Tivo desktop plus very wishy washy.

[healimonster]

I am running vista home premium with a new Tivo HD. They are hard wired networked through a westel DSL wireless modem/router.

I have no interest in transferring anything from my tivo to my computer, so I don't know if this works.

The two (tivo and my computer) do communicate, I can play pictures and music from the computer, and I can transfer videos from my computer to the tivo, but her lies the problem.

The transfers happen in a very haphazard fashion, sometimes not at all.
I have thought that some of the transfers that don't transfer were because of the file format, but that does not appear to always be the case.

Sometimes the transfers will start, sometimes they won't.
Sometimes the transfers will stall halfway through.
I have never been able to successfully complete a transfer of a full length (90 minutes+) movie.

Rarely if ever do I see more than 1 video transferring at a time. I have had better success with shorter videos.

Some mp4 files will transfer and some universal AVI files will not.

I have read in places that you can force or select the start of file from inside your tivo at the bottom of the now playing list. I have never found or seen this feature.

Could this be a performance issue? Possibly port-forwarding issues?

[jasap]

Sounds like you have a couple of issues, not the least of which is simply crappy software. Check out pyTivo to handle the transcoding issues. It uses the ffmpeg codec which handles just about everything you throw at it. It ain't pretty but it's free and gets the job done! It may also take care of the lack of a "share" showing in Now Playing. There should be at least one there so maybe check your PC firewall settings, if not configured properly to allow Tivo/pyTivo server you will definitely have unusual problems. Hope this helps! http://pytivo.armooo.net/

One last thing, as far as I know TiVo's will only transfer 1 thing at a time in each direction so that should be normal.

[healimonster]

Thanks for the info, I will give that a whirl.
The definitely isn't a "share" feature in the now playing list. I will look into my firewall, however vista generally won't allow anything to go out through your firewall unless you allow it, and I already hit the allow "tivosever" button.

One update:
Totally out of the blue after a few days of no activity two full length movies showed up in the now playing list. Not the movie I wanted to (The Dark Night) transfer. Using handbrake to convert my movies is there a preferred setting that tivoserver "likes"?

[LADYBUGBLUE2002]

I have two computers with Vista and Tivo Desktop 2.6.2 and have had no problems. However, I am using my ISP's firewall and service provider and have disabled the Vista firewall etc. There might be part of the problem...I know there are a number of ports that need to be open but Vista firewall might have some of them only half open causing delays and issues.

Hope that helps.

[healimonster]

It doesn't look like the good people at http://www.portforward.com/ have a walk through for the tivo.

Any one know of one?

[LADYBUGBLUE2002]

Not sure if you need port forwarding or not but here is the info from tivo:

http://www.tivo.com/setupandsupport/technicalsupport/networkingandphoneconnections/What_Network_Ports_Do_I_Need_Open_When_Using_My_TiVo_DVR_.ht ml

[jasap]

Thanks for the info, I will give that a whirl.
The definitely isn't a "share" feature in the now playing list. I will look into my firewall, however vista generally won't allow anything to go out through your firewall unless you allow it, and I already hit the allow "tivosever" button.

One update:
Totally out of the blue after a few days of no activity two full length movies showed up in the now playing list. Not the movie I wanted to (The Dark Night) transfer. Using handbrake to convert my movies is there a preferred setting that tivoserver "likes"?

Indeed I failed to give proper credit to Vista and the infinite wisdom of it's firewall. Since converting to Linux last year I do not need or use an OS-level firewall so hope you'll forgive me. That being said there are actually several background Windoze services that need to be allowed through the firewall in addition to "tivoserver". I fired up an old dusty Win XP virtual machine to double-check and found "TiVoBeacon", "TiVoNotify" and "TiVoTransfer" Essentially everything beginning with "TiVo" in taskmanager. Regarding Handbrake the xbox360 profile should produce tivo friendly videos, works good for Tivostream (http://code.google.com/p/tivostream/) as well.

Regards