Tivo Series 2 Functionality - I have it working!

Hi all,

I've been a proud Tivo owner for the whole of 8 days now and wanted to share with you some of my findings and research over these last few days.

First off, there has been a lot of discussion on whether its worth investing in getting some of the Series 2 functionality into an existing Series 1 Tivo. Well having just spent a weekend playing around with it. I can tell you -absolutely!

To cut a long story short, I have got my Tivo able to stream all its video files onto my xbox and have it being played thru the homebrew xbox media center frontend called XBMC.

The nice thing about XBMC is that it allows you to stream music, video clips, and pictures from another machine (in this case my apple powerbook) and display them on screen. As XBMC also supports 480p, 720p and 1080i it will upsample any video signal to those formats. If your TV supports it of course :)

Further XBMC has a built in weather function and the ability to easily add on other applications. At the moment I have a pop3 mail client that will let me download email and view any picture attachments. Overall a very nice package.

I am grateful for the assistance of Ed @ wardos.net for supplying me with a working version of ccxstream. Without him this project would never have got off the ground.

For those curious about this "solution" is. I have uploaded 18 screenshots for you to view. This gives you a good idea of what the XMBC can do. Please note these pictures are 4:3 images squeezed from a 16:9 source so will looked "squished". If there is enough interest I'll write up a FAQ file for this group. But honestly its not that hard. If a dummy like me can work it out, most of this group can as well.

Pics here:

http://homepage.mac.com/hlouey/PhotoAlbum51.html

Henry