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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."
More than 50 percent of TiVo's 3.6 million subscribers have tried TiVoToGo, and nearly half use it regularly, Denney said. The number of regular users was higher than TiVo expected, and "it was surprising to us, to be honest,'' he said.
Based on how slow the transfers are for Tivo2Go I too am surprised that Tivo has that many people using it. Granted, I was only using it over wireless but I assume that's what most of the Tivo2Go users are using as well. It was taking *more* than real-time to transmit a show to the computer and then I had to run it through Dr. Divx to bring it down to a resolution that would play well on my mobile device. Will this automated transcoding process increase the time it takes to put it on the handheld even more?
I have mentioned before that I use the "Record to VCR" option to put shows on my mobile device as I have an Archos that will automatically record it in the best fit option if I so choose... Yeah, it's real time and it's a pain but it was actually faster and easier than using Tivo2Go. Being that I've moved to the DirecTivo I no longer have the Tivo2Go option (with a stock unit) so I am happy to use Record to VCR for now.
Since the files will be converted to mp4 files, they should be playable on a Mac. Let's hope that they'll spend the next few months before rollout working on a Mac compatible version of TiVo Desktop so that you can actually do the conversion on one, too.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Just buy a supported card. Read before you try/buy, it's not that hard. Why would anyone buy something other then the Hauppauge anyhow, inexpensive cards and the best capture quality. Better then the Tivo's even.
It only took me like 4 hours to setup my Myth backend from scratch. It's been like a year since. I have done 3 upgrades via APT-GET and it works great.
I can even transfer my video from the box at Gigabit speeds.
I used to have a Tivo, and hacked it for full network access. This blows it away in almost every single point. I honestly cannot think of one single item that I miss from Tivo. The Tivo maxed out at like 1.3 Megabytes per second on transfer rate, my Myth box gets like 10-15 Megabytes per sec.
iPod seems to be turning into the canonical example of attacking an industry leader from below, as detailed in Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" a decade back.
In business computing, PCs broke the dominance of mainframes in the computing environment by introducing relatively cheap gadgets that were more expensive and less profitable per business function than the industry leaders, who quite logically ignored them; and then PCs crept up the functionality curve to wipe out the dinosaurs.
In autos, the Japanese starting importing cheap cars to the US that were less profitable that our domestic industry leaders, who quite logically failed to respond effectively. While GM etc always made cheap cars too, they didn't try to match Japan's cheap-and-good model; Toyota etc crept up the functionality curve nearly to wipe out the dinosaurs.
Now in computing: the iPod, started cheap, and is creeping up the functionality curve.
The question is, will the industry leaders recognize and respond effectively? Or rather, can they? I don't intend to be making a yet another cheap flame of the world's leading software company, which cannot be ignorant of the what's going on, but responding may require breaking their business model.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Nice to see Tivo do something smart, for a change. This company has disrespected and disowned the Mac platform since Tiger came out. A *one line* fix for the Tivo Desktop software is all they needed to release for final Tiger compatibility. As of today, that broken version is still on their web page. It also doesn't include aac audio support; a minor thing on other platforms, but a snub to the Mac users who have large aac collections. That version also lacks significant functionality that it's Windows counterpart contains. Noteably the TivoToGo (video downloading) feature. This is why I wrote TivoTool.
One goal of TivoTool is to represent what I think TivoToGo should be like on the Mac. It looks like soon I will be able to directly compare. The other goal of TivoTool is to put a friendly front-end on some "hacking" tools. You see, that is the catch - you need to decrypt their MPEG2 video streams to have true freedom. This requires you open the device (void your warranty) and hook up it's drive to your Linux box. Since there are many types of Tivos and many software versions, this process is not as easy as it should be.
In no particular order, here are some points about TivoTool v TivoToGo:
* The Tivo network drivers are slow. Even with a USB2 device and hardware support, the drivers just don't take full advantage of what they have. Of course the enthusiast community has come up with faster drivers.
* Streaming video right off your Tivo and watching it on any computer in the house is cool (TivoTool does this). I don't forsee Tivo adding this capability anytime soon.
* With TivoTool, you can burn a DVD right from the main interface. TivoToGo requires that you purchase another program to do this.
* You also need to pay for some sort of MPEG2 codec. TivoTool uses MPlayer which has MPEG2 support.
* TivoTool can stream-compress to various formats such as avi and mp4 as you download it from the Tivo.
* Other stuff, I don't want to totally start comparing dick sizes. There is a Linux version of TivoTool though!
Finally, I should point out that this new software from Tivo will only work on a specific subset of Tivo hardware. Specifically the "Series 2" with software version 7.x. If you have a DirecTV Tivo, sorry. If you have a Series 1, sorry. If you are in the UK or Aus, sorry. Yes, TivoTool works with all of the above.
Also, notice the Mac platform was never mentioned in their press release. Only "iPod support". This *might* be bad news for the Mac platform, but I'm putting a little faith in Tivo because I still love their device and what it does for me. They can't just put in iPod support for Windows. That would be insane.
John Susek