Tivo Home Media Engine SDK
on 01.31.05, 07:31am in home theater • comments (4)
[PVRBlog] TiVo’s new developer-friendly package, dubbed Home Media Engine (HME), launches today … here are the main points about today’s rollout:
- Developer Toolkit available at Sourceforge starting today: http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/
- Toolkit includes a sandbox TiVo emulator app you can run on your desktop to test applications against
- Developer backdoor password that enables HME (will require that you have the new TiVo 7.1 OS)
- You can now code simple games, audio applications, video applications, and utilities in Java that will run on your computer and communicate with any TiVo with the backdoor enabled on your network (you can share your code with others if they want to run the apps too)
- Developer contest announced, to award the best apps developed in the next few months
- Included sample apps include a simple game, a RSS reader, and a weather app
There still doesn’t appear (yet) to be a way to drop video on to the Tivo, which is what I was looking for when I saw the inital annoucement of the HME. Personally, the more I look into it, the more I believe that the Media Center SDK offers a much more compelling set of API’s if you want to develop software that runs on a home theater.
Jeff Atwood (January 31, 2005 @ 4:55 pm)
> the more I believe that the Media Center SDK offers a much more compelling set of API’s if you want to develop software that runs on a home theater.
Uh, no. The Media Center APIs are an unholy marriage of embedded COM controls and old-school HTML. Ultra cheesy. It works, but after you’re finished you feel like you’ve walked through a sewer. I have given up completely on developing for MCE because I intensely dislike working within the browser– it’s a terrible platform for real (read: beyond gmail) app development.
Now, if they exposed APIs that actually used DirectX rendered UI elements, I could get behind that. More likely, we’ll just be waiting for Avalon like everyone else.
Steve (February 1, 2005 @ 7:19 am)
Sorry, Jeff, I have to disagree with you - most of the MCE API’s are easily accessable via managed code and C# which makes coding them a breeze.
Frankly, I wont even install the HME on my dev box since I wont install Java on it.
Jeff Atwood (February 1, 2005 @ 7:29 pm)
> most of the MCE API’s are easily accessable via managed code
And using these (crappy) APIs, you’re still running HTML apps within the IE sandbox. Which is slow, ugly and unresponsive. It’s also nothing like the actual DirectX rendered MCE interface.
I’m not saying Java is any better, but MCE’s API is just as cringeworthy.
Steve (February 1, 2005 @ 8:21 pm)
I think there’s really 2 parts here:
HTML Apps. I’ll agree with you, it needs the ‘bouncy’ feel that the rest of media center has. DirectX all the way.
The OM. I’m actually pretty happy with the OM and the feature set. I think what’s there really provides a good basis for some interesting apps (just look at Newsgator).