Comments on: TiVo Adding H.264 Playback?

By: TiVo Steve

TiVo Steve — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:56:10 +0000

Just in time for Comcast’s proposed cap on bandwidth!

By: Blake

Blake — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:26:43 +0000

MegaZone – thanks for the definitive answer. I had surmised as much in regards to DTV and Tivo, but just needed someone to tell me the blunt truth. Like I said, DTV and Tivo just need to get back together.

I wasn’t allowed to upgrade our Tivo since I was able to upgrade our plasma size. Still, I’m pleased with my current setup, and will patiently await instantly watchable, HD, carte-blanche, downloadable programming to any device of my choosing from any provider in the world.

By: MegaZone

MegaZone — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:20:30 +0000

Blake – Nope. The S3 & TiVo HD don’t have the hardware to tune the satellite signals. You’d need a new box, blessed by DirecTV, which incorporated satellite tuners and their security card to authorize reception.

I do have a Pioneer DVR-810H, and they only record at SD – but it is 720×480 DVD resolution (at Best and High), and a higher bitrate than non-DVD standalones, which record at 480×480 for Best & High. ‘High’ on a DVD unit looks roughly similar to ‘Best’ on a non-DVD S2 to me, and ‘High’ looks better. But the S3 & TiVo HD look better still, even on non-HD content.

By: Blake

Blake — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:11:49 +0000

Here’s my selfish question – if Tivo does “flip the switch,” would that mean I could upgrade my S2 Tivo to an HD Tivo so I can partake of the MPEG4 encoded HD channels currently provided by DirecTV?

We were left with a tough decision when we recently upgraded to HD – stick with Tivo and dump DirecTv or vice versa. We stuck with Tivo (a Pioneer 810 DVD burning Tivo, to be precise, which, while it’s not recording HD, appears to be recording better than SD, possibly because it’s a progressive scan DVD player? Anyone else with this kind of setup?)

Also, someone alert me when Tivo and DirecTv kiss and make up.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:19:53 +0000

YouTube added the h.264 encode for their videos when they did the deal with Apple for the Apple TV/iPhone/Touch. The quality of the h.264 videos is going to depend on the quality of the uploaded original, not the quality of the flash content you usually watch. Some of the clips I’ve watched on my Apple TV have been great, others very low-rez/soft/blocky.

Like Megazone points out, the newer Tivos just copy the incoming transport stream to the hard drive without changing it (well maybe they remux it, but I don’t think they even do that). Which is why the fast-forward to play transitions are worse on the newer boxes. Until the cable companies start transmitting channels in h.264 video, which they won’t do in large numbers for a while because of the installed base of digital STBs that can’t handle anything but MPEG-2, this won’t much matter for recording cable.

But it could still be a nice option for watching Youtube or video podcasts…

By: kurt711

kurt711 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:31:37 +0000

i would love the h.264 support on tivo, it would make it really easy to watch high quality video off of pc without re-encoding it to mpeg2 using pytivo. I’m just excited of possibilities, making tivo a great media extender.

By: DSSwonsob

DSSwonsob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:33:35 +0000

I’m just looking forward to being able to play YouTube videos!

There are so many times I have people at my house and I remember some video I just want to show them real quickly. Either I can gather them around my laptop or download the flv, transcode it, and pull it onto my tivo. This will be SO MUCH better!

By: Ivan

Ivan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:12:05 +0000

Hopefully, this will eventually lead to better media extender functionality, i.e. playback of user video content (even if it has limited codec support like AppleTV). If they can get that going and Unbox gets HD content, then TiVo will be in good position as in all-in-one device.