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View Full Version : Building a media centre that talks to TiVo


leemoreau
09-18-2008, 09:32 AM
Hey everyone,

I'm just curious. I have my TiVo in the living room downstairs. I'd love to be able to watch the odd show from my bedroom on the 3rd floor that I've recorded. I don't want to buy another TiVo and pay $12.95 a month since it's rare I'll do it and I find that's a big pricy.

What I'm thinking of doing, is just getting a really cheap PC instead. On eBay, small form factor Dell's are like $60 for Pentium 3 1.3Ghz, 20GB hard drive and so on. I have extra drives laying around 80GB and what not so size isn't an issue. I'm thinking of just connecting this to my TV here and using TiVo desktop to download a show and watch it since it's not going to require some heavy processing, since it's all SD anyway.

What I'm curious though, is are there any Media Centre applications (ie MythTV, Windows Media Centre, etc) that actually talk to the TiVo? Meaning, instead of having to go up to the TV use a mouse download a show click it to play and so on. Just wondering if there's any plug ins or anything for any media centres anyone knows of, since I have a IR remote and keyboard already. It would be nice to be able to have some big on screen display I can use from bed that would just show all TiVo shows and play them without having to actually get up and use a mouse to navigate TiVo desktop? Thanks!

dylanemcgregor
09-18-2008, 09:50 AM
I believe with Tivo Desktop Plus you can set up SP and have them automatically transfer to the PC. You should be able to navigate through the menus pretty easy with your wireless keyboard.

leemoreau
09-18-2008, 10:47 AM
I don't think you even need Plus to do that, there's an option Auto-transfer in normal desktop, never clicked though it might pop up saying buy plus. It's not a huge deal just thought it would be nice if there was a plug in or something for one of the media centres that would just connect to the tivo's IP address web server and stream videos from it.

eziemann
09-18-2008, 03:36 PM
I had a Windows Media Center 2005 PC that was able to read the downloaded .tivo files within the Media Center app. It does need the files to be on a PC either locally or on a network share though.