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TiVo Home Media Rollout
ncstockguy writes "TiVo rolls out its new Home Media option next week. Subscribers with a Series2 DVR box can get some impressive new functions to their TiVos. They'll be able to screen digital photos on their TVs, listen to music stored on their computer hard drives on their home entertainment units, schedule to tape a show "remotely" through the Internet, and watch a recorded show in different rooms on different TVs. Some of the functions will require two or more computers connected either by WiFi or ethernet."
If you are a DIRECTivo user - a DIRECTV user with a TiVo2 box you do not get these features. TiVo has offered them to DIRECTV, but DIRECTV doesn't seem to want them. I'll keep my TiVo1 series box until DTV gets on the ball. When I can get these new features I'll buy two TiVo2 boxes!
tbdean
I've been beta testing the service for a while now...
The Apple Music and photo sharing is awesome, total use of Rendesvous and your iBook, Powermac, etc. shows up immediately in your TiVo categorized down to a "T"
Another feature that a lot of people probably wouldn't expect is to try this: Make a playlist with some internet radio stations and share it out to your TiVo. Access the playlist on your TiVo and you can listen to Internet radio stations on your TV! It's very, very cool and works great!
So Tivo users will have the same functionality as Replay 4000+ users do? It's a damn shame that SonicBlue is in the toilet. With the exception of playing music, my 4580 does all the things Tivo just announced. What's even better is that the line protocol has already been hacked and I can watch recorded programs from any computer in the house with mplayer. Also, I can share with my buddy across the country if he ever gets a 4k series.
Truely a damn shame about Replay. Heck, I've been TCPdumping all comms with it since I heard so that I can disect how to emulate the replay server if it comes to it.
1. Viewing files from your home computer (photos, music) requires Windows or a Mac. Their "TiVo Desktop" software is not (yet) available for linux as far as I can tell.
2. The ability to share your recorded shows requires you to buy another Series 2 TiVo and buy (yes, it costs money) the Home Media upgrade for it as well. You cannot "share" the file with anyone else's Series 2 either, only ones registered under the same household account at TiVo HQ. You can't "share" with your computer either, BTW, only another TiVo.
Maybe some of these will be improved over time, either by TiVo or someone else.
I was a beta tester for 'HMO', as it's known at TiVo. I've been living with it for the last month--and I'm not going to shell out the $99 to purchase it. Why?
1. Lack of format support. TiVo plays MP3s. That's it. No OGG, no WMA. My collection is mostly in WMA. If I were to start again, it would be into OGG, not MP3.
2. No playlist control. You can create M3U playlists on your computer and play those, but if you don't create playlists ahead of time, you're stuck playing individual songs or folders (which in my case are sorted by artist). You can't switch songs without stopping the current song from playing. That makes it pretty much useless for parties where you'd like live control over what will play next.
3. No photos simultaneously with music. The feature is named "Music & Photos". But it's actually "Music OR Photos". So if you want to play music during your party, your guests get to see a box with song info onscreen, and that's it. If you want to put a slide show up on your TV, your music has to come from somewhere else. Similarly, there are no other visualization toys to play with.
As for the other features, I "only" have one TiVo, so multi-room viewing isn't useful to me.
And in the month I've been using it so far, I've never had the need to schedule programs for my TiVo remotely.
Even if I had, the conflict-resolution options are minimal: record this program if nothing conflicts, or or record it regardless. You don't get to see what may be conflicting, because TiVo connects to the mother ship every 15 minutes or so to check for new orders.
In short, it's a 1.0 feature set, competing against computers in a 3.0 world. If I want music & photos on my TV, I'll just plug my laptop into my AV system and be happy. So sad.
> Any hardware that is capable of decoding video can easily decode Vorbis as well
This is definitely NOT true... TiVo does its MPEG2 encoding and decoding with SPECIFIC hardware that will only encode/decode MPEG. While they could be using it to decode MP3s as well (since MP3 is MPEG1 layer 3 audio) Vorbis is a totally different (and more CPU intensive) audio codec...
Still, this doesn't necessarily mean that the CPU on the TiVo would not be able to handle Vorbis decoding, just that it has nothing to do with the box's ability to decode MPEG2.
Tivo has released Developer Resources including an API for creating your own TiVoServer as well as an Apache module to get you started. For a company that is frequently trashed in this forum, they seem to be throwing the /. crowd a rather large peace pipe.
- Craig
Now if you're strapped for cash, there's a free way to get guide data without buying an ethernet card (you still must have a subscription of course). It's called ppp over serial - all Series 1 have a serial port and came with a serial port adapter (9pin to your PC). The procedure is well documented here.
"Population 1,656"
As anyone who is familiar with the MythTV project will attest, the feature list trumpeted by TiVo is precisely what is available for MythTV, an open source, volunteer effort (although MythTV supports more, and more diverse features). Isn't competition grand!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The long-awaited TiVo HDTV is on it's way.
You can view the press release here:
TiVo HDTV DVR press release
I'd also recommend checking out the various forums at the TiVo Community Forums, where discussion about the HDTV models has been underway. There are some very knowledgeable folks there.
Found this link on another posting that didn't get modded up yet. Seriously, folks - bug the hell out of DirecTV and let them know that you want this (if you actually do)