Broadcatching Feed

I added a feed on my main site's side bar to show the last couple of shows that I've gotten using RSS + Bittorrent. I had wanted an RSS feed for my Tivo for so long, and now that one is available, I don't even use my Tivo anymore. So I decided to throw this one together.

Its a Python script that will eventually be running on my Xbmc itself. It logs into the SMB share that I have created for my Tv shows, (the same one Xbmc uses to view content), and scrapes the "Now Playing" directory for all its files. It then sorts the files by date and grabs all their relevant information like show name, season, episode. It then uses TvTome to get a synopsis of the show. When its all done it writes out the feed and uploads it to my webserver.

Its a pretty thorough script. I could have just hosted this on my media server but I wanted to make it available to be used on Xbmc.

Once I'm comfortable with the script, I'll make it available.

For now here's the feed: Broadcatching Feed

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Introducing Bloglines.

Finally an RSS newsreader for your Xbox Media Center worth having. Bloglines displays all of your updated items from your Bloglines subscriptions. Catch up on your news/blog posts quickly at the touch of a button. Bloglines will grab all of your subscriptions that have unread items and display them in a familiar three pane format. Read items are kept unread to enable to you to receive them on your desktop later. Set them to be marked read with a single keystroke in the preferences.

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Yes I finally got down and dirty with some python to add some content to Xbmc. Stay tuned for more to come. I'm working on another script now and a third is right behind it.

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Project Mayhem III Beta

Chokemaniac has released Project Mayhem III as beta. Rush over to the download section to grab it and play with his newest creation. He's also themed a screen saver to look like it and included a matching theme for AQTbrowser. mmmmm.....

NOTE: You need at least Xbmc 03-12-2005 for this skin to work flawlessly

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Project Mayhem III Preview

ChokeManiac has posted a preview of Project Mayhem III. Click below for a little taste of what is to come.

My initial thoughts are amazement. It looks like a very clean and thought out skin. I'm curious to see how well list view looks closed in like that. I use list view mainly for Tv and music. I'm not the biggest fan of dark skins. I feel that they give a "techy" feel to Xbmc and are not as inviting to other users, making them feel like Xbmc is hard to use or a hack. They just don't have that user friendliness that something Xbmc needs. Also, I'm once again baffled that this skin doesn't brand Xbmc with its official logo. At least it says Xbox Media Center on its home screen though. You got it Xbmc, flaunt it!

Overall its really great work from ChokeManiac. He's taken a lot of time with this one, and I think its going to be very popular. I can't wait to see it on my Tv screen!

More shots and official preview thread here

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Project Mayhem III Imminent

Chokemaniac is celebrating his 1 year anniversery of providing us with amazing skins. He has a litle retrospective up on his site, and hints at Project Mayhem III coming soon. He wanted to release it today, but he's just not happy with it. So keep watching his site over the next week. You can count on it being mentioned here when the release hits.

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New CVS Build (3-04-05)

A new CVS build has been released and its been quite a while. The last build was released on January 15th. A lot has been added to CVS and the changelog is enormous. Instead of posting everythng that has changed since 1-15-05 like I usually do, I'm going to just post my normal highlights.

My Videos

• New mPlayer build and location
• IMDb fixed
• IMDb scraping moved into system/HTMLScraper.dll (you have to have this for IMDb to work)
• Switching from fullscreen video -> GUI now stable
• New high quality pixel shader YV12->RGB method
• Black screen on launch bug squashed (Yay!)

My Music

• Support for multiple artists and genres in WMA files
• New iPod-style Navigator

My Pictures

• Better zooming
• Supports up to 4096 resolution
• Added the option to disable thumbnail generation during picture viewing

General

• Added screensavers from competition
• 12 hour clock on homepage
• Multiple language support updates

These are just the highlights, there is over 250 additions and improvements to this build over the last build. If you haven't downloaded a new version in a while, I highly suggest updating. It's available at the usual places.

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Xbmc Screensaver Competition Winners

The winners have been announced. The winners in no particular order are:

• SiW for "cpBlobs")
• Dinomight (for "GreyNetic")
• sylfan (for "Stars")
• jme (for "Planestate")
• MrC (for "Shade Worm")

The winners will each recieve an X2VGA adapter.

More info here

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