Adam: I hadn’t heard of hte Neuros OSD before, but it looks interesting and inexpensive, if very different. It’s true that many hackers I know don’t have cable, or only have basic cable and use Netflix or an extensive movie collection for passive entertainment.

MegaZone: Well, that’s a pretty sad story. TiVo has always seemed like a company always on the verge of going out of business, so I can understand their focus on bringing in revenue. But, third party developers are important, especially with competitors coming out with new products all the time.

I notice, for example, that even the awards for interesting 3rd party apps doesn’t exist anymore:

http://www.tivo.com/4.3.hmewinners.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20070525201959/http://www.tivo.com/4.3.hmewinners.asp

Out of band, a number of people pointed out that the API is problematic since applications don’t run locally at all. All graphic elements, animations, content, etc. is downloaded as needed from the Internet. To make matters worse, it isn’t cached, so network lag can cause applications to freeze.

Hopefully API updates resolve this problem — it seems like C# and Python bindings are coming, which helps people who dislike Java create applications.

Unplug the box and remove the cable cards. Plug it back in.
When the box is ready, try out the interface — it should be responsive now.
Put the first card back in and test the speed. It should still be responsive.
Put the second card back in and test the speed. It should still be responsive.
That’s it!

These strange steps seemed to help a lot. But what helped the most was learning that my Harmony remote had set the key delay to 500ms! No wonder everything seemed so sluggish!

/djs

TiVo released the SDK and provided a few updates – then nothing for TWO YEARS. No updates. Developers got tired of the bugs and limitations in the SDK (user audio not working correctly, no video support, no HD support for the new boxes, etc.). Some work was done – developers figured out HD support and hacked it in on their own. Apps.tv, PlayTeeVee.com, and Galleon.tv all had development sustained at some level. And there are a number of other HME apps – here’s some: http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2007/03/31/tivo-hme-applications/

TiVo always had two branches of HME – internal and external. The internal SDK has more features, with hooks deeper into the system. Those weren’t released in the public SDK because of stability and security concerns. But they’ve used the internal HME toolkit to implement a number of TiVo features – KidZone Guides and Guru Guides, Download TV & Movies, and Universal Swivel Search (which you’ll find in the Find Programs menu) are all really HME apps running on TiVo’s servers. In Music, Photos, Products & More – those are all HME, of course. Rhapsody, Live365, Yahoo Weather & Traffic, Picasa, Photobucket, etc, etc – all HME apps using the internal toolkit.

Most notably of all, the internal HME toolkit formed the basis of TiVo’s OCAP software platform which is being deployed by Comcast (and coming to Cox). HME and OCAP are both based on Java.

But with limited resources, what TiVo ended up doing is putting everyone on the *internal* toolkit, and *no one* was assigned to keep updating the external one. I asked about it back at CES 2007 and was told that, at the time, not one person was assigned to it.

Things seem to be looking up a bit. The HME group has grown as TiVo has been using it for more and more, and the OCAP software is shipping now so the big development push is relaxed a bit. In October of 2007 TiVo released the first public HME SDK update since October 2005. It is a beta release, but it adds official HD support and fixes a number of bugs.

I talked with the person in charge of the HME group at CES 2008 last month and he said we’ll probably see more updates this year. They’re working on some major overhauls to HME internally and he hopes to then ‘sanitize’ the internal toolkit to produce a revised public toolkit. Notably many of the features developers have long requested, like video support in HME, are now in the internal toolkit. So there is hope that they’ll find their wait to the public side as well.

I lot of developers walked away from HME because it was stagnant. They felt that they did as best they could within the limitations of HME, and there was little gain in continuing to work on it without support from TiVo in the form of promised updates and bug fixes. (The issues on the TiVo itself, of course, can’t be fixed by the developers. SDK issues can be worked around, but not bugs and missing features in the platform itself.)

Talking to people at TiVo they certainly didn’t deliberately shun the developers. It was a case of limited resources and more ROI from companies who would pay them to develop hosted HME apps.

I’m not a hacker per se but in that kind of demographic. I have an HTPC, but all it does is show downloaded video (mostly Japanese TV…) and play music (via Freevo, I had a showstopper bug with MythTV when I was initially setting the machine up and I’ve never seen a reason to go to the trouble of switching since). It does *have* a TV tuner and I initially went to considerable trouble to make it work as a PVR, but then found that I never used it. The only stuff I watch via broadcast TV I don’t really care about recording. So the PVR functionality’s been broken for ages and I don’t bother fixing it.

Maybe there’s many others in this situation. I suspect the Tivo / hacker demographics overlap superficially – Tivo’s a fun gadget, hackers might buy one to poke – but not fundamentally – hackers don’t watch enough TV to *really care*…

or could just be everyone’s using the alternatives, as you said. The Neuros OSD seems to have a pretty active community.

Hmm… I’m using Firefox 3 on (guess!) Fedora and don’t see anything of the sort. The theme I’m using has little annoying flash applets, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve heard of blogs getting hacked to serve malicious javascript. Maybe that’s happened?