Vongo on the tivo?

[techieunite]

I recently tried the Vongo movie service and although I don't think that the selection is that great, the service usually downloads pretty quickly.

I have comcast and was getting between 200k to 600+k downloads. Plus you can start the movie playback before it's done.(just like a tivo recording).

I don't see why Tivo doens't somehow partner with Vongo to offer this to the consumers. If I'm paying $10 a month to vongo and am able to have three devices on my accont, I would like one of them to be my tivo.

Many tivo users use broadband and it would help proliferate the existance of Vongo and other future video download services.

[megazone]

This has been discussed before. TiVo will probably offer video download services at some point - a couple of years ago it looked like they were going to do so in partnetship with NetFlix, but that seems to have cooled off.

There are some technical issues - most of the current download services, such as Akimbo, use MPEG-4 or VC-1/WMV9 codecs, and the current TiVo hardware cannot support those. The TiVo boxes only do MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. So there would have to be a special version of the service for the TiVo anyway.

The coming Series3 will likely support more formats, but the bulk of TiVo's userbase is going to be S2 for a long time to come, so they'll need any service to support the S2 and not just the S3. Though the S3 will likely have premiums not available on the S2, since it supports HDTV.

[techieunite]

Most of the movies that I downloaded were about a gig and a half. I believe that you're right and that they use some sort of windows media video technology.

Since Tivo is already using microsoft digital rights technology to protect tivo content sent to a pc, the idea of a download service doesn't really seem that far off.

Isn't the Windows media video format very similar to mpeg1 or mpeg2?

[megazone]

Actually TiVo isn't using MS DRM at all, but that's a common misconception. TiVo is using their own DRM system. They just implemented the decoding filter as a Windows DirectShow Filter DLL to make it easy to implement. But they could implement it as a standalone decoder, etc. Implementing it as a DirectShow filter just makes sense on Windows because almost every media player uses DirectShow, and therefore it allows .TiVo files to be accessed by more software.

Windows Media 9 is actually a unique codec. It is also now known as VC-1 - MS offered it as a standard and it is now Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Video Codec 1 - aka VC-1.

VC-1 is based on the same concepts as the MPEG codec family, most modern video codecs are, but it is a unique implementation. VC-1 is considered comparable to MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and it has a similar performance. The Wikipedia page is a good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1