a mythtv plugin proposal

While over at my Mom’s, I happened to notice the Tivo (I bought her) recommending all sorts of wierd things. Let’s just pretend that we don’t know the recommendations are really from paid sponsorships, and that the commercials it automatically downloads are really quite nice. Like I said, pretend….

Here’s my idea. Now that some of my techno-savvy buddies now have mythtv setups, I think it would be quite cool to build a little system that would provide suggestions/recommendations from your friends. Oh No did I just think up another social network peer recommendation friendster linkedin super clone idea!?! Yes, I did.

So here’s how it would work — all it would do would either take your current recordings or scheduled recordings and make basic “search queries” on the titles, times, and maybe channel names (because channel #s are different everywhere). It would then provide a little web service type (rss xml whatever) off your mythweb and let each machine hit each other’s feed. The page to view these suggestions would be just a list of your friend and their suggestions, allowing you to click (thinking about the web interface) the suggestion to perform a search on your current schedule database and schedule the recording if you’d like. They’re just recommendations, after all.

The other idea would be to build some sort of mechanism to actively recommend, by either providing some sort of thumbs up or down rating to recordings ala tivo, but it would be cooler if it could do it semi-automatically. However, I just don’t want all my buddies to know I’m recording Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the Trading Spaces marathon, followed by American Idol. Also, the mythtv setup in my household (don’t know about yours) has two users, so allowing a simple thumbs up or down wouldn’t work (James complains how after my brothers and I come over to their house and use their Tivo, it starts recording those dern MTV/VH1 shows). No offense Jodi, but I like Law and Order, but not enough to record all 50 episodes that come on per day.

It’s almost there - huh?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 12:28 pm and is filed under techno-babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.