Playing music files and viewing photos
When I returned to the den for the acid test, my wife and two of my sons were there, so I seized the remote and took us all on a tour of the Home Media Option.

Sequence of steps, from left to right, needed to play a single music file. Of course, you don't have to drill down to the song level each time. You can select a folder, hit the play button and hear all of the songs, either sequentially or in random play mode.

I pressed the TiVo button on the remote control. A Music and Photos option appeared on the main TiVo Central menu, along with the other major options, such as Select Programs to Record and Now Playing List.

I drilled down through the menu to select the tunes and pictures and found the steps easy to follow. You are given some flexibility to sort the folders and files in different ways, though you can't create special song mixes using your TiVo remote. In other words, you can't move files from one folder to another or create a new folder. That must be done on your computer, prior to publishing your songs to TiVo. You can publish existing playlists that you've saved in M3U, B4S, PLS, or ASX formats. With Windows, you can't sort by genre or artist, but with Macintosh you can, since TiVo works through iTunes.

On the photo side, you can watch slide shows or view images one at a time. You can rotate photos, if necessary. Unfortunately, you can't play music and watch a slide show at the same time.

How about sound and image quality? The photos of my sons' soccer games and Boy Scout adventures displayed beautifully on the 27-inch screen. The punk music cuts my teenage son had downloaded played savagely through the home theater speakers.

Demo concluded, I turned to my wife and boys, ages 8 and 11. "So, what do you think?"

Boys, in unison: "AWESOME!"

My wife, who's not fond of anything having to do with computers, just raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders.