It's been a long bumpy road, but TiVo will finally be available in Australia by the end of the month. TiVo and the Seven Network officially announce the coming availability of the set top box this week. As expected, Australian customers will be able to pick up a TiVo for $699 at Harvey Norman and Domayne stores. If the price seems a bit high, keep this in mind: There will be no monthly subscription fees for basic service.

But it turns out that many of the features that make TiVo stand out in the US won't be available at launch in Australia. There will be no support for networking features. That means you can't connect to the internet to download music and movies. And you can't hook up your TiVo to a home PC to access your photos, music, and videos on a TV set. In other words, basically what you get is the same TiVo service US customers had 4 or 5 years ago, but with support for high definition video.

Seven may eventually add networking features via a software update, but the company would charge for such additional services.

So you've got a PC running Windows Media Center in the living room, but you'd like to be able to watch stored recordings on other PCs in the house. Sure, you could set up a system of media center extenders, but what if you're running MCE on those machines as well? Wouldn't it be nice to just share files over the network?

Doug Knox has developed a program that lets you do just that. MCE 2005 - Share Recorded TV does just what its name suggests, it lets you share recorded programs between Windows MCE 2005 machines. It has not been tested on Vista yet.

In order to share videos, all you have to do is check a tab that says "allow other Media Center PCs to access yoru Recorded TV Content," add a list of shared folders, and reboot. On the machine you'd like to use to watch those files, you run the same program and add the shared folders.

[via Ian Dixon]