problem one: it's way too slow

So folks are all a-twitter with the announcement that Tivo to Go will allow you to push your shows to your video iPod.  Whee.  But my GOD, has anyone actually used Tivo to Go?  Or, more to the point, is anyone actually using it on a regular basis?  May Wong of the Associated Press nails the TTG problem on the head...

Don't expect instant gratification: The transfer process from a TiVo Series2 set-top-box to a PC — a necessary step before syncing to a portable — occurs roughly in real-time. An hour-long show will take an hour to transfer to the PC, then roughly another 10 minutes or so to sync to a portable device.

So, it takes more time to transfer a show to your portable device than it does to actually watch the show.  You can thank a crippled USB (1.0?) port on the Tivo device for this.  I'm sure wily Tivo hackers have figured a way around this problem, but for your average person who just Wants Things to Work, this doesn't cut it.

Comments

[Matt Haughey]

The only way to speed things up is using a wired ethernet adapter that is usb 2.0 (newer tivo boxes can do 2.0). But then still on a 100Mb wired network, the fastest transfers I've heard are about 2-3x the real-time transfer rate. So it's still slow.

[Ian Kennedy]

I believe the codec decryption/encryption makes this slow as well. I've only transfered one show just to see how it works and it took me about an hour for an hour long show (I'm using a wireless USB 2.0 adapter on the TiVo).

Worth it to load up a bunch of shows the night before a long plane trip with the kids but I would agree, too slow to really be practical on a daily basis.

[chris]

Yeah it is the encoding that takes so much time. Before a TiVo file can leave the box it was recorded on, it has to be encrypted so that only a user with the media access key can watch it.

A 600 mb 30 minute show should take about 2 minutes to transfer over ethernet, and maybe a little big longer over wireless. But that assumes the data is ready to transfer - it isn't.

I think users have experienced very fast transfer times by hacking directly into the TiVo and copying the unencoded files straight to their hard drive. But that's not a practicle solution for 99% of users. They'll either have to wait or lobby Tivo/Congress to allow digital transfers from set top boxes without DRM.

Another solution may be to have TiVo software on the desktop do the encoding instead of the box, since presumably your desktop is a more powerful computer than the Tivo box.