Can you schedule a TV recording from your cell phone? I can! One thing all my friends know about me, is that I love watching television. I have a very busy schedule and cannot conform to that of prime-time television. Commercial DVR's (Digital Video Recorders) were not available at the time, so I had to come up with my own solution. I built a small PC that resides on my entertainment center and handles all of my television watching and recording needs. Everything is PHP, MySQL and Flash based and can be controlled by the same universal remote that my television uses. I have enough drive space to record 80 hours of television programming without having to worry about running out of room. Adding network capability was what really made this project interesting. Since all the interfaces are web-based, it wasn't long before I was able to schedule TV recordings from any internet connected PC in the world. This has actually come in handy for when I am sent out of town and might not be around for that season premiere of the next greatest TV show. After getting a WAP enabled cell phone, I had to dive back into this project so I could give it WAP capability. After a few hours of studying the WAP protocol, I made up a quick and simple interface to schedule TV recordings from my phone. I had to keep it simple to keep bandwidth usage down, but how fancy would this really need to be? I've actually scheduled more TV recordings from my phone than any other way. It's actually a very interesting crowd pleaser. This was my favorite project. I ended up getting a DVR from my local cable provider, and I use that primarily; since it has the ability to schedule entire seasons of shows regardless of time shifting and schedule changes. However the PCTV DVR has not been retired. Its still sitting there for when I am on the road, at the office, or even out of the country, so I can schedule a TV show recording that I might otherwise miss. << Back to the Portfolio Content © 2003-2010, JoshKemp.net, All rights reserved.