Brad Dominy

TiVo HME for Movies.com

In 2005, TiVo held a contest for people to create applications that ran using their TiVo HME protocol. My entry was an application that worked with Movies.com. You could browse current movies, see upcoming releases, and find showtimes in your area. It worked by using a combination of RSS and web scraping to gather information and present it to the user on their TiVo DVR.

Since it was for a contest, I didn't really do much more with it after I had entered it, but when the time came for me to put up some projects on this site, I decided to dust it off and lo and behold it still worked! Well, mostly. A lot of the web scrapping portions had broken as Movies.com had long ago changed the formatting of their web pages. Also, some of the RSS feeds I used had been discontinued, but for not having touched the code in 5 years, I thought it was pretty functional.

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TiVo HME works in Java which I don't use very often but it translates pretty easily. Unfortunately, TiVo has not shown much progress on the HME front for a couple of years. I hope that they will take it up again, but with a few changes to make it more accessible. I would love to be able to present something in more of a widget form while overlaying the screen. This would let you quickly call up information while not completely bailing from watching TV.

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• Bananas
• TiVo HME