MiniDV to PC to S3?

[jscozz]

I have gotten the supported formats to work from PC to my S3. But it is a pain in the butt to convert all of my m2t transfers from MiniDV into one of the supported formats. Does anyone know way to get around this? m2t is MPEG2, but somewhat of a different format?

Also, is TRANSFER the only option? i.e. to copy from DV to PC.. then convert.. then transfer to S3, then view it... is a long process. Why can't the S3 just start streaming, buffer a bit and start the show? My home network is much faster than the Internet connection, and I can do that over the Internet!

[Chimpware]

No way around this, why not just process in something that supports batch processing. Not sure on PC, but something like VisualHub on the Mac. The files can be played once the transfer begins as long as your Tivo software is up to date.

[chip_r]

I have gotten the supported formats to work from PC to my S3. But it is a pain in the butt to convert all of my m2t transfers from MiniDV into one of the supported formats. Does anyone know way to get around this? m2t is MPEG2, but somewhat of a different format?

Also, is TRANSFER the only option? i.e. to copy from DV to PC.. then convert.. then transfer to S3, then view it... is a long process. Why can't the S3 just start streaming, buffer a bit and start the show? My home network is much faster than the Internet connection, and I can do that over the Internet!

It's a hardware limitation of the Tivo. The encoding and decoding is done in hardware vs. software because a very powerful CPU would be required to perform these processes in software. It's easier, cheaper, and more efficient to do this in hardware. This limits formats to a subset of the many currently available ones. So not only does it have to be MPEG2, it needs to be one of Tivo's supported formats.

Yes, transfer is the only option. Since the exact decoding (m2t) hardware isn't present, the two step approach of convert and transfer is required. When you're pulling video in from the internet, it's already in a video format that's usable. Your PC just has to decode it and display it in whatever size it came in. A fairly simple process. In contrast, if the Tivo had to support many different video formats in software, then it would have to transcode them on the fly. Again very CPU intensive.

To put it in perspective, if you're finding that it takes 3 hours to convert 1 hour of video on your (assuming) modern PC, then the Tivo would have to be 3x more powerful to do the same in real-time. Hardware makers have to limit the number of video formats to support because even in hardware, it's very silicon intensive to support a wide range of formats. Video processing is a very nasty and math intensive problem.