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TiVoToGo For iPods and PSPs
BushCheney08 writes "According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, TiVo is expanding its TiVoToGo service to allow recordings to be viewed on video iPods and PSPs. Files will be transcoded in real time and will include digital watermarks to try to cut down on piracy. The service begins beta-testing for select subscribers today, with a widespread rollout scheduled for early next year. An AP article is also available at Forbes."
Too bad they never added Tivo To Go For Macintosh, and I doubt they will ever add this feature to Macs either. Nice to be a second or even 3rd class citizen when it comes to Tivo because i own a mac.
I just don't see this flying. DRM and real-time encoding?? So you're limited in what you can do with the file AND it takes 2 hours to convert a 2 hour show and then however long to synch it with the device...
The people who really want to watch movies on their iPods and PSP will either have already created their own (DRM-free) hacks or will have bought the movie on a UMD. The people who only casually thinks, gee, it might be nice to have a copy this week's episode of "Stacked" on my iPod won't want to wait for almost an hour to get a half-hour sitcom... The nice thing about most PVRs and the ol' VCRs is that they're relatively simple to operate. Every additional step and limitation of this new system makes the recording technology less desirable - especially if the media can be found pre-packaged (from iTunes or Sony's UMD format).
"...will include digital watermarks to try to cut down on piracy. "
That's what I like to hear. Honestly, they'll never eliminate it because there will be the people that just won't pay, but if there was a distribution system (that offered better than 128kbps), was reasonably priced, and offered less restrictive DRM, the general public would have little incentive to pirate. The only things keeping me from buying legal tracks are the DRM and the bitrate. I don't even mind the dollar a song because I'm not getting filler tracks that I would get on a CD.
Anyway...I'm rambling...
I'm not sure I'd consider this a flame, but it seems unreasonable to compare this scenario to the bizarre need to constantly have access to a phone. (Don't get me wrong -- I have a mobile phone. I just turn it off sometimes. But I digress.)
Like a bunch of people, I travel for work. I spend at least 5 hours every week on a plane. That's airtime, excluding time sitting around the airport or going back and forth to the airport. And I know many, many people who take 45-minute train rides to work. Personally, when I'm home I want to do stuff that I can only do when I'm home -- taking some shows with me to kill 5 or 6 hours while I'm traveling is pretty convenient. I kill some dead time and regain some free time at home.
Currently, I do that with my laptop, but an iPod with video would allow me to catch up on some shows in the gate area or during my 40-minute cab ride, not have to juggle my laptop when my meal arrives on the flight, and still watch stuff in the limited space I get on small regional jets. I'm not sold on the new iPod yet -- I'll probably wait another generation and hopefully the screen will get a little bigger.
So TiVo will let us transfer shows to our iPods. This is the same TiVo that already makes their DVRs will obey the Broadcast Flag despite no federal legislation ever mandating such compliance. Seems to me that Disney, the WB, and every other studio will simply flag all their broadcasts as Do Not Record, blocking such free attempts to provide content to one's iPod and PSP and requiring these shows to be purchased. Therefore this announcement therefore amounts to NOTHING!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Oh come on. Every single app that breaks does so because of this:
1) Apple posts (or doesn't post!) API. Apple says in large capital letters, "DO NOT RELY ON THE BEHAVIOR OF X, FOR IT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE."
2) Third-party idiot relies on the behavior of X.
3) As warned, Apple changes X, software breaks.
Software which does not rely on unspecified behavior basically never breaks. Find something like this written for 10.0, it will work on 10.4. The problem is that some companies, apparently TiVo is among them, don't understand the difference between public, supported behavior and private, unsupported behavior. And then when Apple rightfully breaks their products, people come out of the woodwork blaming Apple when their stuff no longer works, when they should be blaming the people who wrote the crappy software to begin with.
Wait. Are you referring to a Windows machine as a "real computer?" Bwahahahahahahaaa Priceless.
Transfers from Tivos seem to be slow whatever you use. I have a series 1 Tivo with mfs_ftp installed on it. I transfer over 100BaseT. The harddrive is a year old 72000 RPM drive, so it's not slow. Downloading from the Tivo I see about 1 Mbs. Uploading shows back to the Tivo I see 140-150 Kbs. It takes me 5-6 hours to put an hour show back on to the Tivo! So I think the problem lies somewhere within the Tivo, and not with the transfer software (be it mfs_ftp or Tivo2Go).
Also TiVo Desktop *is* compatible with OS X 10.4.2 and 10.4.3 (I've heard but not confirmed 10.4.4 as well). There was an incompatibility with 10.4.0 and 10.4.1, but the later releases of Tiger worked well. The installer gives a false "failed" message, but it does install and it does work very well (better than 10.3.x).
Mac OS X v10.2 - v10.3.x
(Not compatible with Mac OS X 10.4: Tiger)
- Tivo Desktop Download Page
Perhaps you're correct that you can get it to work on 10.4, but as the download page says, it's not supported and they apparently could care less if it works. The fact that you're saying it does work and they haven't bothered to update their download page shows the lack of care they have for mac users.
The only question remains is whether TiVo will provide Mac software that *pulls* (or pushes) the files from the TiVo to the Mac. If they don't, there are plenty of ways of getting around it, but I can't imagine TiVo wouldn't dedicate the couple of hours to develop this software on the Mac.
I think you might want to be prepared for disappointment . TivoToGo is a terrible solution, even for windows users. Tivo has turned in to a company more interested in making a feature-list than making a good product. These half-baked solutions are proof of that, this ipod compatibility is likely another half-baked solution.
I'd be willing to bet that all this is going to be is a program for windows that will convert the show to a 320x240 sized mpeg 4 video file. That's it. So this means it will take about 1 hour to transfer the show, 20 minutes to convert it, then however long to put it on your ipod. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I don't think I will be.
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