If you follow this blog on a regular basis, you probably already know about how I’ve ragged on TiVo in the past for not releasing an update to their TiVo HME SDK. Well, on the 2nd of this month TiVo released an updated version of the SDK that I honestly didn’t even notice. This update includes a small number of new features however, I hope that this release will spark some new interest in HME and maybe just maybe we’ll start to see some new TiVo HME applications.

10/2/2007 - Experimental HME SDK 1.4.1 Released

* Multiple resolution support: This release introduces the ability for an HME application to control the rendering resolution of the receiver. The resolutions supported by the receiver are constrained by the hardware capabilities and current output configuration. The primary purpose of this feature is to enable the rendering of true HD resolution HME applications on Series 3 and TiVo HD platforms.
* Thread safe API wrappers (experimental): This release contains extensive use of locking and ’synchronized’ blocks in the SDK implementation to work around poorly written applications that use multiple threads but are not thread safe. This bulletproofing of the SDK comes at a measurable cost to performance, and so other solutions are being evaluated. There is no significant visible API change associated with this change.
* This SDK is EXPERIMENTAL, meaning that the direction of the SDK implementation in this release should not be taken to be indicative of future releases. The resolution support is part of the protocol, but the way it is exposed in the SDK may change slightly. The thread safe bulletproofing is a test concept, and so applications that want to be forward compatible should do their own locking and not depend on it.

Spotted on TiVoLovers & ZatzNotFunny.