How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player, Bittorrent, and RSS

Posted Thu, 23 Feb 2006 04:33:00 GMT to , , , , , , , , by
Jesse Newland
The Democracy Player is an amazing open source Internet TV application that allows you to subscribe to video RSS feeds from anywhere on the web. The default feeds will keep you supplied with endless viral and music videos from del.icio.us, Videobomb, and Telemusicvison, but with a little hackery, The Democracy Player will make you wonder why you’re still paying your cable bill.

For quite some time, I’ve been using TVRss to download episodes of The Daily Show that I’ve missed. TVRss scours a couple Bittorrent sites for TV shows, and provides RSS feeds of any search result. For example, here’s the RSS feed for recent episodes of The Daily Show. I currently subscribe to this feed in NetNewsWire and download the new shows as they appear.

These RSS feeds don’t work with The Democracy Player just yet: the feeds simply link to the bittorrent file, but don’t include the critical enclosure element. But with a little help from Feedburner ’s SmartCast service, feeds from TVRss can be plugged into The Democracy Player, effectively creating a Internet PVR.

Now that I’ve sufficiently bored you with the technical details, here’s the simple step-by-step:

How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player & Bittorrent & RSS

  1. Download The Democracy Player
  2. Search for a show of your choice at TVRss
  3. Right click on the RSS/XML icon link and select Copy Link URL
  4. Go to Feedburner, and paste the URL into the text field on the home page, check the “I am a Podcaster!” box, and click next.
    1. If you don’t already have a Feedburner account, you’ll be prompted to create one
  5. Click “Next” to activate the feed
  6. Copy the URL of the feed provided by Feedburner (it should start with http://feeds.feedburner.com/)
  7. Open The Democracy Player, click “Add Channel”, and paste the URL of the feed into the field that appears
  8. Sleep. In the morning, you should have an episode of The Daily Show to watch!
  9. New episodes will automatically be downloaded as soon as they’re available on Bittorrent – I’ve found this to usually be a day after the show airs
  10. Enjoy!

In my mind, this is the future of video distribution. The technologies of Bittorrent and RSS perfectly compliment each other: Bittorrent downloads are much faster when concurrently downloaded by a large swarm. Notifying software programs of new Bittorrent files via RSS creates a swarm very quickly, resulting in faster downloads for everyone. The Democracy Player combines all of these technical elements with a pleasant UI, and great video management tools. The result is nothing short of spectacular.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch The Daily Show...

Comments

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  1. dan lurie had this to say Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:41:14 GMT

    nice article, but its really horrible form to link to something so many times… makes one suspect googlebombing

  2. Jesse had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:20:24 GMT

    Thank you, itarweb-master ;). I did get a little link happy w/ this one, I admit.

  3. WardLarson had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:49:08 GMT

    Nice little hack…

    I’ll be watching Southpark if anyone needs me

  4. Jesse had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:56:33 GMT

    thanks this is great.. No more cable!!!

  5. m41ku had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:26:03 GMT

    Thanks for the tip… this is really useful!

  6. pete had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 02:02:31 GMT

    thats great, but you can already do this with out Democracy Player. Just get a good bittorent client that supports rss feeds. Then you can play them in any player you like. I have xbmc and play them on my hdtv

  7. kingkool68 had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:06:37 GMT

    What is your Feedburner feed for the Daily Show… There is no sense in burdening feed burner when you already have the same feed created. Shoot me an email please!

  8. Anonymous Coward had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:58:40 GMT

    it’s nice and all but I can only add one feed, If I add more it wont add. Whats up with that?

  9. Forrester had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:40:01 GMT

    You rule! Bye bye Bit Comet…

  10. Jimmy had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:58:10 GMT

    Note that you can also do this with FireAnt, a free video aggregator that plays any video format: http://FireAnt.tv/download

  11. Richard had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:00:39 GMT

    I’m confused, why would you go to Feedburner at all, when TVRSS has feeds for search results already?

  12. Jesse had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:20:12 GMT

    Feedburner is needed to add the Enclosures to the RSS feeds provided by TVRss. As is, they won’t work in The Democracy Player.

    Oh, and the comment form is now fixed. Sorry about that.

  13. Dikky had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:22:06 GMT

    you can do these whit just one program. utorrent

    http://www.utorrent.com/rsstutorial.php

  14. Melvin had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 06:06:32 GMT

    My vote goes to FireAnt. It’s directory and streaming preview let you see the video before you download it. It’s cool.

  15. stef had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:05:11 GMT

    What’s the status on the legality of downloading tv shows? Should we assume that since you never pay to watch tv, you can download these? I stopped downloading movies out of paranoia, but im itching to try this out albeit worried about the legality of it.

  16. rolandog had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:06:22 GMT

    There are also plugins for Azureus, and you can get them from within Azureus (Plugins/Installation Wizard/List from SourceForge/RSSFeed).

