Tivo Desktop Plus Sharing Limit and Transfer Rate?

[toddvj]

Hello, I've just purchased a new TiVoHD, and have been playing with the TiVo desktop Plus that I purchased. One limitation that is a little annoying is that while you can auto-transfer files to your TiVo (which is really cool - just add a file to the existing folder and pretty soon it's on your tivo), you can only auto-transfer at most 10. I have several files that I want to store permanently on my TiVo, but I do not want to have several folders on either my computer or the TiVo. Is there any way to get around this limitation?

On another note, the transfer rate is very slow. I have a gigabit router and a gigabit card in my computer, but am only getting about 4-5 mbps transfer rates. Is this normal, or is there something I need to do to make it faster?

[CuriousMark]

Hello, I've just purchased a new TiVoHD, and have been playing with the TiVo desktop Plus that I purchased. One limitation that is a little annoying is that while you can auto-transfer files to your TiVo (which is really cool - just add a file to the existing folder and pretty soon it's on your tivo), you can only auto-transfer at most 10. I have several files that I want to store permanently on my TiVo, but I do not want to have several folders on either my computer or the TiVo. Is there any way to get around this limitation?

On another note, the transfer rate is very slow. I have a gigabit router and a gigabit card in my computer, but am only getting about 4-5 mbps transfer rates. Is this normal, or is there something I need to do to make it faster?

No way around it using TiVo Desktop to my knowledge. You could look at other options though, this is the right place to find out about them.

That is the normal speed, and is much faster than older TiVo DVRs like mine. The DVR is an appliance and doesn't have the computer power to go faster, given that it has to do a fair amount of work to transfer to or from a PC.

[toddvj]

Thanks for the quick reply. I've installed PyTivo, and that works, but I was unable to "push" the shows to my TiVo, and also it didn't keep the videos I transferred in their own folder like Tivo Desktop does.

[ZekeO]

Does the Desktop Plus stream to the tivo or does it store on the tivo?

[orangeboy]

On another note, the transfer rate is very slow. I have a gigabit router and a gigabit card in my computer, but am only getting about 4-5 mbps transfer rates. Is this normal, or is there something I need to do to make it faster?

One thing to consider as well: A network is only as fast as the slowest component. I learned that lesson when trying to determine why my 10/100 ethernet network was running at 12% capacity when doing big transfers from PC to PC. I looked at the specs for my harddrives and found the disk write speed on one of the drives was the culprit.

That being said, will you ever achieve gigabit speed? Highly doubtful unless you replace the harddrives in both the source AND destination with solid state drives, or massive RAID systems!

[aaronwt]

Current hard drives have no problem writing to the platters at 800mbs to 900mbs(and higher depending on the drive). While not 1000mbs it is still very fast.
I can easily hit over 800mbs throughput on my gigabit network when transferring PC to PC(non RAID).

[Kenji]

On another note, the transfer rate is very slow. I have a gigabit router and a gigabit card in my computer, but am only getting about 4-5 mbps transfer rates.
I don't know how this compares with your transfer rate, but when I was using Desktop Plus to transfer TiVo files via my home's wireless network, it basically took twice as long to transfer an HD program as it took to view it. For example, a 1/2 hour HD program took 1 hour to transfer to/from my Series 3 from/to my laptop. Pretty slow.

[Kenji]

Does the Desktop Plus stream to the tivo or does it store on the tivo?
Desktop Plus pulls video files from a TiVo box and stores them on the host computer. To transfer a video file onto a TiVo box from the host computer, you tell the TiVo box to pull the file over from the host computer.