I have recently found a zen with my digital media setup, and would like to share this knowledge with you. The way it works is that I get notified when there are new episodes of my favorite shows available for download (sometimes before it is shown on the networks!). I then download them in HD via bit torrent during the day, and watch it on my HDTV at night.
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.
Hi,
I have a PopCorn Hour and I want to use a Time Capsule (1 To) as a network drive for it.
Can you confirm that you access your Time Capsule from your PopCorn Hour and that 1080p HD movies play greats and without problem ?
If that work’s great, can you tell me the protocol you use for that ? SMB ? NFS ? and any usefull informations for the configuration.
Thanks a lot.
Thank’s for your answer !
Good to know that Time Capsule works with NFS
I’ll buy mine very soon.
For your issue with the audio, I think it’s because your movie have encoded audio in DTS and for now the PopCorn Hour doesn’t decode it (licence probleme, it will be ok in a futur firmware), AC3 works good.
To play movies with DTS audio, you have to use an external decoder like a Home Theater for now. HD TV’s doesn’t decode DTS and probably will never do.
Ahh, yep! That must be my problem. Will have to check for the firmware update. Thanks.
Yep, 1080p works great. I connected my time capsule to the popcorn hour via ethernet cable, then in popcorn hour i put in:
smb://10.0.1.1/MountedDriveName
I did however have issues with a couple of HD movies that encoded the audio in surround sound…the video quality was awesome, but the audio just didn’t come though…and I think that its because my HDTV doesn’t support the audio encoding…cause the audio worked fine on my mac laptop.
Hope this helps.
Hi, I buy my Time Capsule and try to access it with my PopCorn Hour, but that doesn’t work :/
TC : 192.168.0.20
PCH : 192.168.0.11
MAC : 192.168.0.2
PCH can access MAC with NFS.
MAC can ping both TC and PCH, so the network is ok.
I use that rule :
nfs://192.168.0.20:/Videos
Videos is a folder on my TC root directory.
I try to add the TC password on the rule (without username), but that doesn’t help.
What rule do you use (NFS exact match user what password (TC pass ?)) and what config do you use in TC ?
I Use in TC :
- Active File Sharing with Time Capsule Password, without Airport access and without Bonjour.
Thank’s for your help.
I went back in to look at my configuration, and it turns out I had the format of the url wrong (I’ve updated it in my above comment).
Also, I’m actually using SMB.
My url looks like this:
smb://10.0.1.1/data
“data” is the actual drive name when its mounted on my mac…not the root folder name that’s in it.
I put in no username, and my Time Capsule password…and that works.
Hope this helps.
I really dont understand why, but it doesn’t work :/
Ok, so let’s try again :
It’s SMB and not NFS ( sure you can play 1080p movies without lack with SMB ? )
So, I use that rule :
SMB://192.168.0.20:/Capsule
Username : none
Password : TC password
Capsule is the Volume name of my TC when it’s mounted in Mac Os Finder.
Now with SMB, PCH said that “host is unreacheable” :/
Of course TC is reacheable and my mac can ping both TC and PCH.
Please, can you take a screenshot of your TC File Sharing section configuration ?
I try a lot of configuration, without any results :/
Try removing the colon “:” after the “20″ in your url…so it would look like this:
smb://192.168.0.20/Capsule
I’ve only tried the 1080p quality once, and it streamed ok givin that its connected to the TC via the ethernet cable.
Damn it ! I do not see that NFS and SMB haven’t the same format. NFS will not work WITHOUT the colon, SMB will not work WITH the colon…
Anyway, thank you a lot for saving me several hours, now the connection between TC and PCH is ok.
I test 2 HD movies (1080p BlueRay Rip), that’s fine. It take more time than with NFS when you move from the beggining to 50% (hit 5 on the zapper), but well, it’s totaly playable.
I will make more tests on the coming days, now I need a home theater to play DTS audio.
Well, again, thanks a lot for your help.
Nice info on streaming HD using a media box but why wait to read your RSS feed for a new torrent when you can configure Utorrent to directly search and auto download your show in the format you require or you can use Miro or TED to do similar. I leveraged a few other posts and wrote the ‘HOW TO?’ here
http://paddyinba.blogspot.com/2008/10/tv-or-not-tv.html
Thanks for the tip! Automating torrent downloads is something I’ve wanted to do from the get go, but at the time they didn’t have uTorrent for mac, and was a little hesitant on putting the torrent selection process on auto-pilot.
After doing this for a while though I can see that it would work pretty well to automate the torrent downloads.
I heard they recently released uTorrent for mac, will definitely check that out.
http://mac.utorrent.com/