    I really like the direction the Democracy Player is heading towards, though FireANT does have a bit of a lead in having a bit less bugs.

  17. Anonymous had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:08:09 GMT

    This is in response to Stef. The pendants will point out that downloading is legal (or ignored), it’s uploading, or sharing through a P2P app., that gets their attention. I received a letter from NBC through my ISP for participating in a torrent of the TV show The Office (US version, they were off-air recordings not dvd rips).

    I think the networks will continue to crack down on this, and using this cool method to automatically grab TV shows will guarantee that you’ll get a threatening letter from the MPAA.

  18. Treoinmypocket had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:50:47 GMT

    Cool stuff – two questions: 1) Does using any of those “browse the web anonomously” tools (like ‘Anonomyser’) help you avoid the MPAA cops? 2) I have a Palm based Treo 650 Smartphone – which is totally cools as hell by the way – and currently subscribe to MobiTV. This is a TV service available for a monthly fee for use by smartphones and internet enabled PDAs. Do you guys think I can take advantage of what you are discusing here via my Treo?

  19. JBischoff had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:23:48 GMT

    Followed directions; tried to use House and Daily Show, (http://www.mininova.org/get/234686) same result:

    The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Your server is sending us some non-XML data. This is usually caused by your blogging platform or server generating an error page that is not in a valid feed format (usually it is plain-text, or HTML). Please confirm that you source feed is working properly.

    Or is this an operator error?

  20. Rohan had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 11:33:25 GMT

    But what about shows like Lost for example, that typically have 3 or 4 different releases (HD, non-HD, iPod, etc)?

    Do you just let it download ALL FOUR ???

    Seems like there needs to be a filter at some stage. For example: WHERE “HDTV-LOL” is not in title or WHERE “iPod” is not in title etc

  21. JoeS had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:36:36 GMT

    JBischoff: You didn’t follow the instructions correctly.

    >>Right click on the RSS/XML icon link and select Copy Link URL<<

    Not the link for the file(s) that were found. The little orange RSS icon.

  22. freedomfries had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:18:11 GMT

    Could you explain why feed burner is necessary? Doesn’t DTV already support bittorrent rss feeds?

  23. Generic had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:23:17 GMT

    @Rohan:

    Yeah. To me, that’s always seemed like a massive problem with this idea. There needs to be some kind of human intervention/moderation, can’t just rely on the right torrent name being posted every time. Hrm.

  24. null had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:55:29 GMT

    I am so confused. I don’t know what these RSS files look like. I want to get CSI, American Idol, Grey’s Anotomy, and SNL on my Demcracy player. But I can’t get the URLs right. Please help me.

    Email me at tinafeyfan202@hotmail.com with either the URLs or at least a detailed explanation of what to do.

    Thanks.

  25. SOCIALISME had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:07:44 GMT

    The fed works well, until I look at the downloads again, the feed has disapeared from DTV! Is this a DTV bug or something I’m doing wrong?

  26. CourtJester had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:19:42 GMT

    I tried it and it worked great for family guy. But what about when you search for house for example and you get other programs besides “house” like bleak house and desperate house wives. Do you know of anyway of making searches more specific? I tried using quotes to no avail.

  27. Zeus had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:33:03 GMT

    I cant find the RSS link, where is it?? lol sorry if it sounds stupid!

  28. jg had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:53:50 GMT

    Looks good. Thanks.

  29. jg had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 18:59:36 GMT

    It is important to use the RSS feed from a site like tvRSS and subscribe to the feed to a show—not the mininova.org link.

    http://www.mininova.org/tor/234686 BAD!

    GOOD.

  30. jg had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:00:56 GMT

    http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/559/rss5iu.gif

    Good

    The link would be http://tvrss.net/search/?source=all&name=daily&mode=rss

    (pardon the mulitple posts)

  31. alienvenom had this to say Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:53:11 GMT

    JG: Actually the search-based RSS feeds were available before this article was written. Also, if you access the /get/ mininova links directly, they will let you download your torrent. If you are referred from another site (just clicking on them) they will redirect you to /tor/... I guess it’s some sort of “hotlink” prevention mechanism. In your RSS client, make sure you uncheck the option to send “referrers.”

    tvRSS is currently undergoing a massive improvement operation. Planned features are: search-based RSS feeds (stage one is already complete and mentioned in this article) more search options are planned for the future, ability to support more clients (Democracy Player included and there are a few others), more sources for TV torrents, and lastly a massive filter operation that will separate information based on show title, episode number, season, format, group name, and release type (proper, etc.)

    Please stay tuned…

  32. Dave M. had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:23:18 GMT

    Thanks a bunch for this tutorial. I have Azureus setup to pull shows from RSS feeds, but having a builtin player is really nice and Democracy seems like a good tool so far.

    Thanks again!

