Rhapsody's subscription music service is now available on TiVo's DVRs.
(Credit: TiVo)Add Rhapsody to TiVo's bag of broadband media tricks. Real Networks' music subscription service is available as of today to users of TiVo's standalone Series2 and Series3 DVRs. The integration makes good on an announcement by the two companies back at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Rhapsody joins a host of other broadband offerings on TiVo's DVRs, including Amazon Unbox videos, Live 365 streaming radio, podcast downloads, Yahoo photos/traffic/weather, and customized TiVoCast video downloads. (Note: CNET is a content provider for TiVoCast.)
Existing Rhapsody subscribers should have no trouble getting access to their music collection, which can include anything from customized streaming Internet radio stations to personalized playlists drawn from the millions of tracks available on Rhapsody's service. The service costs $13 a month--above and beyond TiVo's monthly fee--but it can also be accessed on other devices, such as any networked PC, the Sonos Digital Music System, or the Logitech Squeezebox. Upgrade to the Rhapsody To Go plan (an additional $2 per month), and you can transfer songs--from a PC, not the TiVo--to compatible portable players such as the SanDisk Sansa e200R series for listening outside the home.
While the availability of Rhapsody is another nice arrow in TiVo's media quiver, in and of itself, it's probably not the sort of make-or-break feature that's going to boost sales of the DVR. On the other hand, existing and prospective Series3 and TiVo HD owners will be happy to know that TiVo has confirmed that the Multi-Room Viewing (transfer recorded shows to other TiVo DVRs in the home) and TiVo To Go (transfer recorded shows to networked PCs and portable media devices) features are scheduled to be added to those high-def models next month. To date, both features have been limited to standard-def Series2 models only.
A final note for TiVo owners: The Rhapsody service is available on the DVR for a 30-day free trial, so you can try before you subscribe. In order to gain access to the Rhapsody function, you'll need the latest 9.1 software update. If you don't already have it, head over to TiVo's Web site to prioritize the upgrade.
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TiVo)
TiVo released an upgrade to TiVo Desktop application yesterday, a PC-based application that allows TiVo Series2 owners to stream music and photos from networked PCs to the TiVo, as well as download TV shows from their TiVo to a PC--a feature called TiVoToGo. The newest update--TiVo Desktop 2.5--offers some significant upgrades: Windows Vista compatibility, DivX and Xvid support for transferring videos on your PC to the TiVo, and automatic conversion of TiVoToGo files for viewing on portable devices, such as an iPod or a PSP.
The feature we were most interested in was the ability to send DivX and Xvid videos from our PC to our Series2 TiVo. To use this feature, you'll need to spend an extra $25 for the TiVo Desktop 2.5 Plus Upgrade, which also enables the ability to automatically convert TiVoToGo files for portables. Once we paid for the update and input our registration key, the process was pretty simple. The TiVo Desktop software simply looks in the My TiVo Recordings folder on your PC for compatible DivX files. Since most users will probably have the files saved somewhere else, TiVo provides an easy workaround--just create a shortcut in the My TiVo Recordings folder that points to the location of your DivX files. In our case, we just created a shortcut to the My Videos folder; our DivX files then showed up as available to transfer.
The transfer process itself is slow, and it seemed to monopolize our PC. After we set it up to transfer a DivX file, the TiVo Desktop application spiked to 90 percent CPU usage, according to Windows Task Manager. This most likely means that the program is transcoding files to a TiVo-friendly file rather than the Series2 box playing the files natively. In our experience, the transfer process wasn't flawless either--a couple small movie trailers transfered fine, but two larger files got stuck and effectively hung. So while we loved the idea of watching DivX and Xvid files on our TiVo, there were enough hiccups that we felt that burning DivX files to a DVD and watching them on a DivX-compatible DVD player is still a whole lot easier--especially since even bargain DVD players have DivX compatibility now.
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TiVo)
Converting files for portable use was easy, although very slow. First, we transferred an episode of The Office from our TiVo to our PC, which took about 30 minutes over our wireless network--equivalent to the length of the show. After that, we had to only right-click on the file and tell it to convert for the PSP, and off it went. Unfortunately, it took about 45 minutes before it was ready to go.
What's nice about the 2.5 update is that you can tell the TiVo to automatically convert transferred files to your preferred format, so you can set up a bunch of recordings to transfer and convert while you're at work, for example. You also have the option of whether you want the original, full-size file to be automatically deleted or to keep it. And you can also set up the software to automatically transfer a series, so, for example, every episode of The Office can be set to transfer to your PC, then converted to portable format, and they will be ready for the next morning's commute without you having to do anything. The video quality on our PSP was pretty good, and we were able to watch in its native wide-screen aspect ratio. There's no denying the whole process is slow, but the automation makes it easier to swallow. Unlike the DivX playback, we could actually see ourselves using this feature.
The TiVo HD lags behind the older Series2 in network functionality
(Credit: CNET)While TiVo Desktop 2.5 offers new functionality for Series2 owners, there are still many holes in TiVo's support for network media functions across the product line. Both TiVoToGo and the ability to transfer video to the TiVo are not available for the newest Series3 and TiVo HD, which makes it harder for TiVo to differentiate itself from the DVRs provided by the cable company, which are usually cheaper. Mac users are also left behind in this update, as TiVo Desktop for Mac is unable to automatically encode video for portable devices or transfer DivX files to the TiVo. So while we're happy to see TiVo continue to support the Series2 TiVo--a more than five-year-old product--we're really hoping to see this functionality on the newest HD-capable TiVos.
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