It’s a big week for Sling Media, which will be at both Macworld Expo in San Francisco and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, showing off their latest video placeshifting hardware and software. The big news from Sling at the Macworld Expo is that they’re demonstrating an upcoming version of SlingPlayer Mobile for Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod touch handhelds, and a new web-based SlingPlayer for Macs that will enable HD streaming to the desktop or laptop.

We’ve been looking forward to SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone since Sling showed an early prototype to Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) attendees last year. SlingPlayer Mobile promises to put our home television experience in the palm of our hands, with full support for changing channels on your home set-top box, viewing and pausing recorded content on a TiVo or other DVR, and select new programs to record. The company says they’ll submit a finished version to Apple for release in the online App Store later this quarter, and pricing is yet to be determined.

For Mac users, Sling will be showing off the new SlingPlayer for Mac HD, a web-based version of SlingPlayer that will be available on sling.com. The player will support Safari and Firefox web browsers on the Mac OS X platform when it’s released later this quarter as part of sling.com, and will support streaming HD content to a Mac desktop or laptop computer from Slingbox PRO-HD hardware.

These Apple-centric announcements follow the recent release of a new SlingPlayer Mobile for Windows Mobile Professional and Standard devices, with support for fifteen new handsets and four new screen resolutions. The software is $29.95 for U.S. users, and is available as a free 30-day trial for those who wish to try before they buy. Last week, Sliing also posted a public beta version of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry handhelds, officially supporting several BlackBerry Bold, Curve, and Pearl models with 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. The company says users may also find BlackBerry smartphones with slower connectivity such as AT&T’s EDGE Network will stream video successfully, but Sling will only officially support 3G and Wi-Fi connections.

We’re expecting more news from Sling Media at CES later this week, and we’ll keep you posted.

Roxio Monday launched Toast 10 Titanium for Mac OS. This new update to Toast adds a number of features, but most significantly for Mac OS users it includes an implementation of ‘TiVoToComeBack’, video transfers to a TiVo, which they’re calling Mac2TiVo. This has been sorely missing from any official solutions for Mac OS using TiVo owners.

Toast 10 Titanium also includes AVCHD Archive, which makes it easy to burn content form HD camcorders to BD or DVD, Web Video To Go, which allows users to grab video from websites to save locally or transfer to portable devices, place-shifting support which streams content from the Mac to a Streamer application on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and a number of others.

Toast 10 Titanium goes on sale today at http://www.roxio.com/ for $99.99, with special pricing at MacWorld Expo January 5-9. The High-definition/Blu-ray Disc (HD/BD) plug-in, which is required to author BD discs and is normally $19.99, is available free to those who purchase Toast 10 Titanium from http://www.roxio.com/ through February 5, 2009. Toast 10 Titanium Pro is also available for $149.99.

Press release:
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DivX has come full circle, what started out as a reverse engineered version of Microsoft’s non-compliant implementation of MPEG-4 Version 3 over ten years ago with DivX 3.11 is now a full-featured product based on H.264 (aka MPEG-3 AVC) with the release of DivX 7. It sounds like DivX 7 is a full featured H.264 application, including support for advanced file formats such as Matroska (.mkv) which has been growing increasingly popular for online video distribution as it allows for packaging of multiple video, audio, subtitle, etc, streams in one file.

Along with the new player and new feature support comes a new DivX certification, the DivX Plus Certification. Hardware vendors who certify their products at this new level will support the new DivX 7 formats, while older DivX Certified products will likely only go as far as the DivX 6 equivalent.

The press release:
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I reported on the release of SuperSync 2.3 back in April, but now version 3.03 is being announced in conjunction with MacWorld. SuperSync is an iTunes library manager for PC, Mac, and iPod.

SuperSync makes it easy to create a main library, and have a subset on computers and laptops around the house. By offering an easy way to visually compare and merge multiple iTunes libraries, all music, movies, and playlists can be synced across all devices. Any new content that is added on one computer can be uploaded to the master library.

Use SuperSync to:
* Keep track of all music across multiple computers - Mac OS X, Windows, and iPod
* Compare and merge any two music libraries
* Move music, videos, and playlists from one iTunes library to another
* Export all or a subset of a library as a well-organized directory of tracks
* Find partial albums, duplicates, missing tracks, corrupt files, and other common music library problems
* Intelligently import media from a hard drive, iPod, or network drive without duplicates
* Easily move a music library from Windows to Mac, Mac to Windows, or any combination
* Access a home music library from anywhere - upload/download songs, movies, and playlists
* Share a common library with multiple iTunes users on a network drive
* Access your MP3’s and playlists from Tivo

More information in the full release.

I’m really getting tired of this. I’ve mentioned this before, but I just have to mention it again since I was just burned, again - TiVo Desktop is terribly buggy. Some of the bugs are annoying, but some of the bugs are serious - for example, up and losing all of the TiVo Web Video subscriptions. This has happened to me several times now, on two different computers. I won’t touch TiVo Desktop for weeks, just letting it do its thing, but then I’ll realize I haven’t seen anything from my TiVo Web Video subscriptions for a while - and when I check, the configuration file is wiped.

