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View Full Version : TivoConvert is unusably slow...

gconnery
10-19-2006, 07:51 PM
Am I the only one having this problem? All I wanted was to have "Countdown with Keith Olberman" ready for my iPod every morning. Since its on at 5:00pm here in California this didn't seem to be that big a thing to ask...

So I paid the extra money for the codecs and enabled the series for automatic transfer, and for conversion to the iPod h.264 format.

Now my Tivo spends most of every day and night with the little spinning wheel displayed and I rarely have an episode ready to go when I want it.

The conversion software seems to use about 25% of my CPU all the time. If I go into the target folder I can see one, two or even three files partway converted.

I have used other conversion tools, and I can obviously do this myself manually with those (probably DirectShowDump and then Videora TivoConverter). I expect these would take less than an hour to convert a one hour show, yet the Tivo Conversion software churns on and on for hours.

I have no idea what is going on. If I'm the only one seeing this maybe I need to uninstall and reinstall Tivo Desktop.

Glenn
whollymindless
10-22-2006, 01:15 AM
Only 25%? My Semperon 3k runs 100% 20/7 to keep up with the tivo. And the transfer performance continues to be dismal - 1 1/2 hours for a 30 minute show? Crazy.
mike55btz
10-31-2006, 09:10 PM
started a thread about this in the wrong section though...

pc is a 3.2 xeon and it takes forever to convert
CuriousMark
11-01-2006, 04:54 PM
Get a radeon X1xxx video card and use AVIVO, it is fast. I paid $65 for a gigabyte x1300 card that converts 2.5 times faster than the CPU does.

You have to do the conversions manually, TiVo Desktop doesn't support it, but if speed is what you want, it should do the trick. I went from 21 minutes per hour of basic quality conversions to 8.5 minutes per hour.

CuriousMark
gconnery
11-07-2006, 10:19 AM
Yeah, I was thinking about one of those ATI cards. Planning to hold off for the CableCard version I suspect will come out early next year along with Vista, as I have an MCE computer, and could then also record more stuff directly on the computer. I appreciate very much your posting your experience with AVIVO though. Hard to tell from the ATI site if its really anything or not....
classicsat
11-07-2006, 01:47 PM
Don't hold your breath. My understanding is you need to buy and use the CC tuner as part of a complete PC, rather as an add-on card.
Stu_Bee
11-07-2006, 09:03 PM
You can try www.TVHarmony.com to see how the auto transcode to ipod works for you.