This has got to be one of the top 5 coolest things you can do with an iPhone 3G. I recently payed for a year subscription to di.fm premium radio. This gets you like 30 channels of electronica, and another 30 channels of rock/reggae/everything else…all commercial free and CD quality. This is great on the computer, but I immediately wanted it on my iPhone so I could stream it in the car or through headphones on the go.

After some tinkering I figured it out, so I made this video to show how its done.

What you will need:

• Media box (like apple TV or Popcorn Hour)
• A networked hard drive (could be your computer)
• Bit Torrent
• TVrss.net
• A feed reader like Google Reader
• TV (preferably HDTV)

A little background

About a year ago when I moved to Hawaii, I decided to leave the TV behind. I soon started missing some of my favorite shows like south park, and resorted to watching it on sites like South Park Zone, which has crappy video quality, and full of annoying ads (the kind of ads that force you to click them to make them stop the obnoxious blinking). This got old fast; my laptop screen is pretty small, the speakers suck, and its just not as easy as using a remote on a TV.

As a wedding present my grandfather got my wife and I an awesome flat-panel HDTV. Instead of going out and subscribing to the local HTDV cable service, I decided to explore the digital hard drive media streamers that were starting to surface on the market.

The Media Box

These “media boxes” serve as the liaison between your TV and the movies/shows that are located on your local network…allowing you to control the media on your TV with a remote control, just as if it were on a TiVo or DVR.

Though the Apple TV was a decent choice (and can be hacked), it doesn’t play a lot of the formats that you’ll find from using bit torrent (hence, “commercial-free”), and is more expensive than the completely open standards box, “Popcorn Hour“. This thing will play anything you can throw at it, supports HD, and even surround sound.

The networked hard drive

I needed a new wireless router, so I naturally gravitated to the Apple Time Capsule, which killed two birds (a fast new router, and a built in 500gb wireless hard drive). I connect the time capsule’s hard drive to the popcorn hour media box, which streams the shows on the hard drive to my TV via remote control.

Bit Torrent

Now that I had the TV, the media box, and the hard drive, it was all about getting the media to play on it. This is where bit torrent comes in. One of the most popular mediums on bit torrent right now are TV shows. The day a show comes out on the networks, it is usually rampant on bit torrent, with thousands of seeders. This allows you to download a 300mb TV show in a matter of minutes. For example, check out this list of torrents for the popular show Entourage.



These are sorted by number of seeders, and notice how it happens to be pretty much chronological order with the most recent show first (S05E06 = season 5 episode 6).

Let the shows come to you with RSS

I quickly got tired of hunting down my favorite shows, and so did the creator of TVrss.net. On this site, you can narrow down torrents by TV show, and subscribe to the results, which will notify you the second a new show is available for download via bit torrent. Then all you have to do is click a link to start the download. Just look at this list of TV shows available on bit torrent.

Lets take the show Entourage for example. On TVrss.net, I can filter down the torrents to show only 720p HDTV versions of Entourage:




Now, all you have to do is subscribe to the RSS feed for that search, and you’ll be notified in your RSS reader when there are new episodes available in 720p HDTV format. Repeat this for all of your favorite shows, and you’re now rocking out on demand commercial-free HDTV.