Galleon

After drooling over the Creative Zen Vision and noticing it had support for TiVoToGo (T2G), I decided it was time to check out the state of affairs of TiVo HME software. I have previously used various versions of JavaHMO and was never really thrilled. The music performance was spotty and pretty plain, and the T2G features never worked at all. I'd also tried iSee iTunes and that was even worse. It added the album art feature that I wanted but it was horribly limited. You couldn't browse your full iTunes library, only the playlists you had created.

Anyway, it appears that JavaHMO has been rechristened Galleon, and while it still has problems, it's a lot better. You can still browse music by folder, it has added support for iTunes playlists, and the T2G features do work. You can even initiate downloads from the TiVo itself. It crashes if you push left while the stupid Winamp style screen is loading, but as long as you're careful, it seems to work ok. And honestly there were ways to crash JavaHMO too so what's the difference. Still no support for iTMS files but I doubt that will ever come. I couldn't get my iPhoto albums to load but I only spent about 20 minutes on this whole thing last night. Hopefully with a little time I can get things working the way I want.

More annoying is the fact that although I can now do T2G downloads, I am stuck with worthless .TiVo files instead of mpegs. TiVo doesn't yet support T2G on OSX. The best workaround I've found so far is here; I do have Virtual PC with Windows XP installed so this solution should be ok for me. But it's annoying, I shouldn't have to boot XP just to do this. I doubt I'll be doing it often in any case, but especially if it's this involved of a process. I suppose that the Zen Vision can handle .TiVo files directly which makes this a bit less frustrating, but it'd be nice to be able to dump TV shows to disc to watch on the plane now, without buying additional hardware. I also need to see if the PSP supports T2G, that would push me a little closer towards one of those.