Announced at the TiVo Community forum was a neat piece of Windows software called TiVo.net that allows you to use your TiVo as a media extender so you can play a variety of video formats from your PC.A list of video formats and codecs that TiVo.net supports can be found here. The software works by converting the video on the fly to MPEG2 TiVo compatable video that can then whizz across your home network to your TV screen, via your TiVo.
TiVo.net is an open source project so others can get involved. It's early days for the software and if you experience any bugs it would be worth pointing them out to the developer.
[Via TiVo Lovers]
1. There are a couple of hardware network media players that work the same way, by having the "server" PC convert everything to a format they can handle. This brings up a couple of problems:
- You need a fast PC doing nothing but converting and streaming. It takes so much horsepower that unless you have a gamer PC, you can pretty much count on not being able to use the PC for anything else while it's working on the video.
- FF and Rew either work poorly or not at all with this approach.
- Because the source is being converted, there will be some quality degradation. If you use this to play Divx files of movies, it'll be at least the second conversion it'll be going through. Not good.
I'm not against Tivo.net, anything that enhances the Tivo is a good thing. But if you want a much better solution search for "Xbox Media Center" (XBMC).
Posted at 5:56PM on Jan 24th 2007 by Pat Gomes