How-To: Democracy Player – Download and watch television

Don’t hold your breath. The Democracy Player has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is an open source internet television player which scours the net via RSS and automatically downloads video content worthy of viewing. With a little know how, Democracy can be used to download bittorrent files for you to watch the next time you roll out of bed.

• Download The Democracy Player
• Search for a show of your choice at TVRss
• Right click on the RSS/XML icon link and select Copy Link URL
• Go to Feedburner, and paste the URL into the text field on the home page, check the “I am a Podcaster!â€? box, and click next. If you don’t already have a Feedburner account, you’ll be prompted to create one.
• Click “Nextâ€? to activate the feed
• Copy the URL of the feed provided by Feedburner (it should start with http://feeds.feedburner.com/)
• Open The Democracy Player, click “Add Channelâ€?, and paste the URL of the feed into the field that appears
• Sleep. In the morning, you should have an episode of The Daily Show to watch!
• New episodes will automatically be downloaded as soon as they’re available on Bittorrent – I’ve found this to usually be a day after the show airs
• Enjoy!

The original, by Jesse, can be found here

While the tutorial does assist in automating the process of downloading television content from the net, I personally prefer a little more control and flexibility by automating downloads and playing with VLC.

Take the Democracy Player for a spin if you often find yourself staring numbingly at the screen at short video clips.