Daily DIY

I used a cardboard can to make a coil cantenna to improve my UHF reception.


By: pir8p3t3

Windows only: Freeware program TVUplayer lets you watch potentially any TV channel for free.

TVUplayer works like this: Someone (called a “broadcaster”) records live TV on their computer, then sends out the stream to the world at large. From that point, the more people who decide to watch the station, the better the “signal” you’ll receive, since TVUplayer uses peers to redistribute content similar to bittorrent (or that’s how I understand it). That means it’s going to be uploading plenty while it’s running (and believe me, it did). What I was most impressed by is that TVUplayer was less than 1 minute behind my live TV, which is pretty impressive.

The quality was good, especially for streaming video, but this will depend on the channel you watch. If you try a station with fewer viewers, the signal won’t be as strong, and you stream will suffer.

Will this last? Probably not. But if you’re looking for yet another good way to watch some free TV on your computer (with channels like ESPN, HBO, Comedy Central, and all the major networks), TVUplayer is a good place to look. — Adam Pash

The Future of TV is here folks! Sharp Pencil Quality TV!



Here’s my papercraft TV set with a film strip of selected frames from a movie. The strip is wrapped arround two pencils. As you turn the pencils film scrolls over the screen.



I have done versions for three movies so far. Kill Bill vol. 1, Dirty Harry and Dr. Strangelove.



All you need is to print it, cut it and assemble it. You’ll need two pencils (chopsticks might do also) and some glue.



Sharp Pencil Quality TV




By: StaneStane

If you’re missing your stories during the fall baseball playoffs on Fox, they’ve come up with a solution: free full-length episodes of selected Fox network shows at MySpace.

Included on the list are Bones, Justice, and Prison Break. Note: you will have to download the free Fox player in order to watch these shows, but if you’ve just GOT to see what that crazy Wentworth Miller is up to, it’ll be worth it. — Wendy Boswell

by Adam Pash

Ever since we first posted about the Democracy Player, I’ve been excited to get a better handle on it what it has to offer. For example, you probably already know that Democracy offers desktop integration of free internet television, making it the best tool out there for subscribing to “vidcasts”, but what a lot of people don’t know about Democracy is that it has built-in support for bittorrent downloads.

That means with the right RSS feeds, you can subscribe to and download television shows over bittorrent just as easily as you would manually subscribe to a podcast in iTunes. This week I’m going to show you how simple it is to download all of the latest episodes of your favorite television shows shortly after they air via bittorrent and RSS using the cross platform, open source Democracy player.

I’ve covered this territory in the past using another open source program called TED, which is good solution in itself. However, subscribing to TV shows with Democracy is dead simple, so I wanted to offer another option for readers who still hadn’t found comfort with any of the available bittorrent clients. I also wanted to highlight the kind of integrated downloading and playback we can hopefully expect more of in the future.

Note: TV shows are copyrighted, download at your own risk, etc. etc. You must have your opinions about this by now. Do what works for you.

Download and install Democracy

If you read Lifehacker, you know how to install software. So go ahead and download Democracy, install it, and run it. [1]

Find feeds for your favorite shows

Keep in mind that Democracy works like any podcast aggregator, meaning that you have to have the right kind of RSS feed for it this to work (specifically a feed that includes the enclosure tag). Luckily, there is such a feed from a wonderful bittorrent site called tvRSS.

If you browse to the Shows section of tvRSS, you should see hundreds of television shows conveniently organized alphabetically. Find the show you want to download (say, for example, 24). You’ll see a page full of episodes of that program, but you’ll also see duplicates.

That’s because tvRSS tracks more than one distribution group. To weed out the dupes, select a distribution group from the drop-down menu (I use EZTV, for example) and hit search. Now your results should be pruned of all the duplicates and you should see all of the latest episodes sorted from newest to oldest.

Now just copy the link labeled “Search-based RSS feed” to your clipboard and head over to your Democracy player.

Add your bittorrent feed to Democracy

Now in Democracy, hit Control-N (Command-N for Mac) or go to Channels -> Add Channel and the address you’ve copied from tvRSS should already be in the text field (if not, manually paste it in). Hit OK and you should see a new entry in the channel pane. Click on your new entry (which will read “tvRSS - search-based…” - unfortunately Democracy won’t let you rename feeds).

