TiVo's AN0100 802.11n WiFi adapter hits the FCC, stirs up imaginations
By Darren Murph 
posted November 6th 2009 10:51AM
posted November 6th 2009 10:51AM
posted November 6th 2009 10:51AM
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Or faster speeds when transferring shows from TiVo to TiVo like you can currently do over ethernet or 802.11g
Looks like this isn't a USB adapter, but an ethernet bridge.
I love my TiVo Series 3 HD, but once I can get cablecards for my PC that will show all channels, the box will be history. It's been great to have, but no more transfering to the PC, it'll already be on the PC (or server).
Don't worry, Hulu will block the User-Agent.
TiVo,
2006 is calling and wants Series 3 back. Where the hell is our Series 4?
Have you ever seen the size of an HD recording?
Tivo needs a faster adapter just to deal with it's own streaming requirements.
Being able to tap into user content would probably require a lesser network interface since a lot of that stuff is aggressively compressed with better codecs either by the end user or the source of the material.
Some sort of HW video acceleration dongle would be more relevant to decoding user content on a Tivo.
I've had surprisingly good luck with the old Tivo 802.11g adapter. I have a TivoHD in my theater connected, via ethernet, directly to my wireless router. I have a second TivoHD in the bedroom connected wirelessly using the 802.11g adapter. For transferring programs from one box to another, the transfer speeds are just fast to allow real-time playback of HD material as its being transferred, or quasi-streaming from box-to-box. It's also fast enough to build a buffer so that, on a 30 minute or 1 hour show, by the end of the first commercial break I have enough buffer to fast-forward through the rest of the commercials.
What I think is somewhat comical is that the TivoHD/HD XL/S3 have had their ethernet ports tested at a max of around 20Mbps, so not only could the N adapter possibly offer an advantage over the older G adapter, it may also offer an larger-than-expected advantage over wired ethernet.
What I'm really hoping is this device is a prelude to home network streaming and/or native playback of the most common video file types, mainly h.264 MKV. The box has the processing horsepower to handle at least 720p h.264 (evident from native playback of HD YouTube clips), so why not open that capability up to a host of media available on a home network. This capability, along with uPnP client capabilities would make the TivoHD much more of a home entertainment hub than just a DVR with a few semi-useful network features.
You can already stream and push 720P h.264 to the box - see pytivo/streambaby. I have been doing this with h.264 stripped from mkv containers and remuxed into .m4v for a while now, but I've not tried it with 1080i or 1080p content.
I used pytivo all the time until I disovered the PS3 Media Server app started streaming every format under the sun to my PS3. Don't get me wrong, I love my TiVo Series 3, but for streaming movies and such, I find the PS3 UI better for me and the PS3 Media Server app easier to configure. And now that my PS3 has Netflix streaming, my TiVo will be regulated to only doing one thing, time shifting.
TiVos - even the newest ones - top out at round 20Mbps when transferring stuff around, so an N adapter probably won't buy much in the throughput category. Where this will likely help is for those homes that are 802.11n only, and don't have a b/g network anymore. Plus at some point TiVo is going to start to have supply issues with their older parts and would need to redesign it anyway, so why not go .11n?
I'm never able to get much better than 10-12Mibps on a clean, low-use 100Mibps switched LAN. My PC is clearly able to do higher rates (to my UNIX box) so that's not the bottleneck. Mike-engadget mentions hard-drive bottlenecks, but even a 5400 RPM IDE drive can beat those rates and they don't vary significantly between zero, one or 2 simultaneous recordings. TiVo to TiVo is about the same as TiVo-PC so my money's on the Network interface or more importantly, the CPU's ability to stuff/clear the buffers.
Hopefully, this is ultimately a driver issue and TiVo just haven't bothered tweaking the driver/kernel 'cos the transfer rate *is* good enough to keep you ahead of ad breaks etc as described, but it sure is a pain when transferring to my PC in order to xcode to a portable device as the xfer time is by far the long tail. My xcode spreads neatly across all 4 cores and really pins them, so a 2hr show only takes about 20min to xcode, but pretty much 90 minutes to xfer.
Darren is absolutely right. The throughput limits in the TiVo for streaming and file transfer are in the processor and OS speeds. I have all of my TiVo units on wired 100MB LAN and they are still slow as dirt for transferring recordings, especially if the units are recording other shows at the same time.
I am rather disappointed that we aren't getting a Series 4 this year that makes use of a faster processor and a native HD user interface.
Always hope they pull their heads out and get something on the market next spring that doesn't look like it was designed in the year 2000.
I'm guessing that the slow transfer speeds are partially to limit the hard drive access.
All most times the HD is recording 2 streams, and reading another. Adding a high speed transfer to this could probably cause some issues.
What a joke, I have my TiVo HD hooked up to my gigabit LAN and the transfers are still dog slow.
Uhmm, that's because the nic is not a gigabit nic.
Expect Great things from TiVo in these next two quarters..... I WARNED YOU!!!!!!!
Just to chime in with the crowd, this thing isn't going to solve anything. Even _ethernet_ transfers don't run at anything resembling 100mbps.
We need a series 4 box stat. If it could do the sling-thing, it might even sell, too.