  33. bob had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 01:26:50 GMT

    Am I missing something? Is there some kind of option in Democracy Player for selecting what port to use for bittorrent. Does anyone know the default port? I think its 6881 but I’m not sure

  34. tvr had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 03:58:11 GMT

    Everyone!! Feel free to use my Feedburner URL for the Daily Show…

    should save you some time and effort. You are welcome. Bye!

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/tvrss/ilCw

  35. Boros had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 12:58:57 GMT

    Is anyone else finding the torrent downloading in Democracy excessively slow? A 22 minute show torent takes 3 or four hours while the very same torrent only takes 30 minutes in utorrent. Am i missing something?

  36. Eirik had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 14:17:20 GMT

    Here is a php backend that uses the ajax callback that tvtorrent.info has, and creates a rss feed that is functional in Democracy Player http://www.nesjo.no/rss/

  37. Ashley had this to say Sat, 25 Feb 2006 18:32:14 GMT

    Helpful Article I was having trouble finding Video streams etc.

  38. turnip had this to say Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:23:38 GMT

    nice proof of concept but the downloading is slow and democracy player is crashy.

    until torrent behavior becomes more predictable, hiding the torrent details from the user is not a good design decision. democarcy doesn’t even show you where it puts it’s files!

    azureus and utorrent are much, much faster and you can actually see if the torrent is working or not.

    sadly the “rss feed” azureus plugin seems to be broken and abandoned. “rss importer” still works but has fewer features.

  39. Susan had this to say Mon, 27 Feb 2006 04:38:17 GMT

    Everything is working great…thanks for all the directions. I do have one question…does anyone know where I can get the torrent for the tv show, “Campus Ladies”?? I have been looking everywhere and have found nothing. If you know of anything, please help me (twister1@ufl.edu). Thanks!

  40. peter had this to say Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:22:50 GMT

    Seems I’ve kind of got it working. The tvRSS/Feedburner method didn’t seem to “stick” in Democracy Player. The new channel would show for a few moments then disappear from the list.

    However the link from http://www.nesjo.no/rss/ is “sticking” and currently downloading a show.

    This is interesting stuff.

  41. Kristin Van Ausdal had this to say Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:44:42 GMT

    I followed your directions and they worked great…until I tried to play the downloaded show and was told “this file type cannot be played in the main Democracy window” When I tried to play it externally, I was told that “Some necessary QuickTime software is missing” – but it didn’t tell me what was missing and it works with everything else so…I’m really bad at this stuff so I could be missing something very simple, but do you have any suggestions? I’m on a PowerBook if that matters…

  42. Ben had this to say Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:35:41 GMT

    Clever and simple hack – just the way I like them. As many have noted, there are many was to accomplish this feet, but this is simple and quick. The next step (for me to try) is to figure out an AppleScript to make it quicker.

    You’ve also given me a great use for my palmOne LifeDrive (notes here)

  43. G.eorge.C had this to say Wed, 01 Mar 2006 07:09:57 GMT

    Copied the RSS url, and put through Feedburner – Democracy says its not the right type.

    Some concerns is that Feedburner advertises your feed….

  44. G.eorge.C had this to say Wed, 01 Mar 2006 07:42:26 GMT

    Copied the RSS url, and put through Feedburner – Democracy says its not the right type.

    Some concerns is that Feedburner advertises your feed….

  45. CT had this to say Thu, 02 Mar 2006 14:42:54 GMT

    It seems to no longer be working? I’m trying with this feed:

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/tvrss/yZSj

    And I keep getting the “Not Compatible” message. I’ve tried this 3 times now.

    Any ideas?

  46. CT had this to say Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:11:28 GMT

    The www.nesjo.no/rss/ links seem to work fine. But, the instructions above don’t seem to be working.

    Curious.

  47. James Wynn had this to say Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:42:36 GMT

    Awesome idea man. I’ve got it working like a champ now. When Democracy Player gets a bit more polish it will be a real tight setup.

  48. bdd had this to say Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:52:39 GMT

    I too keep getting the “Channel Not Compatible” error.

  49. a-mac had this to say Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:08:57 GMT

    can someone please tell me the feed for 24 i just cant figure this thig out

  50. alienvenom had this to say Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:57:30 GMT

    >> can someone please tell me the feed for 24 i just cant figure this thig

    http://tvrss.net/search/index.php?distribution_group=combined&show_name=24&filename=&date=&quality=&release_group=&mode=rss

  51. alienvenom had this to say Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:57:58 GMT

    alright, this weblog is somewhat broken… it doesn’t do links well e-mail me… support@tvrss.net and I’ll help you out :)

  52. roel had this to say Sun, 02 Apr 2006 17:21:46 GMT

    If you want to use other bittorrent feeds that dont directly link to episodes, you could use Ted. Ted supports mininova, torrentreactor, torrentspy and more.

    see http://www.ted.nu/

  53. Yong Hwee had this to say Tue, 02 May 2006 04:15:00 GMT

    I can’t get it to work. Somehow after adding the channel, it disappears when I try to update it.

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