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A little over two years ago, TiVo quietly enabled the ability to stream unprotected AAC to TiVos for use via the Home Media Option. I say quietly, because this feature required you to install lame and didn’t appear to be documented anywhere. At the time, I viewed this as a promising sign that TiVo was starting to make good on it’s then 2-year-old statement that they were looking to add AAC support to the HMO. However, it’s been another 2+ years since that time and not much has changed.

What has changed is that Apple unveiled iTunes+, complete with unprotected AAC files. In theory, these files should “just work” with TiVo’s existing AAC support. Of course, as is true of many things, the transition from theory to reality did not go as planned. As reported by The Apple Blog, iTunes+ still are not playable through HMO.

We come here not to bury TiVo, but to fix it.

(more…)

Engadget:

As expected, Netflix and TiVo are teaming up on a video-on-demand service…

Excellent. Netflix has already signed up Warner Brothers for the trial period. It looks like this thing is really coming together.

Matt Haughey:

Tomorrow’s Newsweek carries a story about a new Netflix/TiVo partnership that sounds perfect for anyone that has a subscription to both TiVo and Netflix.

OK, this is cool. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting Netflix once I move into my new apartment next week. If this is done right, it could pretty much seal the deal for me.

I realize you’d probably lose a few things by downloading the movies to you TiVo instead of popping in a DVD. It wouldn’t surprise me if all the DVD extras were missing. I think the audio options would be limited, since the TiVo only has stereo-out ports.

On the plus side, you wouldn’t have to worry about damaging or losing the DVD. Hopefully, I’d could also decide that I wanted to watch a flick when I get home from work and queue up the download so I could watch it when I get home (deities of bandwidth willing).

Like I said, this really needs to be done right if it’s going to work. Since TiVo currently offers web-based scheduling, I’d expect that you’d at least be able to queue up movies over the web. It would be really cool, though, if the process were completely integrated with Netflix — the TiVo web interface is certainly usable, but I’d rather use something like Netflix Freak.

It’s been this way for about two weeks now, but TiVo has made the Home Media Option a part of the standard feature set for Series2 DVRs.

I reviewed the Home Media Option for ATPM slightly over a year ago (damn, where’s the time gone?!?) and not much has changed since then. The slide shows are still pretty basic. The promised AAC support hasn’t arrived. The integration with iTunes and iPhoto is still decent, though it would be cooler if you could sync your TiVo Desktop preferences with the sharing preferences built-in to the iLife applications.

Downside: I’ve gotten nothing new for the $100 I spent last year.

Upside: 1. If I can slip a wireless networking adapter on the back of my parent’s TiVo, I can probably impress the heck out of them. 2. If I buy another TiVo, it’s $50 I don’t have to spend.

Seems like I worthwhile tradeoff to me.

MacMinute:

TiVo is working on a new version of the Mac OS X software for its Home Media Option that will let users stream AAC music files to their TiVo Digital Video Recorder (DVR), in addition to the already supported MP3 format. “We are working with Apple on a solution to support the AAC file format while also honoring the rights of copyright holders,” a TiVo spokesperson told MacMinute.

This is great news for us Mac/TiVo users. As soon as iTunes 4.0 was released, the lack of AAC support, both protected and unprotected, quickly became the largest shortcoming of the Home Media Option. Representatives from TiVo claimed that since iTunes 4.0 was released after the HMO, TiVo was not required to support the format. However, I’ve been expecting an announcement like this since Apple started selling TiVos in Apple Stores last week.

Furthermore, it looks like TiVo and Apple are working on a method that will enable the HMO to work with both unprotected AAC files and the protected files purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Whether the solution will be involve using a TiVo as one of your three authorized “computers” or if you stream to unlimited TiVos (like you can copy to unlimited iPods) remains to be seen.

Excellent. O’Reilly announced that TiVo Hacks is the latest title in the Hacks Series. TiVo Hacks is being written by Raffi Krikorian.

Kirk McElhearn’s review of Google Hacks makes it sound like the book covers some fairly advanced topics, so I have high hopes for TiVo Hacks. [via raelity bytes]

Moved to the new TiVo category.