TiVo HME UI Disaster
Now that my TiVo is finally back online, I’ve been playing around with the home networking features. I’ve used them in the past, but my TiVo has been offline for a few months and I figured I’d check to see if there had been any improvements. Unfortunately it would seem not. Although the pre-release of the new TiVo desktop does apparently support moving non-TiVo video content to the TiVo, if it’s in a supported format, I haven’t been able to get that to actually work. It’s possible that the files I’ve been trying have been unsupported formats; I haven’t spent all that much time messing with it.
What interests me more is the music streaming capability. I keep all of my music on my computer (in iTunes) and sometimes I’d like to listen to it in my bedroom using my TiVo. I could get an Airport Extreme, but why invest the money in that when I already have a device hooked up to my television which should accomplish the same task?
The mp3 streaming feature of TiVo has been around for a few years now, and it works fine from a technical perspective. While emerging formats like AAC are not supported, that’s a limitation I can live with. What I cannot live with is the horrible UI. Generally TiVo wins against all other DVRs on the market not for superior technology or price, but for incredibly good UI. Unfortunately this has never been the case with their computer integration components and I don’t understand why they haven’t remedied this.
I have a substantial amount of music on my desktop computer, and with TiVo I must create new playlists (why it does not support iTunes playlists I don’t know) and import them. This is a minor hassle, but acceptable. What’s unacceptable is the interface for browsing music that’s not in a playlist. It’s just a many-pages-long alphabetical list. Finding something requires tedious scrolling with no random access search at all. There’s also no filtering based on metadata other than the artist name.
TiVo has already has solved the random access search UI with their Search by Title television recording interface. Why do they not apply this to video and music that’s available on home networked computers? It seems obvious to me that this is the right solution, but when will they ever implement it? It’s very frustrating, and I hereby volunteer to beta test that version of TiVo code when it’s released.
Tags: TiVo