Last week a friend of mine told me about the Java HMO (Home Media Option) server. I had no idea it existed and immediately got it set up. This provides your TiVo with a place to get MP3s, streaming audio, and images over your local network through whatever other computer you have around to do the work for it. The regular Windows TiVo HM “Desktop” software isn’t nearly as cool. With the Java HMO, you can get movie listings, web cams, etc. It’s terrific.
Anyway, this was supposed to be about code, but it’s more about a growing itch to patch. It seems that the “Internet Images” module is either very fragile and/or doesn’t like having spaces (or maybe commas?) in the image titles (which it uses for caching in /tmp/javaHMO.cache/)
The overall system is a great design, and I’m currently enjoying watching some great webcams in places that are in daylight while I’m in the dark:
Antarctic Gentoo Penguins
Hanmer Springs, New Zealand
Tembe Elephant Watering Hole, South Africa
I can see elephant butts! :)
TiVo published their networking specs, but only included the broadcast and “desktop” specs. I think it would be cool to have the TiVo share movies with my computer too. Would be great for movie trailers and DVDs. My DVD player is in the other room, so I can’t watch movies in the TiVo room (at least until NetFlix and TiVo get their movie-delivery system finished). It still might be tricky to resample the DVD on the fly. TiVo normally records stuff at half-resolution, so dealing with a full DVD MPEG2 stream would be exciting to say the least. I’ll just have to see what’s on the wire between two TiVos configured to record shows from eachother.
(Edit: Holy crap! My wish is granted in the TiVo->PC direction, at least!)
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.