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View Full Version : TiVo should support USB ATSC (Digital) Tuners

Justin007
03-05-2007, 02:30 PM
What would be great is if TiVo would, in their next system update, include drivers (or whatever) to make the use of USB ATSC Tuners possible on non S3 TiVos...

For Example...
Best Buy sells a "Pinnacle Systems PCTV HD Pro Stick USB 2.0 TV Tuner" (search " Pinnacle PCTV" on BestBuy website...) for $130...
It would be great if you were able to plug that into your S2 TiVo and be able to record HD programming via that ATSC tuner... at the very least in SD... as the digital channels look much better then the analog ones...

Justin...
maharg18
03-05-2007, 02:51 PM
Unfortunately USB tuners such as that depend on the system CPU to handle most of the workload, and Tivo's just don't have anywhere near the needed horsepower to do it.

It is a nice idea, though.
Justin007
03-05-2007, 03:48 PM
Unfortunately USB tuners such as that depend on the system CPU to handle most of the workload, and Tivo's just don't have anywhere near the needed horsepower to do it.Yeah, I guess your right... I didn't think of that... To bad...

Hopefully TiVo will come up with something else to accomplish the same thing...
Otherwise my S2 TiVo will be no good come Feb. 2009...

Justin
Stormspace
03-15-2007, 04:00 PM
Unfortunately USB tuners such as that depend on the system CPU to handle most of the workload, and Tivo's just don't have anywhere near the needed horsepower to do it.

It is a nice idea, though.

Once the signal was converted to analog by an add on box it would record the same as any other channel as long as the tuner used a RF connection to feed the video to the TiVo.
Dan203
03-16-2007, 03:59 PM
Unfortunately USB tuners such as that depend on the system CPU to handle most of the workload, and Tivo's just don't have anywhere near the needed horsepower to do it.

It is a nice idea, though.

Actually as long as they only support recording of ATSC it should be fine, as those channels are already in MPEG-2 format they wouldn't require any extra CPU power to store. The CPU power is only needed for converting analog channels.

Although I think TiVo would be better off supporting something like this instead...

http://www.9thtee.com/hdhomerun.htm

it uses an Ethernet connection, rather then USB. At least for the S2DT units which have a built in ethernet port.

Dan