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Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Video content is readily available online for you to download, but the download process isn't always as simple and automated clicking a button on a TiVO or DVR. Fortunately, with a little set up and some help from a few great tools and BitTorrent or Usenet, you can turn your computer into a TiVo-like downloader. Here's how to set them up. Note: This tutorial is going to mention Usenet.
Between the Blu-Ray player, cable box, laptop, and everything else hooked up to your TV, your home theater situation is a mess. Here's how I rolled all those devices into one awesome media center—the media center of my dreams—for under $500.
Your home media center may be awesome, but it doesn't do you much good when you're at a friend's place and desperate to watch the Game of Thrones finale, get in a few laps on Mario Kart, or listen to a great new band you discovered.
Dear Lifehacker, The back of my television is a barren wasteland. I have one HDMI port in use and, beyond that, nothing else.
DVD players are so 1999. In this day and age, a custom media center running XBMC is the only thing you really need hooked up to your TV—whether you're watching movies you've ripped, streaming your favorite TV shows from Netflix and Hulu, listening to podcasts, or even playing video games.
At its most basic, Network attached storage, or NAS, is a great way to share files on your local network. But it's also a perfect solution for backing up your computers, streaming media across your home network, or even torrenting files to a central server. If you have an aging computer lying around, you can turn it into a NAS for for free with the open-source FreeNAS operating system. Here's how.
So you've set up your own NAS , and you'd like it to download more than just the occasional torrent. If you'd like to automatically download TV shows as soon as they're available with previously mentioned Sick Beard, you can install it to your NAS for an always-on internet PVR. If you'd rather not keep your main machine on all day waiting for new TV shows to download, installing Sick Beard on a NAS is a fantastic way to automatically download your favorite TV shows, whether your other computers are already on or not. However, installing SABnzbd and Sick Beard to a NAS takes a bit more work than installing it to a normal computer.