Visual Nomads

Mininova recently started filtering copyrighted material on their site. This is a shame because it was my main source for downloading TV shows. Since my selection of content is rather limited here in Kuwait the feed was my lifeline back to real world entertainment.

While some content is still available, the reliability was horrible. I tried a few other sources to get my content (TVRSS, FeedMyTorrents, ShowRSS) but everything seemed to have issues (either the site was blocked in Kuwait or the content was limited). Then I came across an article by David Segonds where he used Yahoo! Pipes to create a reliable feed straight from the source, EZTV. I copied his pipe and used it as the source for my pipes which clean up the names and make things a little more user friendly. Since I was already messing with the feed, I decided to take it a little further and add more content.

After a couple days of tinkering I was able to pull the episode name and air date from epguides.com. Since epguides also links to TV.com for each episode I went ahead and pulled the episode description from there. I am finally happy with the outcome even though not all shows have the details (since epguides.com is user maintained and not always 100% up to date).

As one finishing touch I stopped blocking 720p content and simply added (HD) to the end of the show name. This should make it easy to filter out if anybody doesn’t want the large files showing in their feeds. I also allow duplicate posts for shows, which are rare, because I want to be able to download the one with the most seeds. This can also be easily blocked.

Take a peek at it and let me know what you think in the comments. If there is anything I should add, remove or change just let me know. I am always looking for ways to improve it.

In the future I will be implementing some of theTVDb.com’s API features and hopefully some zap2it.com and IMDB features as well.

Here are links to each of the pipes used in the process:

Finished VNTV Feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/spazlon/tvshows
Source feed (EZTV.it): http://pipes.yahoo.com/spazlon/neweztv
Episode details (epguide.com): http://pipes.yahoo.com/spazlon/epguide
Episode description (TV.com): http://pipes.yahoo.com/spazlon/epsummary

Quick Tip: Looking for a way to make the most of the feed? Take the VNTV Shows feed and add it to your raman amplifierGoogle Reader. In your reader go to Settings, Folders and Tags, and select private next to Your Starred Items. This will create a RSS feed of your starred items. To get your starred items RSS feed click view public page and copy the atom feed. Paste that feed in your uTorrent RSS feeds and select Automatically Download. Now when you are at work  catching up on the hottest articles on Lifehacker and you see a show you want to download in your reader, simply star the show and it will automatically start downloading at home.

azlon Blog, HTPC, VNTV eztv, torrent, utorrent, VNTV, Yahoo! Pipes

Today I took some time to update my RSS feed of the most recent movies released. I actually made quite a few changes that I have been meaning to do for some time now. New improvements include:

• iMDB page is now a hyperlink
• formatted the titles removing the junk
• removed lots of useless info from the bodies of both aXXo and FXG
• removed ugly white spaces
• removed ugly > which plagued aXXo’s posts
• formatted aXXo feed to the same font as FXG

I actually had to do the formatting seperately in for each feed instead of trying to format both in one pipe, then merge them with a third pipe. Soon I will write an article on how to load this into your Google Reader and setup uTorrent for easy movie downloading.

azlon Blog aXXo, FXG, google reader, mininova, rss, utorrent

I figured since I was changing the theme of the page I might as well start with a post about how I started with HTPC type stuff. One of the main things I wanted when I moved to Kuwait was to be able to watch my favorite shows instead of being limited to AFN. There are lots of sites out there have tutorials on this type of thing, many of which you will see are pretty much the same. This is just a starting point for me and a place where I can easily write more blogs expanding on the subject.

After many trials and revisions, this method is what has worked best for me over the last couple years.

Read more…

azlon Articles, Blog, HTPC dropbox, eztv, mininova, rss, tvrss, utorrent