Streaming Music to the TiVo
I recently purchased a HD TiVo Series 3, and have been experimenting a bit with the home media option stuff, and third party applications on the appliance. I’ll be writing about several of these apps/plugins over the coming weeks, hopefully culminating with a complete write-up of the must-have applications for the TiVo.
One of the things that I wanted to be able to do with my TiVo that I couldn’t do with my HD DirecTivo is stream music and photos from my computer to my home theater. The TiVo comes with this capability out-of-the box, once you install TiVo Desktop for Mac or Windows. The problem is that it kinda sucks. It is designed around the same interface that TiVo uses for TV shows–a UI model that either doesn’t apply to music or just doesn’t really scale to 15,000 songs and hundreds of artists and albums. It works as advertised, but isn’t nearly as easy as using iTunes or an iPod.
So there is another option: a third party application called Audio Faucet. The application was the Grand Prize Winner of TiVo’s Developer Challenge, and for good reason. The application is simple, effective and attractive. Audio Faucet works much like TiVo Desktop: an application runs on your desktop machine, which publishes an application to your TiVo’s “Music, Photos & More” section.
Audio Faucet features some additional improvements over TiVo’s own application:
- Rate music directly on your TiVo
- Access an MP3 directory or an iTunes Library
- Better “Now Playing” and screensaver interfaces
- Audio can play on your home theater or on your computer’s speakers
All of this comes at a price: Audio Faucet is a Java application that ends up being a CPU and memory hog. On my G4 (my machine that has iTunes library on it), it dominated the machine, making it pretty much unusable for any other application. CPU utilization was averaging between 50 and 80%–pretty much unacceptable. It actually takes less CPU to play an MP3 in iTunes then it does for Audio Faucet to stream the MP3 to the TiVo to play. Bizarre.
Audio Faucet Streaming an MP3
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 13233 JavaApplic 75.7% 0:44.14 19 578 314 51M+ 7120K 62M+ 576M
Streaming from TiVo Desktop
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 92 TiVoDeskto 5.8% 82:02.42 19 407 294 50M- 368K 53M- 357M
iTunes Playing the same MP3
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 13260 iTunes 26.5% 0:21.03 9 278 756 42M- 7832K 53M- 212M-
It is a trial “pre-release”, so take with a grain of salt. It seems though that development of the project has stalled, as the last version was released March 26, 2006. Its a shame because it could be a really great app.
