You know how Great Aunt Emily regales you for hours and hours and hours with photos and cute stories of her grandchild, Precious Poopsie Woopsie Darling, over Thanksgiving turkey? Or how about your girlfriend who e-mails album after album of her Charming Kitties to you? Well, with Tivo, you can exact revenge against the photo-mongers of the world by commandeering the television with your very special photos.

File Sharing Options

TiVo offers two options to share pictures with your loved ones. Digital Photo Viewer is available on any Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo networked to a personal computer. You can create and store photo albums and slideshows on a PC and showcase them on television. Gather your peeps around the TV and relax while you show thousands of digital photos to your victims, er, family and friends.

Another more insidious option was in beta testing until the end of May. Home movie sharing, a joint venture with One True Media, provides broadband networked TiVo users with their very own private channel to share home movies and photos. Services are free

for the duration of the trial period with the idea that One True Media’s regular monthly fee of $3.99 a month (or $39.99 annually) will be the only charge incurred by TiVo users. Of course, subscribers to your own personal channel will not be charged for viewing.

Getting Started

The set up seems to be fairly simple. Visit onetruemedia.com and upload short videos and photos to create the montage complete with soundtrack. One True Media supports the following file types: MPEG (.mpeg, .mpg, .mp4), QuickTime (.mov), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), Windows Media View (.wmv), 3G Mobile Phone Video (.3gp), and JPEG (.jpg or .jpeg). Users seem to be fairly pleased with editing and special effects capabilities.

Keep in mind that a user can only create montages. However, several movies can be added in one montage basically creating a home movie. Mac users should be pleased to note One True Media will work with their platform. The terms of use page from One True Media notes a montage should not last longer than fifteen minutes. Anything exceeding that time may be counted as more than one share or the share can be stopped entirely

Once the montage is complete, you’ll be assigned a personal TiVo channel code to share with other TiVo subscribers. You can email friends, family, and victims with a detailed message on how to access your channel.

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