TiVo's Late Adopter Penalty

Hello friends, and welcome to today's Grandpa Simpson rant!

So TiVo's next big thing has finally been announced.  The TiVo premiere will be shipping in April and is being touted as the one set top box you need to provide a way to get all kinds of content on your living room TV.  Cool!  I've been a proponent of using a TiVo as a multi-purpose media box for ages.  The current TiVO HD units have a lot of options for content besides cable programming, TiVo has just never done a great job of beating that drum. 

Now the company has started figuring out they should really get into the integration game and push that existing stuff (and some new) front-and-center.  Even better, there will be a real, honest-to-goodness HD interface.

Hooray! I'm sure some of these things will get pushed to the existing HD units since they have that capability, no more ugly stretched SD interface.

Wait... What's that? Oh, so the new platform has a lot more processing horsepower, and they're not going to be refreshing the UI on the HD units?  Sure, it's understandable, the thing uses Flash after all, that's not gonna cut it with the HD's geriatric computing power.  After all, the HD and Series 3 units have been around for years, time for them to go.

Based on the way TiVo has dropped support for the previous platform as soon as the next new and shiny platform comes up, this doesn't bode well for those of us sitting on Series 3 and HD units.  I can understand that, except for one small thing, I just bought a unit in December for Christmas, so I'm not over here like Grandpa refusing to give up my Windows 98 box and dial up modem because it hasn't caught on fire just yet.

Fine, my fault for not waiting, for being a late adopter and all.  My unit will keep working no harm no fail. 

As long as I keep paying TiVo that monthly fee.

Gee, no new features, no update to the UI that was pretty much a stop-gap to begin with, and I get to pay for that privilege?  Awesome!  It's like the mob is running things over there.  We're sorry we can't really give you new features, but you should pay up, we'd sure hate for something to happen to your ability to access your videos over the network or your season passes.

Sure, stuff gets obsoleted all the time, and someone has to get stuck with holding the bag on legacy hardware, but even Microsoft and Apple usually keep supporting a platform at least past the damn warranty expiration.

I'm still a fan of my TiVos, mostly because of the convergence, I can stream my DVD collection, or online content right along side of the stuff I record from old school TV.  So far there's not really much that can compete with it (HTPC maybe, but it's still a bigger pain in the ass, and has a way lower wife acceptance factor.)

More and more I become filled with dread over the prospect of getting a new TiVo.  First there's buying the unit, then the monthly service charge which eventually will be to pay for nothing other than to be able to use the thing.  And that's after the dreaded 7th ring of hell which is getting the cable company to figure out how the hell to make the stupid cable card work.

I'm thinking maybe it's time just to live with a so-so DVR experience paired with a second, internet-enabled set top box to get all the modern content.

Play any Shoutcast stream through TiVo (OS X and iTunes)

I discovered this feature by total accident the other day.  This may be well known, but who knows, I figured it might be worth sharing to anyone that stumbles across this.

Those of us with TiVos and Macs are kind of left out in the cold when it comes to the built-in functionality of the TiVo supplied TiVo Desktop for Macs.  You get only photo and music sharing (and some basic video publishing if you hack it).  If you want anything more advanced you have to spring for commercial software from Roxio (or go with one of the unsupported, but excellent community apps like PyTiVoX).  Anyway, there's one thing the stock software offers that as far as I know the Windows version doesn't: sharing your iTunes library complete with playlists to your TiVo units.

The fact you can share iTunes playlists with the Mac version of the default desktop is nice to begin with.  But, it turns out if you have a ShoutCast (or similar streaming audio) location saved within iTunes, you can select it from your library and the stream will play. I noticed this simply because a streaming station ended up in a smart playlist and just started playing along with my regular MP3 files.

It's pretty simple to setup, here's the details:

The first step is to download and install the TiVo Desktop then configure iTunes Sharing.

Next, add the address for a stream in iTunes, which can be found under the Advanced menu.  As an example, I'm using the audio feed from TWiT, which steams live and recorded audio from the podcasts being recorded by Leo Laporte's TWiT network.

Enter the URL:

When you click OK, a link to the stream will show up in your music library like any other audio file.  To make it easier to find on the TiVo side you can add it to or create a new playlist so it's listed on the top level of your iTunes listing on your DVR.

Once you have the file in iTunes, go over to your DVR and select your shared iTunes library from the Music, Photos and Showcases menu.  From there you can navigate to the location of your newly added stream and just hit play to begin streaming.

Keep in mind this is just simple streaming, as far as I can tell it won't send across any metadata such as current track or play times, but it's a nice little undocumented feature to have.