Edit:
I have to refer you to Lifehacker that did an amazing Job of explining how to make a media centre. They have included how to get your TV shows, so I think their post is most pertinent.
http://lifehacker.com/5894075/set-up-an-awe+inducing-media-center-this-weekend
I am like most people and love to be entertained. The internet has created a bit of a revolution in the entertainment world and a lot of institutions such as cable companies or mass media moguls are extremely threatened by it. With good reason.
The problem lies with the nature of information. It has a tendency to propagate. And whether it be hollywood or you local TV channel, in the day and age of digitizing everything, that propagation has an ideal vehicle: the world.wide.web.
The traditional distribution networks try to maintain a certain exclusivity to the access to the media they are gatekeepers to, and thus they milk it for very cent they can. In recent years, sole advertising revenue to the distributors has proven insufficient to their shareholders so distributions fees have been a major source of revenue. That's why there's 300 channels on you cable or satellite box, but there's nothing on and it's 40 to 60% advertising. Not only that, every year your supplier tries to increase their "distribution fees" by 10%, for essentially delivering exactly the same soup.
To many of the die hard TV and Movie fans this is patently insane.
Though it may be understandable that from the media producing industry protecting intellectual property may be vital, so much has been vested in this thought, that anything else seems tantamount to heresy. I mean forget selling a movie for a few dollars and make sure
everyone sees it 3 or four times. They have now opted for licensing media containing the movie, to which you have no rights. (I mean literally, if you even try to make a backup of a DVD recent Canadian law would have you become a criminal.
The media industry have armies of legal groups, lawyers and politicians eager to pursue a single mom for millions in damage (which ultimately is more profitable than having produced a million copies of a movie and marketed, distributed and sold it). Anyhow that's just one of many aspects of the media industry that is apparently sick and deficient. Beyond that there are other reasons people are sick and fed up to be treated like cattle by the people that are supposed to cater to their whims. Keep in mind this is entertainment not health care...
Disclaimer:
All of the information pertained herein is solely for educational purposes. It should never be construed as a endorsement for illegal behavior or neither does it condone piracy. The important part to remember is that this is a discussion of theoretical application of technology.
Part one: Where is the media?
There are 5 main sources (in no particular order):
a) The web. Various links exist that allow download of media files. File sharing sites (not to be confused with torrent indexes, seen later) are websites where anyone can upload a file, pretty anonymously and then send a link to friends or family to download. Many file sharers opt for this because of the rather anonymous nature of the upload. I refer you to wikipedia's link on the subject:
http://www.eostech.in/2011/11/list-of-all-free-file-sharing-and.html
b)
The Usenet. This is a cousin of e-mail. It was designed to be used as a discussion billboard/forum with many topics. But just as e-mail, it allows the attachment of files and thus the propagation of all types of data is done this way. Many of the discussions that exist on the Usenet are discussions about media thus media circulates via those forums as well.
c)
Peer to peer networking.
Torrents. The apparition of peer to peer networking technologies in the last 5 years has had a bit of a revolutionary effect. Since the technology is designed to allow any data to be shared among hundreds and thousands of "peers" when a new peer joins the group, he receives the file from not one but thousands of sources simultaneously. Which is, arguably, the most efficient way to receive data.
d) You can "buy" it. Several online media stores exist, which will allow you to obtain, legally, a copy of media that you may be interested in. Notably Itunes from Apple and more recently Google's music store, to name a few. The caveat is that your are bound by all kinds of licenses and technologies that bind you. Either you are limited in the number of times or the timeframe when you can consume the media (such as renting a movie from Itunes) or the contract you agree to when obtaining the media binds you to using it on a single device. So, if you enjoy a tune on your phone you are legally prohibited to listen to it on your car stereo. Arguably, a DVD is probably the least prohibitive. DVDs are usable on television sets laptops and other dedicated devices (cars in asia have built-in DVD players) So since you carry a physical piece that contains the media you can play it on many devices and as many times as you want. The drawback is, the retail price of that media can end up being 6 to 10 times as a digital copy. With a production cost of merely a dollar more.
e) Last but not least: Over the AIR T.V. Yes, the good old TV antennae. But these days there's a twist: all over the air TV is digital and crystal clear. Often broadcasted in high definition and *GASP* it's FREE! Yes you sill have to put up with the commercials, but your could simply hook up your signal to a PVR and then, presto, you can fast forward through the commercials. In my opinion this is the best of all solutions because this allows you to legally obtain a digital copy of your show(s) or movie(s) and has the lowest inherent cost. Obtaining a PVR that will allow you to record and eventually edit and save the files to a secondary location, is a different matter.
Part 2: I am a media collector, help me organise it.
So you have managed to accumulate many digital files in which you have a mix of tv shows and movies (for example) how do you keep all of it ordered and organised?
Fortunately, there are many media fans out there that will share their knowledge and information about movies and TV shows. There are also websites that specialize in maintaining detailed information on movies or TV shows. These websites are all to happy to allow users to search for information on their favorite movie or TV shows.
Along with that there are enthusiasts that create (and sell) programs that help by automating the tasks of searching and classifying video files. In this section I will focus on one:
Media Centre Master. It is not free, but has a one time lifetime license of 50$ and personally, I have paid for it.
The name of the software is probably derived from a new functionality that has been added in Microsoft's Windows latest flagship: Windows 7, called Media Centre. Not to be completely sidetracked (we will go into it later), but this little piece of software had the ambition of becoming a hub for all your media; pictures, music, videos and movies.
