Archive for September, 2009

My show downloading stack

I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot’s VOD service (and happily pay to watch the shows I enjoy), but my true favorite for getting my entertainment is everyone’s favorite not-a-dumptruck, the internet. In this post, I will describe how I do it.

Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:

  • You have to be graphically logged in for it to run. Among other things, this means that if someone reboots your computer, there’s no way to get it to start automatically. (I’ll be very happy to know if I’m wrong about this)
  • It doesn’t give you as much control as I’d like over torrents.
  • Its BitTorrent client doesn’t perform as well as rtorrent.

However, Miro does one thing which I haven’t figured out how to do myself yet: It keeps track of your position within watched shows. That is, stop watching a show -and next time playback will resume from the same place.

› Continue reading

Saturday, September 5th, 2009 Coding, Software, Tips 1 Comment