surrealization.com

Tivo Home Media Engine For .NET

Friday, March 10 2006

Everyone who's been unhappy that TiVo only released their Home Media Engine APIs for Java can be a bit relieved. Gary at ByteBuilder has released a version for .NET. It doens't contain a UI toolkit, but it gives you a great start to building .NET server applications that enable your TiVO to interact with them. I've been packing for the past two weeks (that's about how long ago he put up the code) so I've only barely gotten to look at the code. It's similar to the Java APIs but takes advantage of some .NET specific classes and to un-Java the API. I'm hoping to be able to start building something...

CableCARD Overview On Ars

Tuesday, February 07 2006

ArsTechnica has a good overview of CableCARD (what it is, what's coming in the future, what's going to obsolete it). Even though there will potentially be a new technology shortly after CableCARD 2.0 (which offers 2-way communication features for capabilities like video-on-demand and pay-per-view), I still can't wait to get my hands on one of the Series 3 TiVos with CableCARD support. I'm curious, since TiVo constantly updates their software, if it will be able to support the software-only CableCARD successor when it comes out. As long as the runtime environment for the software isn't a hardware...