Future Feature?

[bluedakar]

The TiVo can play music and photos over a home network so I am wondering if, with the proper software upgrade, would the S2 hardware be capable of playing .iso or .avi files over a network? I have an Xbox running xbmc, which does this beautifully and it even supports cover art, but it would be nice to have it all in one box ala TiVo. It seems like this would be a natural expansion of the TiVo product.

[Dan203]

.iso is a format used to describe CD or DVD disk images, it's not an actual media format.

.avi is a container format which can contain any number of audio/video combinations, so again it's not an actual media format.

That being said Seires 2 TiVos only support a limited number of audi and video formats because they are hardware restricted to those formats. Other files can be transcoded to a TiVo compatible format but the TiVo will never be able to play those formats natively.

Now I myself have written an audio plug-in for TiVo Desktop (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=295778) that can transcode almost any audio format into MP3 on the fly so it can be played back via the TiVo music feature. If TiVo adds support for things like cover art then I will update the plug-in to support that as well.

As for video... TiVo support MPEG-2 video, with either MP2 or AC3 audio. However it also has specific requirements about frame rate and resolution. So your best bet is to use a program like Videora TiVo Converter to transcode files to TiVo format if you want to watch them on your TiVo. I myself am considering working on a TiVo Desktop plug-in that will perform this converion on the fly, but I'm waiting for an updated SDK from TiVo which supports video related plug-ins. (the current one is a couple years old and out of date)

Dan

[bluedakar]

Thanks Dan for the informed response. Sounds like the TiVo could be made to work around it's limitations. Maybe something can be developed in the future as I think there will be more demand for it. I'll probably stick with the xbmc for now. It works good for playing what I have.

Maybe a better solution for TiVo is something with a Netflix partnership. I heard something about that but I don't know what it consists of. It would be nice to use TiVo to browse the catalog and then pick a movie. Something like "XX" number of movie downloads per month for XX.XX dollars subscription fee per month. It would be like having a huge Movie library without the storage requirements. I'm sure encryption/copyright and bandwidth limitations are the bottleneck with that scenario however.

[Dan203]

One thing I forgot to mention. The next generation HD TiVos, dubbed the Series 3, will have hardware support for MPEG-4 playback. Which means it could possibly play a lot of download avi files with DivX or Xvid encoding natively without transcoding.

Dan

[classicsat]

Thanks Dan for the informed response. Sounds like the TiVo could be made to work around it's limitations.
Umm, no. A Series 2 TiVo is limited to MPEG2 video and MPEG audio becasue of hardware. No amount of Tivo side software could fix that*.

* TiVo could import MPEG4 and convert to MPEG2 in box, but the puny TiVo CPU makes that scenario impractical.


Maybe something can be developed in the future as I think there will be more demand for it. I'll probably stick with the xbmc for now. It works good for playing what I have.

XBMC works becasue the X-box has the CPU power to decode MPEG4 video. Now, they could make some hardware dongle or gateway that transcodes incoming MPEG4 or similar to MPEG2.


Maybe a better solution for TiVo is something with a Netflix partnership.

That is primarily a business/legal issue. TiVo developing some sort of agreement with a major content provider won't help the Series 2 TiVo decode other than MPEG4 one bit.

[Dan203]

Umm, no. A Series 2 TiVo is limited to MPEG2 video and MPEG audio becasue of hardware. No amount of Tivo side software could fix that*.

As I said they, or I, might be able to write a TiVo Desktop plug-in that transcodes other formats on the fly as they're being transfered to the TiVo. This method uses the PCs hardware power to do the transcoding and eliminates the extra step and disk space requirements required by programs like Videora.

This is something I'm really interested in doing so as soon as TiVo releases an updated SDK I'm going to take a crack at it.

Dan