One of the shortcomings of this, Windows Media Centre (in windows 7), is that the information about the media files it serves, is very brief and often a bit confusing. It has no real idea if a video file is a movie or a TV show, for instance, and if a file is not named in a familiar way it has no clue what the file is in the fist place.
In comes Media Centre Master. It uses some fairly robust algorithms to determine if a file, in a given folder, is a movie or a tv show. Once it has determined which one it is, it does a search on the internet about the show and obtains as much information about it as it can in order to classify, rename and store it in an organized fashion.
Consider this:
You have a folder on your computer called C:\AllMixedMedia
In this folder you have a mashup of movie and TV shows files.
You will indicate to Media Centre Master, that from now on, movies belong in
C:\Movies
and tvshows belong in
C:\TV
Media Centre Master will detect what is in
C:\AllMixedMedia and move it to either
C:\Movies or
C:\TV accordingly.
Furthermore it will create subfolders:
C:\Movies\Movietitle (1999)\ in which the file will be placed in case of a movie
and
C:\TV\TvShowTitle\Season 1\ in which the files belonging to the first season of the show will be used.
Pretty amazing, huh?
Well it doesn't stop there. While it was originally purposed to organise your media, it can now go on the internet and try to see if new media exists and get the media for you. Not directly, but still.
It heavily relies on external programs for this task, principally
uTorrent.
uTorrent is a very lightweight peer to peer filesharing software. You can run it for several days, weeks or months on a computer and it will not gob up all your resources. The computer will still run fine. Keep in mind it can pull massive amounts of data from the internet, so if you have an agreement with your internet provider that you will only transfer a specific amount of data per month, beware and limit the transfers in the application if needed.
So essentially, Media Centre Master will locate for you the
"torrent" files that contain the peer networks that are likely to have your media. This file will be saved in a configured location on your computer (i.e.:
C:\Torrents\)
Well now, when and if
uTorrent is fired up, it can automatically peek into that folder and load up those torrents and obtain the media. And lastly and more importantly, when it has finished the downloads, it can relocate them to any other folder (for example
C:\AllMixedMedia) which in turn Media Centre master will inspect and organize back where it should.
Part 3: So there you go, you got your media and it is organized... now, how can I watch it?
One of the options, which is not the least is plain old double-clicking on the file on the computer it was downloaded on. Though this might seem simple enough, this is hardly a convenient way to watch TV and movies, aways stuck in front of your computer or laptop. How about watching it comfortably?
This is party the reason that windows 7 had introduced Media Centre. It allowed you to connect intelligent TV's or other computers together and share the media. One notable example is the way the Microsoft's Xbox 360 videogame platform can locate a windows 7 computer and then allow you to watch the moves and TV shows from the remote computer, on the XBOX itself. There is one caveat though: the type of media that windows 7 serves, natively, is fairly restricted.
Again not to get too sidetracked, but video files come in many flavors. Often, they can be recognized by the extension of the file (or the last 3 digits making up the filename).
So video files can be; .AVI .MPG .MP4 .MKV .WMV .3GP and so on. As technology evolves the improvements on the files that contain video also evolve. Containing more and more data.
For instance, a .MKV file can contain several audio languages and also subtitles. An .AVI file cannot.
Another shortcoming of Windows media Centre on Windows 7: it does serve some .AVI files, and .WMV files but not .MKV files. This may be a dealbreaker for some.
Fortunately, more and more devices are able to serve media files in more formats. But to allow a shorter description of the technologies lets focus on 2 of them.
Device 1: A normal PC, connected to a TV screen.
This seems obvious, there are several small form factor PCs these days that can, unobtrusively be placed in the living room, out of sight and out of mind that can do a perfect job. However, if we consider what we have determined just a moment ago, windows 7, natively can only manage certain video files and that can cause us problems. Fortunately again, media enthusiasts have given us a free piece of software called
XBMC. This little fellow can do it all and is free. Well worth the investigating. It can also replace windows 7 entirely, though, it will only allow to watch media files (no web browsing)!
Device 2: A media box. Lately, one can find all kinds of "media dedicated devices" that can replace a PC for the living room. Some of them may be in the form of a hard drive with connectivity features that allow you to plug it to your TV and comes with a remote. Some DVD players feature a network cable or a wireless interface that can connect to shared media on your network. These can be a bit of a hassle to set up originally, but one properly set up, will often offer the most user friendly approach.
In conclusion, with already existing and on the shelf technology, it is quite possible to have a set up that allows to watch television shows without the traditional inherent costs. Though it takes some doing and configuring several pieces of technology to work together, most of it is very affordable if not free. I will list below Useful links in order to get you set up, if this seem like a way you would like to go.
Software
Torrent program
Usenet Program
Media Centre Master
XBMC
Transcoders This allows to convert or stream live, from a non-supported video format, to a supported one
PVRs have a look at Hauppage's HD-PVR!
Digital TV Recievers To get free digital TV
on older TVs you need this
Digital TV antenna More than just antenna, but useful info on what to choose.
Digital media playback devices:
Western Digital's media player
Small form factor PC's Peersonally I have the cheapest ZOTAC brand and it works well with XBMC
NEW:
PC on a stick
Tutorials (work in progress)
How to set up a folder structure for media centre master
Configure the uTorrent "tab" in Media Centre Master
Configure Media Centre Master to download and parse Usenet
XBMC Media sharing:
XBMC Accessing Media over shared folders (samba)
XBMC Accessing Media via UPNP
