ryan kennedy’s blog

I’ve been using the newest version of the TiVo Desktop software for a while now. I keep meaning to write something about it, but for some reason I’ve never quite gotten around to it. I think I’ve been using it long enough now that it’s time to write this review.

The major new addition in version 2.2 is the ability to share video content from your PC with your TiVo. Previous versions would allow you to get TiVo video off of the device (also known as TiVoToGo). This is a fantastic addition. It allows you to pull video content from many sources (camcorders, DVDs, the internet, etc.) and view it on your television. I’m not entirely certain how multi-room viewing (viewing video from one TiVo in the house on another TiVo in the house) works, but I’m guessing it’s similar. Your PC shows up in your “Now Playing” list. You can select the PC and it will give a list of all video available to be viewed on your TiVo.

One really nice thing about this is being able to offload recorded content to your PC. Presumably your PC has a large hard disk or you can at least upgrade the storage. That’s a major contrast to the TiVo which is pretty well fixed unless you pop it open and drop in a hard drive. So using your PC to hold old programs is a really appealing feature.

Once you’ve found the video you want to watch, TiVo will offer to transfer it from the PC to itself. There’s no option to simply stream the video, you have to transfer it. That being said, you can view the video while it’s being transfered. If you have a fast enough network in your house, you can actually start the video immediately after you start the transfer and watch it to the end without waiting for anything to download (assuming you’re not fast forwarding through a lot of commercials).

In addition to viewing TiVoToGo files, you can also view MPEG-2 video on your TiVo (with some restrictions). I used this demonstration on ripping DVDs to successfully rip an episode off of the Firefly DVDs on my PC. I was then able to watch it on my TiVo. While it would probably have been faster and easier to put the DVD in my player in the living room, this proved an adequate proof that things worked as they should.

So, great…you can watch anything you can transcode to MPEG-2. What’s the downside? Well, there’s several:

• It is still SLOOOOOOWWWWW when you transfer video. I have a fast network in my house with fast network adapters on my devices (even the TiVo) and the transfers are much slower than they should be. Sounds like TiVo still has the USB adapters running in USB 1.1 mode.
• The TiVo Desktop software is awful. Every time you start it up it has to look at the movies directory on your machine and reindex it. This can be painfully slow and it will thrash your hard disk if you’ve recently added a couple of large movies. In the worst cases, the software takes minutes to start up while popping up periodic dialog boxes telling you that the software is taking longer than usual to start (no shit Sherlock).
• The TiVo media server (packaged with the desktop software) is also awful. Every time you connect with your TiVo to list the movies on the PC, it ALSO reindexes your movies directory, thrashing your hard disk and leaving your TiVo to appear as though it’s hung or as though it can’t find any movies (there’s no “in progress” throbber or anything to indicate that it’s working).
• The TiVo firmware sucks too. I had some early failures with some MPEG files that I was trying to transfer. As it turns out, I think I had encoded them incorrectly (too high a bit rate or something). When I tried transfering it to the TiVo, the transfer failed. I had to go into the TiVo’s “ToDo List” to look up why the transfer failed. According to the TiVo, it failed because the “file can’t be found.” That’s bullshit, because after reencoding the file it was able to find it just fine.

So is the TiVo Desktop 2.2 worth it? If you already have a TiVo, yes. If not, maybe. It’s still a better option than that horrifically bad D-Link media system I tried out. What would be really great is if TiVo got off their asses and made the software not suck so much. Better would be if someone with a bunch of spare time on their hands reverse engineered all of the particulars of serving video content to a TiVo. Then we could have a nice, open source alternative that (presumably) won’t suck.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 10:44 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.