ryan kennedy’s blog

I got home from the Bay Area tonight and figured I’d check to see if my TiVo programming was available through TiVo Desktop. Much to my delight, I was able to see and queue up transfers right away. It’s really easy to transfer stuff using TiVo Desktop. That’s the good news.

Now the bad news. As I mentioned in an earlier post, TiVo ToGo isn’t exactly fast when it comes to transfering content from the TiVo to your desktop machine. The number I saw before was roughly 1GB per hour. I’m currently downloading Scrubs from yesterday. It’s a little over 600MB (medium quality) and it’s going to take over 35 mintues, putting it right smack in the 1GB/hour realm. Bear in mind, Scrubs is only 30 minutes long and I’m recording it at only medium quality. Imagine a 1 hour show recorded at higher quality, which I’m likely to do after I put a hard drive upgrade in my TiVo.

I can only hope there’s some way to script/schedule the transfer process so I can run it while I’m sleeping or away at work. Nice work TiVo…yet another nail in your coffin.

Update: I decided to see if the video would play on my PC before it completely downloaded, the results are mixed. Yes, it would start playing before the entire show had been pulled from the TiVo. Unfortunately, when Windows Media Player 10 loaded the file, it thought the program was only 24 minutes long. So after 24 minutes had played it stopped playing even though the full 30 minutes had been downloaded (it finished downloading while I was watching the first 24 minutes). I’m not sure if that’s to blame on TiVo or WMP, though. I’m guessing it’s WMP’s problem.

I also tried using GraphEdit to “un-DRM” the .tivo file. It works…well. It’s really fast, so I’m guessing it’s not doing very much to the original file (just stripping the DRM bits, not reencoding the entire thing). I really have no need for the non-DRM version, so I already deleted it. But it’s good to know that if the DRM gets in the way of my fair use of the content that I can work around it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.