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TiVo to Offer SDK
Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo has begun an effort to court third party developers to try and figure out a way to provide additional add on type services to somehow differentiate itself from the satellite and cable providers that are presently nipping at their heels. Initially the company plans to release three add ons: a weather information plug in, an RSS reader and a game. David Pogue of the New York Times is out with some of the features [NYT=Check soul at door] that at present already make TiVo a superior offering to the cable and satellite freebies. "
Nothing prevents you from having more than one TiVo. DTiVos have 2 tuners and balance the ToDo list between them.
Yes, the UI is superior to all the competitors. Hack the box to get TivoWebPlus and JavaHMO on it and you're cooking.
RSS has been available for quite a while. Weather, sports stats, caller ID, stodck info and headlines have been available for a few years.
Some form of ToDo list killer based on matches from a list would be great. IOW, run the internal priority process then remove from the ToDo list those entries which match the list.
Parsing the song data from the music channels and pulling the album cover from allmusic or Amazon and putting that on the screen along with persistent album and song title would be nice instead of the stupid blackout.
Shoutcast support including serving across a LAN would be cool. Yeah, like the music mafia wouldn't have a cow over that one...
Theoretically, a web browser could be made but support would have to be for very limited formatting and no motion. Still, wouldn't it be cool to do overlays from IMDB while a movie is on?
JavaHMO has a tic-tac-toe implementation but the hardware isn't capable of sophisticated graphics. You could do nethack but that's about it.
IR keyboard support would be great, especially when searching by titles. That would also allow text-only adventure games. Heh, 20 years later and we go back to 40-column text adventure games.
PiP isn't really supported but maybe some kind of text IM with buddies as text overlay on the lower third of the screen would be possible. Would require keyboard support, though.
Well, OK, if we've come that far, blog overlay.
Or I could build a MythTV system and get all of these things and not pay a monthly fee.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
[NYT=Check soul at door] ;), look here http://extensions.roachfiend.com/index.php#bugmeno t
Not with Bugmenot (http://www.bugmenot.com/)
And if you are using Firefox (as you should be
You can get the SDK here no NDA required:
http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/
It is Open Source, includes full source for the samples and the SDK itself.
Actually, TiVo made it EASIER to get shows off of. There is now a web server in the new version 7 software, and within a week of it being launched, users discovered that it can do this. It's not an official feature, but it works.
After using a Digeo Moxi box for several months, I really feel that the likes of TiVo and ReplayTV have huge hurdles against them. I am a long-time ReplayTV user, and though I chose ReplayTV over TiVo, I certainly respect and even envy TiVo's design and imp0lementation. TV viewing without SOME sort of DVR is, to me, a huge step backward.
That said, the Moxi box is certainly not without its foults, and while I absolutely miss the ability to offload shows to my PC (thus I keep my ReplayTV 5000 running) the simple fact is that Moxi's integrated dual digital cable tuners, (eliminating virtually all scheduling conflicts) its ability to record HD programs, its inclusion of games, a Ticker (Weather, News, Sports, etc.) and forthcoming Video On Demand for under $10.00 per month with no up-front equipment costs blows the doors offf of TiVo or ReplayTV hands-down. Joe Sixpack isn't going to care if a feature or two are missing as long as he gets a high "cool factor" at a low price, and DVR's like Moxi deliver.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
PVR150's can come either with or without remote. Typically without they run about 10 bucks cheaper. I personally went the do it yourself route with the universal remote I already use and built a little IR receiver with parts from radioshack using a design from the web.
Here's a rough overview: Lirc Homebrew page
But there are more user friendly step by step guides out there. Takes about ten minutes to do if you're a complete novice with a soldering iron and circuit boards like I am, and about 10 bucks worth of stuff from Radio Shack (I actually had to buy the soldering iron too, so it cost more than if I just bought the dang thing)
Never confuse volume with power.
I've had a TiVo for over a year and recently got digital cable and the DVR from Cox. I have to say that TiVo has spoiled me. The Scientific Atlanta Explorer from Cox is laughably inferior. It can't handle "season passes" properly. Searching for shows takes forever; there is no searching by title and then displaying all upcoming episodes; no "wishlist" capability. If it is already in the middle of recording a show, you can't tell it to start playing the show from the beginning. It doesn't warn you if you have exceeded your capability -- it just stops recording shows. It is, in short, a piece of crap. It is like the Wal-Mart version of DVR's, and I predict in five years nobody will know what a TiVo was.
That is because Cox' cable modem does something that my TiVo cannot do -- it records digital channels. A lot of consumers who have never used a TiVo will probably think it's great, which is sad.
Proverbs 21:19
"Yep, JavaHMO [sourceforge.net] can do basically everything that TiVo is adding already. Here's a list of what it can do from it's web site:"
And from the provided screenshots on the SourceForge site, it looks like JavaHMO will be available using the HME features instead of the hacks it has to use now.
http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/?page=screenshots
The DirecTV HD Tivo can do that as well. As a matter of fact, it can merge the OTA broadcasts with the regular programming guide. It can also record the HD DirecTV programming. And since it's not July 1 yet, I'm guessing that the DirecTV HD Tivo ignores the broadcast bit as well. Of course, that may change after July 1, but you're not going to be able to buy TV Tuner cards that ignore it after July 1 either.