Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 7 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

The 9.4 software release for the TiVo Series3 and HD boxes included the ability to stream YouTube videos in H.264 format and the community quickly started re-engineering the feature. pyTiVo developer wmcbrine was the first one to get a basic stream working in his HME for Python framework.

Now, TiVo Community user moyekj has released a small java HME app called tivostream that allows you to stream MPEG and H.264 content directly to your box without the need for transcoding (which is what pyTivo does via ffmpeg).

You drop the jar file into your high-level video directory and run it. A new ‘videostream’ menu item will appear on your TiVo’s Music, Photos, Products, & More menu through which you can browse your video hierarchy and then select a file to stream. Playback starts almost instantaneously. Since it’s a stream, the file isn’t actually copied to the TiVo so there’s no disk space taken up. Also, if you drop out to Live TV or go back into the TiVo menus, the stream is cancelled. So what if you want to pick up where you left off? moyekj has written the ability to jump x minutes into the stream. Just start the stream again, enter a number (in minutes) and press the skip-to-tick button. Pretty slick. Overall, tivostream is still in very early development, but it works and shows promise of cool things to come. You can read this thread on TCF for more details.

One note: if you’re going to run tivostream alongside Galleon, start tivostream first. Both apps try to grab port 7288 but Galleon is smart enough to try 7289 (or the next available port) if 7288 is in use already.