Okay, I don't have a lot of experience performing TiVo hacks, so don't expect step by step instructions here, but kennybain over at the TiVo Community Forum poses an interesting question: do you really need a Slingbox to watch TiVo recordings remotely?The answer is, kind of. Kennybain applied the "Zipper" hack to his TiVo and installed TiVoTool on his PowerBook. This allowed him to download and stream shows from his TiVo. And then he went and opened up some ports on his router allowing him to access his recordings from sites outside of his home network. He was even able to watch live TV, although it wasn't a particularly smooth stream.
There's a few problems:
- It's not secure.
- You can't change channels on live TV.
- It's really not secure.
1. The functionality of this hack is EXTREMELY limited. You can do the same thing with a web browser any and standard TiVo with TiVoToGo - open the ports ans suck the video out with a browser. I've done it from work on my home TiVo - no hacks required.
But it is MPEG-2 video with both of these methods. LARGE files that need a very, very fat pipe to transfer in better than realtime. There is no interactive playback, there is no stream optimization for the available bandwidth and screen size, etc.
In short, it is NOT just this easy to do. It isn't even close to doing that Slingbox, Hava, Location Free, etc, do. To do what those products do requires hardware that is just not in the TiVo today, and would add real cost to the boxes.
I would be surprised if TiVo were working on place shifting. As recently as this past week at CES I had TiVo people express to me that they see place shifting as a very small niche, much smaller than the DVR market, and that they're not interested in pursuing it. They have limited resources and wasting them on place shifting makes no sense when they have a lot of work yet to do in the DVR market. It makes more sense to partner with a market leader like Sling Media than to try to re-invent the wheel.
Posted at 8:07AM on Jan 14th 2007 by MegaZone