TiVo Reader - RSS Aggregator for TiVo

Published 17 May 04 10:30 AM | mhawley

Okay, so my boss has gotten my brain churning on a new project, something that isn't work related (wahoo!). As you can see from the title of this post, I'm going to attempt to make a TiVo Reader, aka - a RSS Aggregator for TiVo.

Here are my problems, though - I have about 20 days left on my free HMO trial (I think) and I cannot directly interact with the TiVo without hacking.

My plans are to create a Windows service/UI front end that will (on a timely manner) read RSS feeds and create images (probably using GDI+) to store them to the file system so the TiVo desktop server can pick them up and you can read them on your TiVo.

My boss already has a working implementation of this, however he's using Linux, some random scripts, and its just not that easy. I wanted an easy way of doing this that anyone already running the TiVo desktop software can work with.

What do you guys think? Can it be done in 20 days (so I can actually use it)? Would people want this?

PS - I've also had thoughts on using POP3 to connect to NewsGator's POP edition to download my posts, maybe a future item?

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Comments

# Chris Weiss said on May 17, 2004 03:03 PM:

For those that do like to hack - here's the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-your-fingers-dirty version: http://grumet.net/weblog/archives/2004/01/29/nutty_rsstivo_hack.html

# Michael Maggard said on May 17, 2004 04:53 PM:

Check out http://javahmo.sourceforge.net/. It's a GPL Java-based HMO server already running on *nix, Windows, & MacOS X. It already grabs movie listings and such, creates images out of them and serves those up to TiVo(s). It should be reasonably easy to do the same with RSS.

I know you're not a Java person but with an existing project out there offering nearly what you're looking to do, as well as so much more... Well, might be worth looking at playing with some Java.

An interesting alterative would be a TiVo feed reader that works over the 'net. Folks could subscribe for feeds to processed (individually or via OPML) and then view 'em on-demand from their TiVo.

As long as a TiVo has HMO and the right ports are open (no firewall blockage) there's no need for a service to be loval, it just won't show up in browsing (no Rondezvous/ZeroConf). However it is easy enough to manually supply an address. this is the same way the 3rd party music & photo collections are already handled.

# Matt Hawley said on May 17, 2004 04:57 PM:

Michael, I have checked out JavaHMO, and personally - I hate Java. So, I'm not even going to look at the source code to see if I could implement it like this.

I've started working on the parsing engine for a single feed, and so far its going good. I'm thinking I'll start with that and maybe extend it to web based retrieval if I have time left on my free trial :)

# Michael Maggard said on May 18, 2004 01:54 PM:

Your time, your energy, your call :)

Hopefully if you get something working in time you'll release it, it'd would be nice to trivially track a few feeds on the TiVo.

# Chris said on June 11, 2004 04:32 PM:

Hooray, now we get HMO without having to pay extra!

http://www.tivo.com/4.9.asp

Are you still working on the RSS reader?

# Matt Hawley said on June 11, 2004 09:34 PM:

I haven't recently, though I'll probably pick it up now since HMO is free!

# TrackBack said on July 12, 2004 12:57 AM:

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