From Computer to TV, Via TiVo

[Gregg Lengling]

By Anthony Zurcher
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page F07


A computer works just fine for collecting digital music and photos, but just try gathering a dozen friends around the monitor to look at your honeymoon pictures.

Owners of TiVo Series 2 digital video recorders can download, for a one-time $99 fee, TiVo's Home Media Option, which links a TiVo box to a computer through an Ethernet or wireless connection. The free TiVo Desktop software, for Windows 98 or newer and Mac OS X 10.2, will share with TiVo the music and pictures stored on a computer.

A little work is required. First, you have to buy some extra hardware: an Ethernet or WiFi adapter, at $40 or so, to plug into one of the USB ports on the back of a TiVo Series 2.

Getting the TiVo on a home network may not be easy either. On our first try, a TiVo Series 2 box recognized and joined a wireless network almost immediately. Unfortunately, it was our neighbor's WiFi setup, unintentionally left open. (Note to neighbor: You really ought to consider password-protecting your system.)

Persuading the TiVo to talk to our Apple Airport Extreme Base Station took a lot more work. After failing to find answers in TiVo's online documentation, we spent several hours browsing the TiVo Community Forum site before learning that we had to disable the AirPort access point's higher-speed mode.

Then we used the remote to tell the TiVo to obtain a network address from the AirPort -- and it was as if we had just plugged a very, very large CD changer into the stereo.

We couldn't hear any loss in quality from the transmission over a wireless network, and none of the music took up any room on the TiVo's hard drive. The TiVo remote lets you select, play and pause songs just as easily as you'd pick TV shows to record; with shuffle and repeat options, we had a soundtrack good for an entire evening.

The system, however, supports only MP3 audio files, leaving out music stored in such competing formats as Microsoft's Windows Media Audio or the AAC files used in Apple's online music store.

The Home Media Option's picture-sharing capability isn't as impressive as the audio feature, nor is it likely to get the same intensive use, but it can come in handy for treating guests to your better work with a digital camera. Once you select photos to share with TiVo's software, you can browse through individual shots or set up slide shows with the TiVo remote.

The upgrade also brings two noteworthy improvements to TiVo's core video-recording functions.

It enables owners of multiple TiVos to move recorded programs between their units over a home network, allowing such conveniences as sending a half-watched show from the living room TV to the bedroom set. The transmissions are coded to prevent Internet transfers; to export a recording to a friend's house, you'll still need to use VHS.

It also adds a remote-access feature, which lets users program their boxes to record shows from any Internet-connected computer. This Web interface isn't really conducive to browsing through channel listings and is actually slower to use than the standard TiVo onscreen controls -- but if you have a specific show in mind, entering its title with a keyboard is much easier than spelling it out by selecting letters with a TiVo remote. You can receive e-mail confirmation of your instructions, but you can't view your TiVo's schedule of recordings online.

The Home Media Option has room for improvement, but it's still an impressive addition to TiVo's repertoire. It should only get better. The company has published the source code for its desktop application, which should result in third-party plug-ins for other music and image formats before long.

[Todd Wiedemann]

Most of the above is "free" with ReplayTV

[FreQi]

All that and more is also available via Xbox Media Player, but you have to know how to, or some one can, modify your Xbox console.