Nutty RSS/Tivo hack

This hack has evolved into a proposed format for developing shared To Do lists. I’m calling it RSSTV. I hope you’ll take a look and consider participating. -AG

Okay, I’m not going go out of my way to explain myself on this one. But if you’ve already hacked up your Tivo to the point where you can telnet to it, it’s not a whole lot of extra work to display RSS feed data right there on the screen. Click on the thumbnail to see the RSS 2.0 Reader for Tivo in action. The display options need some work. I’ll probably try excerpting more from each post and then split the output over a few pages.
For the curious, here’s the code. It runs on top of another hack called Tivo Control Station. My three year-old Tivo runs an ancient version of Tcl so you don’t get non-greedy regular expressions or fancy string options like “string equal”. Tivo’s runtime is also very fragile so this code favors efficiency over elegance.
Crazy.
Update I’ve updated the interface, as described here.

18 thoughts on “Nutty RSS/Tivo hack”

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Anil January 30, 2004 at 2:53 pm

This reminds me of some hacks Matt Kingston was doing a year and a half ago:

http://www.hitormiss.org/archives/2002/07/after-a-few-false-starts

Anil January 30, 2004 at 2:54 pm

Oh, and Matt has a bunch more Tivo scripts here:
http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/tivo/

Andrew Grumet January 30, 2004 at 3:04 pm

Thanks for the links, Anil. It looks like Matt’s hooking into Tivo Control Station as well, though he doesn’t show us how he did it.

I should have said this above, but what I think is really interesting here is that we’re parsing a standard, widely deployed XML format (RSS) instead of screen scraping like most of the other modules. That should open the floodgates to all sorts of new content which will now be Tivo-consumable.