Home Tech Dilemma Pt. 2
In my quest to find a permanent solution to running Front Row 2.0 on my HDTV without touching my Mac I found a command line solution that sounds like it will work. Tomorrow I will post my results as well as a walkthrough if it works.
However, this brings me to my second dilemma. The great thing about the Apple TV is that you can have it download your TV shows as soon as they’re released. But what happens if you don’t have an Apple TV? Well, you can always torrent the TV shows if you’re cheap like me, but that still leaves you with extra steps to take:
1. You have to search for the show yourself and out of the many listed episodes find the one you need. Not only that, you can only do this once you’re home from work, which means that you’re just starting the process and it will be hours before you can watch the show.
2. Once you’ve downloaded the episode it will most likely be in a format that iTunes does not like. So then there you go again spending more time converting the video using something like Visual Hub. And I have to add it to iTunes if I want it in my Front Row.
I’ve been looking around for something that will, much like iTunes, search for the shows I want, and download for me the latest episode as soon as it’s posted. I found an old app that’s called TVShows which does just this. You add TV shows to your queue and voila. However, the application is complete crap and development seized about a year ago. The website for this app now says “TVShows 1.0 is coming soon with great new features. You’ve already waited 8 months for a new release, one month more is not going to kill you. Stay tuned!” Link
We’ll see when it’s released if it is all that it promises.
One more thing though. This leaves me with only one more step to take; build some kind of an Automator script to automatically convert the video files with Visual Hub once they finish downloading. Visual Hub has a feature to automatically add the file to iTunes once converted.
