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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!
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.
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.