JavaHMO
Jake over at blahstuff alerted me to the JavaHMO I had heard about a few weeks ago. Check out the screenshots to see what new functions this open source, free piece of software adds to your Series 2 TiVo. I imagine it's a rewrite of the HMO server that exploits features in the developer API and lets set up schedules to download images of weather and movie data from the web.
Jake also said it was a cinch to install and configure. Hopefully TiVo takes notice and rolls similar features in (and doesn't send the JHMO guy a cease and desist :). Looks like it's linux and windows only for now.
They shouldn't have any trouble, they're not doing any hacking. Everything they're doing is just clever use of the protocol TiVo published for developers to use. Most of the things show on the TiVo are just generated images, so you see the images. And the menus are dynamic too - J. River does some of that kind of thing with their HMO support too, for finding songs.
That's some clever work there though.
Posted by: MegaZone | December 15, 2003 at 08:56 PM
It would be cool to have some mp3 playing while watching a slide show (as many others have asked for, Im sure)...does anyone know if JavaHMO can do it?
Posted by: Gaza | December 16, 2003 at 12:03 PM
Gaza: Nope. You might think you could start an mp3 or Shoutcast stream playing and then back up and start a slide show, but it stops playing music as soon as you back up past the music menu, sadly. And that's just TiVo behavior - nothing to do with JavaHMO.
Posted by: Jake | December 16, 2003 at 05:12 PM
FWIW, I got it installed on MacOS X last night. It was MacOS X 10.3.2, Java 1.4.1_01-27, and Java Advanced Imaging DP2. The JavaHMO site claims it requires Java 1.4.2. There is a Developer Preview of Java 1.4.2, but I didn't install, and JavaHMO seemed to work with 1.4.1. I probably should have installed the release version of JAI, but I saw the DP release first. I didn't install the Java Service Wrapper stuff because SourceForge was down last night, but I'll probably do that today. I hacked up the run.cmd script to convert it to a shell script and started the server that way. I only tried Weather, Cinema, and My PC, but they all worked. I had one crash while viewing weather, but all-in-all it seemed pretty stable and very cool.
Posted by: Coty Rosenblath | December 18, 2003 at 10:10 AM
I have it running on Windows XP. One annoying limitation is that you can't view pictures within folders. If that gets fixed, I'm hooked.
Posted by: Patrick Watts | December 18, 2003 at 02:30 PM
The really nice thing about HMO and JAVAHMO is TIVO® has made their HMO service OPEN source, meaning that ANYONE can do anything they want to the HMO server to make it better.
So the creators of HMO are not only safe from TIVO® they are welcomed with open arms.
Posted by: Joe | April 08, 2004 at 07:20 PM