TiVo Desktop stores the TiVo Web Video subscriptions in files under C:\Documents and Settings\[account name]\Local Settings\Application Data\TiVo Desktop, at least on WinXP. The files concerned are RssFeeds.xml and wspc.xml - with DownloadQueue.xml of lesser concern. What seems to happen to me is every so often TiVo Desktop up and wipes out wspc.xml, which is the main file. I’ll find the file back to its default 1KB state without any subscriptions. Having done my share of development and support I suspect what happens is that when the server is updating the file something goes awry and instead of the updated copy being written it is wiped out. Then the default file is recreated when the server sees it is missing.

This is infuriating and frustrating. And it is a rookie bug. There are ways around this - a simple one is A/B files. Write a ‘B’ file then, only when you confirm the file is correct, remove the ‘A’ file. Then reverse that the next time. Or keep the file in memory until you do a checksum and confirm the file was written to disk successfully, and if not, try again until it is. And considering the subscriptions can only be managed from the cloud, and my TiVo still thinks I’m subscribed to these channels, in the worst case the subscriptions should be reloaded from TiVo’s servers.

I’m a geek, and when it stops working I know where to go looking for answers. But if this happens to an average user I’d expect them to be baffled - their TiVo would still show them subscribed but they wouldn’t be getting any new content. And the resolution isn’t clear - you basically have to delete and re-add the subscriptions so the server recreates them. Or, if you’re a geek and kept a backup copy, recreate the file manually. Of course this means it goes and re-downloads lots of old content.

And that’s not the only serious bug, it also fails to clean up after itself. After downloading content and transferring it to the TiVo, it is supposed to delete the downloaded file - and it does, most of the time. But it misses some and over time they build up. I’ve found multi-gigabytes of orphaned download files left using up space on my drive. If you subscribe to HD versions of content the ‘leaking’ burns space faster. Before Revision3 was added to TiVoCast I used to subscribe to many of their shows via TiVo Web Video, and they were HD versions. Just a few of those left behind can add up to a GB. You can check to see if TiVo Desktop is leaving files behind in C:\Documents and Settings\[account name]\Local Settings\Application Data\TiVo Desktop\Downloads I just removed 746MB of orphaned files from the past couple of months, and that’s after I’d dropped all the Rev3 HD shows.

Bugs happen, I know that, but these have gone unpatched for a while now.

These are hardly the only issues, just the two that really get under my skin. But there are other changes that really need to be made. And why is it that the TiVo Web Video interface on the TiVo itself seems to be stuck in the past, rarely reflecting the current episodes on the feeds? That makes the ‘Download Past Episodes’ feature useless. These are RSS feeds, would it really be so hard to make the server pull in the updated list automatically? And now that HD TiVo models can decode H.264 and VC-1 it would be nice if we could skip the transcoding entirely for compatible downloads.

I love the concept of TiVo Web Video, but it feels more and more like abandonware. All the attention goes to TiVoCast where TiVo can make business deals, and TiVo Web Video just rots on the vine. I know there are third party solutions to replace TiVo Desktop, but the point is this is what most TiVo owners will be aware of and use. TiVo needs to fix this issues if they’re serious about this as a product feature.

I’ve been remiss in keeping up with Requiem news since my last post, back in October. At the time I reported on the release of Requiem 1.8.1 which enabled FairPlay DRM removal on the Mac for iTunes 8.0.1, but didn’t work on Windows. In the meantime iTunes 8.0.2 has been released, which breaks Requiem - so don’t upgrade to that if you want to use Requiem.

But Requiem 1.8.2 was also released, which enables DRM removal in iTunes 8.0.1 under Windows. The discussion thread in the Hymn project forums has the details. If you need iTunes 8.0.1 you can get it for Windows or Mac from OldApps.com.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, I do not support or condone piracy. I stress that Requiem strips the DRM but does not strip personally identifiable information. If you share the freed files they can be linked to your iTunes account. I support the use of Requiem solely for personal fair use, being able to use the music on non-Apple devices - like streaming to a TiVo or loading them on your non-iPhone smartphone.

I’d link to Requiem, but Apple sends out cease and desist notices to sites that do, so I’ll just say use Google, it is available via BitTorrent.

Sorry I’m a little late in posting this one, I missed it when it came in. Buy Nero 9 for $79.99 and get Nero BackItUp 4 and Nero Move it free! That’s a $110 savings off MSRP. Offer good through December 28, 2008.

Buy.com currently has Roxio Toast Titanium for only $46.99, that’s more than 50% off the $99.95 MSRP. Roxio Toast Titanium is the only media burning application for Mac OS officially sanctioned for use with TiVo.

Nigel Tufnel should be happy with TiVo’s latest software update for Series3 and TiVo HD models, as it is version 11. Zatz Not Funny mentioned that version 11 is hitting Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL units. Poking around the net it looks like this started trickling out back on November 20th. TiVo usually trickles out a release as the last test before launching the full download for everyone, and it looks like the floodgates opened within the past day or so. A number of people are now reporting receiving it, and my Series3 downloaded it today and I just restarted to install it.

The version number is 11.0-01-2-648 on my S3. This update includes the changes seen in the 9.3.2 update that hit Series2 systems recently. Aside from those changes I don’t see any other differences. I looked through all the menus but nothing seemed different to me. I’m sure there are under-the-covers changes to warrant a major revision number jump. I’m guessing WMV/VC-1 decoding is in there for Netflix streaming support. And maybe some other surprises.

Buy.com has Nero LiquidTV | TiVo PC for $125.99, $74 off the $199.99 MSRP. LiquidTV | TiVo PC turns your PC into a TiVo DVR. This is the full retail package with the software, TiVo peanut remote and USB IR hardware, and one year of service.