I have now installed Tivo To Go in my Laboratory... (otherwise known as my living room).

And it's been an eye opening experience - both technically and otherwise.

I've been running my Tivo desktop off of my G5, which is where I have all the family pictures and music. But the new app (2.0) is PC only at this time. So I needed to rethink home network architecture. Argh. First, i downloaded a great new app Network Magic which may have been unnecessary - but turned out to be very cool.

Basically - it is a PC app that maps your home network in a graphical way. Also no Mac app (argh), but it does map your Mac's if you run it on a PC.

Then I powered up the new Tivo To Go app. After some troubleshooting with the firewall, ta da.

First piece of WOW is just seeing every file on your Tivo listed on a computer menu. Can't explain why it's cool - just is. Seeing that those files are free to move around - or the promise of that - is exciting.

Now, to the tricky part. Watching something. First you have to TRANSFER the file from the Tivo to your desktop (my Dell). This takes forever. But the files are big, and I'm still on a 802.11b network - so you just transfer and wait till tomorrow.

Then the fun begins. Because now you're out of plug and play Tivo land and into Microsoft Windows Media 10 land. First - the player says that I don't have the right Codec. No clues what I can do to fix it - but Tivo sends me to a bunch of $20+ codec products. Not sure who I'm doing business with here, Microsoft, Tivo, or 3rd party guys who I didn't even know I needed. But MPEG 2 needs a new Codec.

A quick visit to the Tivo user-content discussion boards clues me in -there's a free package that works fine. 19 download, install, configure steps later...

I'm watching Seinfeld on my PC. But it's 480 x 480 and the sound is out of sync.

So it's been 4 hrs. I've got bad aspect ratio and bad sync - and the solution seems to be to keep trying to remove and re-install the codec's until one works.

Hardly for the faint of heart.

Lesson - if we think IPTV or any such thing is just around the corner, we've got some engineering to get through. No average consumer is going to be able to spell Codec.

And then there's the question of what I can do with the media after it looks and sounds right. Because it's still in a Tivo security wrapper. So - for example - if I want to store a news story that my son was featured in, but it's recorded in a 2 hr block of CNN - I've got no way to edit it without dumping it to tape and then bringing it back in.... or using some sort of Dr. Divix software an other $30 - which I don't want to do.

Bottom line. Coolness Factor - +10.
Ease of install - +7
Ease of use (codec install) -3

Now, if only I could de-install the Ligos Codec, I'd be all set.