at Clarkson for 3 years privy to every channel under the sun, I needed to find a way to watch my standard repertoire of shows (without going seriously into debt in the process). The solution was TimVo, an automated downloading/notification system which used rss, a custom "downloading" client, mysql, and a number of php scripts to make the whole thing work.
Content
Obviously in order for this to work, I needed a place to get TV Shows. Suffice to say I found one :-) This document does not go into detail on where. email me if you're interested
Software
In order to grab the shows, I needed to know what was out there to be downloaded. Fortunately the source mentioned above provided a rough rss feed of new content as it showed up on the servers. I quickly wrote a custom parser and created some simple rules to download only shows I was looking for. However, after a short while, I realized that my system was plagued with duplicates, episodes from old seasons, and many other similar issues. Hoping to fix this problem I added a database to the mix which stored a history of everything that was downloaded. This way, things would only be downloaded if they HADNT been downloaded before. Finally, I needed a "downloading" client that could run in a headless environment on my server. Having just taken python, I decided to write my own client which would send me a text message whenever a new episode had been successfully downloaded, and move it to the right location for archival.
Later additions included an rss feed, and a dashboard widget.
Future Goals
Now that I am no longer in college and have a 16' antenna in my attic, I am able to acquire TV shows through a more typical way. As a result, the TimVo downloader has minimal application/use. As a result, I would like to update it to serve as a more general purpose recurring downloader. For example, there are numerous open source apps on my mac that lack automatic software updates. This application could be tailored to automatically download, notify, and install new apps. It could also download linux distros, webcomics, or any other web delivered content which is recurrently updated.