Democracy will automatically begin downloading the latest show from the feed you just added. You can cancel it by right-clicking the entry and selecting “Cancel Download,” or you can let it do its thing if you want that episode.

Watching your content

Check on the progress of your downloads in the Active Downloads section. I’ve found that bittorrent downloads with Democracy get pretty good speeds, especially if it’s a popular torrent (as is the case for any bittorrent client). If you’ve got the app running in the background, you can be sure that it’ll start downloading the show you want as soon as it’s available, meaning that you’ll get better speeds because that’s when the most people will be downloading.

Democracy does not have the same options for tweaking your bittorrent downloads that you would find in more robust, full-featured BT apps like Azureus or uTorrent, (in fact, it has none), but if you’re not one to futz around with those settings to begin with, Democracy is just the ticket.

When your downloads complete, they’re moved to the New Videos section and you can watch them whenever you want. New videos will expire in 6 days by default, but you can tweak this preference in the settings if you’d like to keep videos longer. Alternately, you can save a video indefinitely by clicking the Save button.

If you’ve put much time into Democracy, I’d love to hear more about what you think about it and whether you’ve found any killer functionality that’s gone unnoticed. Personally, aside from the bittorrent business, I’ve realy been enjoying some of the built-in channels, specifically the music videos offered by the Telemusicvision channel.

If you’re loving or hating Democracy, let us know about it in the comments.

Related reading:

If you’ve got a thing for TV and technology, these related posts might really be up your alley:

Build your own DVR
Automatically download your favorite TV shows
Forget the TV and watch the web

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who enjoys a good torrent of bits every now and again. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Unfortunately for many Windows users, Democracy seems to be riddled with memory leaks. However, many Windows users seem to be able to use Democracy without the memory leak, so your mileage may vary. My experience: After running Democracy for an afternoon, I was burning over 500MB of RAM, which is insane. On the other hand, I haven’t noticed any significant problems running Democracy on my Mac (though it still has a relatively hefty memory footprint). Either way, I’d love to see Democracy mature into a stronger, less buggy app, since I really do think it has a lot of potential. [back up]

I was intrigued by the instructable explaining how to add biased lighting to your LCD monitor.

My monitors are CRT and sit in a spot that does not allow biased lighting, but my big screen TV could be a candidate.

Now I can watch TV for hours on end without eye-strain.


By: ColumbusGEEK

This is a really easy hack for a remote control that can boost its signal power by creating a reflector behind the IR Emmiter.


By: Neodudeman

The Elgato Eyetv Hybrid looks like a promising spent-all-my-money-on-my-mac-can’t-afford-a-tv solution. It’s the latest update to the EyeTV line - a USB-powered tv tuner that supports analog antenna, digital (or HD) antenna, coax and s-video sources. There’s full front-row support and the EyeTV software allows lossless recording even in HD mode (assuming you have a G5 or core-duo processor).

Sure, HDMI support would be nice, but probably impossible right now at the $149 asking price. Overall, it’s a good solution for those who’ve evolved to not watching porn on anything but their computer screen. -Mark Wilson

Product Page [via krunker]

The iTunes Music Store now has a section aggregating all of their free video offerings.

This isn’t the first time you could find free video on iTunes, but it is the first time you could find their free downloads in one organized place. While iTunes isn’t offering a lot of free content (currently a whopping 14 videos), the offerings do look somewhat interesting. The free downloads are available in the U.S. only (sorry to our international readers) - link below launches iTunes. — Adam Pash

If DVB-TV broadcasts ever catch on the U.S., Trek has a small-sized solution that could make tuning in far more simple than it ought to be. By combining a USB 2.0 flash drive with the DVB-TV tuner, Trek has eliminated the need for extra software discs that end up getting lost more often than not. The drive can have up to 4GB of storage, but you’re more likely to find the more common 512MB and 1GB versions on the street.

The current version of the ThumbDrive uses MPEG2 to compress recorded video, but an MPEG4 HD version is scheduled to debut in September. That way, you can record all that great DVB programming and save it on the spacious flash memory. Or you can just be normal and watch TV at home like everybody else, I suppose. – Nicholas Deleon

Product Page [Trek via Everything USB]