Mac OS X Leopard/TiVo HD: Wired Networking?

[johnnylundy]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to see if anyone can shed some light on a couple of issues with TiVo HD transfer of files, now that we have the ability again.

I have Leopard 10.5.1 installed, and now with the new TiVo 9.2 I can use the "nowplaying" web address to download the recordings as .tivo files.

At present, the TiVo HD gets an address from my NetGear wireless "g" router using the TiVo-branded USB wireless adapter.

Transfers this way are about 450-590 kilobits per second, even though the connection is wireless-b at the minimum.

I wonder if anyone can advise as to how making a temporary wired connection would or would not help. First off, does the TiVo HD have an autosensing ethernet port? I tried connecting a standard (NON-crossover) cable between my MacBook Pro and the TiVo HD and the MacBook Pro didn't see anything on the other end of the cable. Does a wired connection require a hub or router, or do I have to change the settings in the TiVo to make it activate the wired ethernet jack?

Would a wired connection be faster than 500 kilobits/sec? This speed is about the same that I got with the Series 2, and I thought the TiVo HD would be much better, since the bottleneck seemed to be the USB port on the Series 2.

I wonder if the TiVo-branded USB access point is USB 1.1.... hmmm...

So, to summarize..

1. Do I have to have a router/crossover cable to use the ethernet port on the HD?

2. Do I have to change the network settings to use the ethernet port instead of the USB/Wireless adapter?

3. Both the TiVo USB adapter and the TiVo HD are USB 2.0, right?

Thanks for any light anyone can shed on wired networking.

[Dennis Wilkinson]

1. Do I have to have a router/crossover cable to use the ethernet port on the HD?

2. Do I have to change the network settings to use the ethernet port instead of the USB/Wireless adapter?

3. Both the TiVo USB adapter and the TiVo HD are USB 2.0, right?

1. No. The ports on your MacBook Pro are autosensing and will go into crossover mode internally, regardless of whether you use a crossover or straight Ethernet cable.

2. On both the Mac and the TiVo, there are settings you'd need to reconfigure, yes. TiVo has a support page on setting up this kind of a network for the TiVo side of things. On the Mac, you'll have to enable the ethernet port in the Network pref pane, and possibly pick an address/netmask compatible with what you set up for the TiVo.

3. Yes.

[johnnylundy]

Thanks so much Dennis. With your tips I went back to the TiVo, went into Network Settings, and discovered that there was no option for Ethernet. The TiVo was out-thinking me and since it knew that I had a USB adapter connected, it would only allow setup of the wireless. LOL.

So I disconnected the wireless adapter and now it gave me a choice. I connected the MacBook Pro to the Ethernet input and after some fiddling with the URL and the login dialog, I got the Now Playing screen and am downloading at about 800 KB/sec. The limit of 10baseT ethernet is not much more than that, so if the TiVo can only do 10baseT then I am in good shape. If it is supposed to do 100baseT, then that is way low, and could either be the fact that both tuners are running or the disk on the MBP can't stream it in fast enough. Dunno.

What speeds are people seeing on file transfers? I thought I saw multi-megabyte per second quoted; maybe I mis-read it.

Thanks again.

[johnnylundy]

OK an interesting update - once the first download finished at about 800 KB/sec, I set both tuners to channel zero and started the second download.

It's coming at 1.2 MB/sec. That's a 50% speed increase just from setting the tuners to channel zero. It's also the max on a 10base-T connection. I'll have to check the specs in the TiVo documentation to see what the Ethernet chip is, but I think all of them nowadays are 10/100 chips.

That means that the TiVo HD (Series 3 platform) can only stream data from its disk at 1.2 MB/sec or approx 10 megabits per second, even with both tuners idle.