Author: admin

I’ve had a TiVo for a little over two years after being pushed into it by a few friends and it really is a great little thing. It’s not majorly life-changing (unless you spend a large percentage of your time watching tv) but it is a big improvement over standard television watching.

About a year ago, the Home Media Option for the TiVo came out that added nifty features like the ability to listen to your digital music and view your digital photos. It also added the ability to move recordings between multiple TiVos in a house, but that isn’t very interesting to me since I only have one TiVo. I was most interested in the digital music player part of it as it finally allowed me to easily play the mp3 encoded music stored on my computer through my stereo connected to my TV.

The only real major downside of the digital music player part of the TiVo as provided is its lack of support for any file types other than mp3. I’ve pretty much completely switched to using AAC as my primary music encoding format. AAC features better compression (smaller files at the same audio quality) than mp3 and I think it represents higher frequency sounds better which results in a ‘brighter’ sound. I’ve also succumbed to the super convenience of the occasional iTunes Music Store purchase and all of those files are in AAC format as well, with an extra bit of DRM goop to make the major labels happy. So, the end result is more and more of my digital music is unplayable on the TiVo and I’ve been looking into other ways to shuttle my music around my house from where the files are stored to wherever I want to listen to them. So considering all of this, imagine my joy when I discovered that I now can play my AAC audio files on my TiVo, including those purchased from the iTunes Music Store.

While fiddling around with the new and very promising TiVo programming interface I ran across a message board post describing how to set up the latest Mac version of the TiVo desktop software (1.9) so it would transcode AAC files on your computer and send them to the TiVo as mp3. A self-described geek poked around in the TiVo install directory and found a utility program called SoundConvert that had references to the LAME mp3 encoder libraries within the binary. With some testing he discovered the TiVo Desktop software would automatically work with AAC files if it noticed the LAME libraries installed on your computer. I followed the link to the OS X LAME installer package, installed it and enabled music sharing in my TiVo Desktop preferences (after upgrading it to 1.9), and my AAC files were suddenly playable on my TiVo! They show up like all the other files (they didn’t show up at all before) and they play like any other file. A quick check on the computer acting as the server verified that the files were being transcoded before being sent out. Awesome!

Once I had AAC files playing, getting iTunes purchased music to play as well required one more step of questionable legality. I personally think it’s idiotic that I can’t legally play a song I purchased legally on my own device in my own house, but such is the idiocy of DRM. There are ways around the DRM iTunes uses such as JHymn, but you’re not currently allowed to use them in the US due to the DMCA. Anyway, I did try it on iTunes purchased music and it did work and I was able to listen to it on the TiVo. Unfortunately, since I first used JHymn successfully, Apple has made a back-end change that has rendered it unusable. I’m sure the JHymn people will get it working again before too long, but don’t head over there excited to claim DRM-free iTunes bliss just yet. I’ll update this when I hear of JHymn (or something similar) working again.

UPDATE (April 11, 2005): As reported by the main JHymn developer himself in my comments, JHymn is now working correctly again. TiVo and iTunes can play nice together once again. It is a forbidden love, but just as sweet.

Continuing in my TiVo thread… during my geeking binge that included the discovery of how to play AAC files on my TiVo’s digital music player I also managed to teach my TiVo some other new tricks. The whole thing started with a re-visit to the TiVo Home Media Engine (HME) website. From there I followed a link to a whole HME portal site with links to a bunch of applications that can run on your TiVo. Some of the available applications let you look up maps via Google Maps, read your email, view your friend’s Flickr photos, and remotely control iTunes (intended primarily for use with that Airport Express thing Apple sells).

The most comprehensive HME project I ran across is called Galleon and promises to be a complete media server offering a bunch of features not provided by the TiVo Desktop media server provided by TiVo themselves. Among those features is an RSS reader, Weather forecasts, local movie listings, and my favorite… easy access to streaming mp3 radio stations. Excited about the prospects of all of this I quickly downloaded the third beta release and went to work trying to get it to work. It’s java so in theory it should work fine on my Mac but after spending a couple of hours fiddling with it I came to the conclusion that it does not yet work properly in Mac OS X. That was a bummer, but then I checked out JavaHMO, the project that spawned Galleon. JavaHMO is a similar sort of thing but it works within the much more limited Home Media Option framework rather than the newer and better Home Media Engine. JavaHMO is essentially ‘obsolete’ technology at this point, but it’s much more polished than the early releases of Galleon available now and it works fine on my Mac. I now have JavaHMO set up to stream mp3 radio stations and download RSS feeds from a few favorite websites. The streaming radio is the thing I wanted most and it works well enough for my needs.

Note that the HME applications require that your TiVo have the very latest version of its operating system and yours may not have it yet. If you look in the System Information area it should say version 7.1 with some extra stuff after it. The 7.1 version of the software also enables the new TivoToGo service that lets you download recordings from the TiVo to your computer and watch them later. You can’t yet watch the recordings on a Mac, but you can download them using JavaHMO or from the new web server built-into the TiVO. The web server interface has not been documented by TiVo as far as I know, probably because not everyone has it yet.