Comments on: CES: TiVo Desktop 2.6 Details

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:30:28 +0000

is there any kind of plug-in that i can download or get from somewhere, to get the movies from my tivo, to my pc???

By: William C Bonner

William C Bonner — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:40:24 +0000

Transcoding is a huge burden, in that I don’t want to leave a power hungry machine running to do my transcoding, especially when the TiVo has the hardware to play the stuff natively. My home server is built on a low power VIA EPIA EN12000EG motherboard running on a fanless picoPSU-90 power supply. I believe that it draws less than 25 watts at full utilization. It takes at least 4 hours to transcode a one hour show in TiVo desktop.

I don’t want to let Tivo desktop run on my laptop because it’s not got enough ram for excess bloat, plus my laptop is optimized for low power as well.

Here’s my hardware links: http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=399 and http://www.davisnet.com/drive/products/drive_product.asp?pnum=08226

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:02:36 +0000

Regarding CPU, I spoke with to the product marketing manager who didn’t seem to the think the transcoding would be a huge processor burden. As far as conversion times, the slowest it might be on a modern computer would be real-time. He said with a dual core processor, an hour show converts in just a few minutes.

We also spoke a bit about why they don’t support video podcast (or other) streaming or downloads direct to the TiVo. And some of the assumptions here are probably right regarding video type versus playback capabilities. gt, TiVo’s audio podcasts streaming may not be the best example since we can’t even pause the content. I’d rather transcode and be able to have my TiVo controls available while viewing.

By: gt

gt — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:35:44 +0000

huh? this makes no sense…you can input url’s for regular audio podcasts, which are then streamed, but you cant do the same with video? why all this workaround? drm or something?

By: TiVo Steve

TiVo Steve — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:05:31 +0000

Now if only TiVo would fix the bugs in the 9.1 update!

By: Glenn

Glenn — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:41:48 +0000

Personally I think the folder support is a far bigger deal for me, but we’ll see how this goes. Now if they can just tell it to do the transcoding in the middle of the night…

Like others I wonder about the obvious… since Xvid and DivX are both basically mpeg-4 variants, if I have a video in either format, and want to push it to a Tivo HD or Series 3, what will the CPU load on the PC look like? Light and fast, like a wrapper change, or a full transcode burden…

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:21:15 +0000

It’s a step in the right direction, but I’m with William C Bonner. I want my S3 to do this natively with H.264/Mpeg video podcasts. It has the power.

My chief concern with this approach is that the desktop app has to be running constantly on the PC sucking up cycles. I purposefully minimize all running apps on my PC to keep performance at its peak. I don’t want TiVo Desktop pulling my system performance down. And I sure don’t want to have to remember to manually start and stop TiVo Desktop every day just to get my video podcasts over to the TiVo.

I understand why they are doing this for S2 users, but for TiVo HD and S3 users, the better approach is to do this all within the TiVo

…Dale

By: William C Bonner

William C Bonner — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:59:05 +0000

Automatically transferring files to the Tivo looks really cool.

I’ve got the TiVo HD, and it supposedly has hardware support for H.264 and MPEG4. I’ve experimented with transferring DVD VOB files to the TiVo directly as MPEG2 and that looks better than my $50 DVD player, and skips transcoding. What I’d like to know is there going to be a way of skipping the transcoding using the protocol any time soon?

I paid for the TiVo desktop plus, only to find that the free Windows Home Server addin does a better job of transcoding shows for my widescreen tv. http://durfee.net/software/2007/07/tivo-publisher-for-whs.html