In an effort to compete with the media features of Windows Vista and the many Linux based media applications, TiVo has put their TiVo Desktop application right in the face of TiVo users. A software update last month forced me to check it out. I saw the features it promised. It said I would be able to transfer video from my TiVo to my PC and vice versa. This sounded great! There’s only one problem, it doesn’t work. Here is a list of my experiences with this new TiVo “feature”.

• I tried downloading an episode of Harvey Birdman from the TiVo to my PC. It downloaded but wouldn’t play at all in any of my players. I tried another video and got the same problem.
• I placed a video in the My TiVo Recordings folder to make it where I could view a video on the TiVo. It didn’t work, so I tried several videos in many different formats. None of them showed up on my TiVo.
• My PC hardly ever shows up as an option in the Now Playing list. It seems to pick and choose when it wants to be available at random.
• I tried playing some of the little games the feature enabled on my TiVo, every one of them locked up about 2 minutes into the game.
• I tried playing music from standard MP3 files on the TiVo, it wasn’t able to find any of my music though.

I’ve tried to solve the issues by troubleshooting the normal things, but I give up. I think the only thing that worked so far is that it can find my photos in my My Photos folder. If I can’t get any of the main features to work without trying to fix them first, it’s just not worth playing with. TiVo, you may have lost me as a customer. Why am I paying you for services I can obtain for free anyway?

Tags: tivo, multimedia, tv