When you have a wireless network and broadband Internet connection at home, having to plug your TiVo into a phone jack so it can periodically download program schedules and software updates at a slow crawl seems unnecessarily clunky. Especially given that the nearest phone jack is, inevitably, going to be way on the other side of the room. Which means having to string a 20-foot phone cord across your living room floor — unwanted décor, and a constant tripping hazard. (The alternative is to leave the cord coiled up by the TiVo most of the time, and only connect it once every few days to a week or so, but that leaves your program info prone to getting out of date when you go out of town or forget to reconnect the cable for a while.)

Deciding it was finally time to remedy this ridiculously inelegant setup, I ordered a USB Wi-Fi adapter from Amazon last November. TiVo's website listed a number of TiVo-compatible and officially supported 802.11b wireless network adapters, but I figured why not just go 802.11g while I'm at it. Although our home network was (and is still) 802.11b, an eventual upgrade to “g” seemed inevitable. The faster “g” devices can fall back to the “b” protocol for compatibility, so although there'd be no immediate performance benefit to be had in going the “g” route for this one device, it seemed a reasonable attempt at minor future-proofing, especially given the rather bandwidth-hungry amounts of compressed video data that I hoped to eventually be able to pull over the network via “TiVoToGo”. Besides: at that point “b” adapters had actually started to become harder to find and more expensive compared to the faster “g” models that were rapidly replacing them on the store shelves. All of which made going the “g” route seem like the slightly more clever thing to do.

This was not such a wise move, it turned out. The network adapter drivers in TiVo's embedded Linux, I learned the hard way, only supported “b” network adapters at that time. The presumably future-proof D-Link DWL-G122 that I had just bought turned out to be present-proof in this case. There was talk of TiVo adding support for “g” adapters in a future system update, but the company offered no definite release schedule for the upgrade, and TiVo's engineers made it clear in public support forums that the transition would require a non-trivial amount of work on their end. The difficulty of getting individual network adapter manufacturers to open their driver sources to you in the first place, if you're a relatively niche platform developer like TiVo, apparently contributes to the problem.

After I finished reading what I should have read on TiVo's user support message boards before making my oh-so-clever purchase, I set about grudgingly returning the adapter I had bought so I could purchase an officially supported 802.11b equivalent instead.

I meant to return it, really I did.

I have a PDF receipt right here from initiating the return transaction with Amazon...

There was just the little detail of getting around to packaging the thing up and dropping it off at a UPS shipping location on my way in to work, during a time when getting to work (and getting as much work done as possible at work) was an especially more urgent priority than whatever miscellaneous postponable errands needed doing.

So the adapter sat in its box in my office. Until last week, when I Googled the issue again for the first time in a while, and learned that, with the recent 7.1 system software release, TiVo had added support for a couple of 802.11g network adapters. The DWL-G122 I had bought wasn't exactly named in the adapter compatibility list, but the “DWL-G120 version B2” that was listed sounded awfully close. Taking my adapter back home, I plugged it in, did a little configuring, and, lo and behold, it works! Which means I can now happily say goodbye to this:

In its place is a small USB dongle that could hang invisibly off the back of the TiVo unit, if not for the fact that the USB ports on our Series2 DVR are a bit too close to the RCA audio/video jacks to allow room for the side of it to clear — so instead, it sits beside our TiVo, still fairly unobtrusively, in the small cradle/dock that came with it:

In addition to helping insure that your program info gets updated frequently, networking your TiVo provides a variety of potential benefits, including the ability to program your TiVo online, using a Web interface that not only facilitates scheduling programs to record from afar (you're on vacation or at work, and you'll just die if TiVo doesn't record tonight's “Apprentice”), but also offers a more time-efficient way of searching for shows and doing everyday scheduling. (The search interface seems to be missing a lot of the features I'd like it to have, such as the ability to browse/search by category rather than by channel, as I can do on my TiVo — but, on the other hand, typing on a keyboard is one heck of a lot faster than hunting-and-pecking on screen using a 4-directional remote control, when you're searching for something specific...) Web-scheduled recording requests get refreshed to your networked TiVo unit once per hour, and there's even an option to have TiVo send you an e-mail to confirm whether the unit received your request and was able to schedule it without encountering any schedule conflicts.

With the “Home Media Option” (which is now a free offering), networking your TiVo also adds the ability to stream your digital pictures and music to your TV. The latter isn't of much interest to me yet, given that at present I have far better speakers attached to my computer (where the music is in the first place) than to my TV ... but I imagine the former might be nice to have for casually sofa-surfing vacation pictures when guests come over. The one small caveat at the moment with respect to this feature is that the 1.9.1 Mac version of the TiVo Desktop software has problems installing and running on Tiger. For the hacking-inclined, Dennis Wilkinson has documented what some of the problems are and has devised some suggested workarounds in this helpful post. (Among other things, TiVo Desktop was apparently relying on its preference .plist files to be stored as textual XML, and was therefore bit by the transition to using binary .plists to store user preferences in Tiger.) I haven't yet gotten around to trying an install using Dennis' suggested workarounds yet, but hope to give it a whirl soon.

Another possibility networking opens up is that of streaming recorded shows between two or more TiVo units. (Not yet a benefit here at our stately single-TiVo manor, but who knows, maybe someday that will be of interest.) For many, though, I think the big item of interest is the possibility of pulling video off to a computer, for watching or archiving there. “TiVoToGo” provides this capability for Windows PCs, and I've been hopefully awaiting the eventual release of a Mac OS X counterpart — though, unfortunately, I've seen at least one report asserting that this may not be in the cards anytime soon. (Oh well. Maybe it's for the best. Do I really need another way to watch re-runs and accumulate (and spend time herding/hoarding) another kind of stuff?)

Sadly for Windows TiVoToGo users who go to the trouble of getting an 802.11g adapter, the word on the street is that there's no transfer speed benefit to be had over 802.11b, as noted here and here.