Any News on TiVo-to-Go? (1 Viewer)

[SteveLa]

Eagerly waiting on TiVo's new service that will allow users to export programming to their computer. Since I find myself falling behind on programs that have been recorder, the ability to view programs on my rail commute into the office would be a big plus. Anybody heard when it may be coming out?

 

[Stephen Tu]

Today. I'd go over to www.tivocommunity.com for in-depth discussion.

 

[Matt.R]

Saw on CNN yesterday that it has been released. Not available for Directv Tivo customers, though. Plus it will not allow you to move any copyrighted material.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Not true. Per their contracts with the content providers TiVO had to make it possible for the content providers to encode their programs in such a way as to prevent moving shows. But this does not apply to all "copyrighted material". (For one thing, everything on TV is copyrighted, so if your statement were correct, nothing could be transferred and TiVO2Go wouldn't do anything. ) AFAIK there is no restriction on moving any material at the moment. The option is there, but I haven't heard about anyone using it. The password-for-playback system seems to be viewed as protection enough for current use. Maybe the studios will apply the limit to first-run films on Pay-per-view, or exclusives sold to HBO or Showtime, but those are things that are sure to be released on DVD in short order, so why bother transfering them to a hard drive or burning them to DVD. For the regular programming that TiVO is most used for I don't expect there to be any limitations on transfers.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

P.S.

I just got the download on my original ("black") Series2 in the living room, but am still waiting for the update to hit my new ("silver") series2 in my home office. I only installed the second one about a week ago, so it may be awhile. (Given bandwidth restrictions and server capacity TiVO estimated on January 3rd that it would take about six weeks to distribute the new software to all registered Home Media Option users.)

You can speed things up a bit by getting on a priority list at www.tivo.com. I registered my first TiVO around January 4th or 5th and it downloaded the version 7 software overnight Thursday/Friday. I had to restart the unit and wait a couple of hours for it to update itself when I got home from work yesterday. I had no idea how this was going to work, so I checked my system settings everyday to see which software version it showed. Last night I still had 4.x, but the "status" of the last connection said, "Pending restart". So I restarted it and found I had the new software.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Dustin A]

Nothing like still not having a sofware release a month later. It will come.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

I signed up on the list on the 4th just like thousands of others. I finally got it last thursday.

Worked like a charm for the first day, and then it came up with a notice saying I needed to run the initial setup again because it lost my settings. So I went to do it, and it was just like the very first install which requires a phone line. I do not have a phone line, only cable modem and a network. For the initial setup it won't use it so I had to once again take it all apart and take it to my parents house to run the setup via a phoneline.

That is one thing I don't get about Tivo. If it can run and get updates with no problem over a network, then why the hell can't it do the initial setup that way?

That all aside, I copied a couple episodes of Whose Line to test. 30 minutes, at best quality took about an hour to transfer and they were 1.5gigs in size. The files played fine with the tivo extention. I changed the extention to mpg and the files sort of worked and didn't ask for the password. Haven't tried burning to dvd yet. The site seems to require or at least suggest MyDVD by Sonic. I have an old copy of that but never used it. I prefer Nero, so I'll try that with the mpg extention one. Haven't had time to read around the web to see what works and what doesn't.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

What does "sort of worked" mean exactly?

TiVO has partnered with Sonic to do a version of My DVD that will work with *.tivo files. I'm not sure if their standard out-of-the box software will do so. I got the pre-TiVO version of Sonic My DVD but havent' tried to access a TiVO file with it. Once they've released the TiVO version of the program I'll see if they offer a TiVO update or plug-in for TiVO users. What I'd mostly like to do is edit the files to remove the TiVO screens and commercials before I archive material. I have a couple of good video editing programs, but they require standard MPG files, so I'd really like to find a way around the problem.

(I already have Pinnacle Movie Box analog-to-digital convertor that I've been using for some time to transfer material like home movies from VCR and programs from TiVO to my hard drive for editing and eventual DVD burning, But for the TiVO stuff this involves a digital-to-analog converion coming out of the TiV0, tranmission to the Movie Box which does a conversion from analog back to digital, and then into the PC. I would dearly love to go straight from TiVO hard drive to PC rifle all in the digital, while still retaining the ability to edit the files, and create DVDs with the tools I'm used to using.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

Sort of meaning it showed the image, skipped, but ultimately was unwatchable.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Ah, I see. "Sort of" meaning, "It didn't work at all as a practical matter."

Regards,

Joe