February 8, 2006

Tutorial: Stream Music Through your TiVo

Got a Series 2 TiVo and a little spare time? How about setting up a Shoutcast server to stream music to your TiVo? Engadget has a nice tutorial that'll walk you through the process:

TiVo's rumored HD model seems almost as good as vaporware these days, so it's a good thing your existing Series 2 still has a few tricks left up it's sleeve. For example, your PC can broadcast audio from the Sirius web site and then stream it to your TiVo. The beauty of this hack is that you can actually transmit any audio playing on or through your PC, such as those DRM-encumbered tunes provided by Yahoo!, Napster, or other PlaysForSure services.
You'll need a few pieces of software to pull this off. Winamp will monitor your sound card and pass the audio to SHOUTcast server software. The SHOUTcast server then rebroadcasts the audio from your PC to TiVo. In theory, TiVo's Desktop software can stream MP3 broadcasts to your TiVo. In reality, TiVo's recorder isn't very fault tolerant and your TiVo server software may crash while attempting to pass networked streams. Therefore, you'll use Galleon's proxy to serve audio to the TiVo.

This is a pretty cool hack, but I can think of better ways to stream music through the house. Still, this might be fun for a little weekend project.

More at Engadget.com