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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...

In an article entitled Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista, Michael Desmond at PCWorld gives what he thinks are ten things “to be excited about” in regards to the upcoming release of Vista. He really only gives nine reasons, as the last is hype about a promised feature:

Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s co-president, says that Windows Vista boasts a re-engineered install routine, which will slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes.

After reading through the nine real reasons, only two mention features not currently available on my shiny Powerbook. I’ll touch on those later – first, here are “Seven Reasons to Ignore Windows Vista and Buy a Mac”.

1. Security, security, security

   Michael gets all excited about three security features Mac OS X Tiger has had for more than a year now a firewall, home directory encryption, and non-admin user accounts. Once the first real virus for OS X appears, we’ll talk about security.

2. Internet Explorer 7

   Are you kidding me? This badly designed Firefox/Safari ripoff makes no improvements in the quest for web standards. Thanks alot, M$.

3. Righteous eye candy

   One of the critical new features of Vista’s new UI interface:

   ”...hover your cursor over minimized programs that rest on the taskbar and you’ll be able to see real-time previews of what’s running in each window without opening them full-screen…”

   Hmm..sounds a bit like the Dock to me, eh?

4. Desktop search

   I guess since WinFS didn’t pan out, M$ decided they’d just copy Spotlight. Lame.

5. Better updates

   This is getting boring. See Software Update

6. More media

   What? Did you say there’s a Music Player? A Photo Management App? A DVD Creation App? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you: I was busy making a DVD of my photos and music on my Mac.

7. Parental controls

   Aww, how cute. Michael’s description of features sounds just like OS X’s Parental Controls

Michael does makes two valid points:

1. The backup solutions included in Vista are better than those included free in OS X – but a .Mac account not only allows you to backup your files, but synchronize them between computers.
2. Windows Collaboration, apparently the fruit’s of Microsoft’s deal with WebEx, looks interesting. Won’t do any good if you’re collaborating in a multi-platform environment though.

All of this hype over Vista seems completely wasted. I’d much rather unpack a new MacBook Pro anyday. Do yourself a favor and make the switch. I promise you won’t look back.