LiquidTV Scheme; Will it Work?

[cowboydren]

I'm trying to develop an exit strategy from my addiction to PayTV, and it seems that TiVo has the only platform that will replace my Dish ViP-722, but to replace the three tuners that I constantly jamb up with OTA recordings, I need to use LiquidTV.

Will this fail miserably?

[cowboydren]

Seriously? 114 views in two days and no comments? Not even a "nice flowchart, man?" 91,500 users, and nobody's tried this? I know that LiquidTV isn't exactly a "hit" (Nero constantly changes the price), but surely somebody is playing with it...

[steve614]

Sorry, I don't know anything about HDHomerun or Liquid TV.
But that is a decent flow chart, if only I knew what it meant. :)
Doing an open forum search, I only found 5 threads that refer to Liquid TV.
2 of them were about the availability which is of no use to you.
Here are the other 3.


http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=422283&highlight=nero+liquid+tv

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=406480&highlight=nero+liquid+tv

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=406531&highlight=nero+liquid+tv

[cowboydren]

Thanks for the input and compliment, Steve.

Clearly, this has to happen in stages; get LiquidTV and a single tuner running ($50 USB stick if it's not included in a box) first. Then expand the tuner pool with HD Homeruns (2 boxes, 2 tuners per box, each box talks to the PC via ethernet instead of USB). Then insert VideoRedo into the stream to try to automate commercial skipping. Then try to use Nero Digital to conserve bandwidth/storage space. The DVD loop is mostly peripheral.

[orangeboy]

I'm with Steve614 on this one: I don't know what I'm looking at. There are some pretty sharp folks in the TiVo Home Media Features & TiVoToGo (http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=35) forum that may understand and appreciate your flowchart, and could give better advice than I am!

[wombat94]

Sorry about this... I responded in your hardware thread, but missed this.

I don't know a whole lot about the LiquidTV product, but did some research.

Let me ask a few questions so I can understand precisely what you are trying to achieve:

1. Will you have multiple Tivo HDs on the network?

2. If so, do you need the ability to have 4 tuners controlled by a single recording device? (The main reason for this would be to have automatic season pass balancing for times when > 2 programs recording at the same time).

3. If your recording habits are such that you can manage 2 manually (by assigning conflicting season passes to different tivos) then you could effectively eliminate the following: cost of LiquidTV and another annual subscription, cost of 2 HDHomeRuns.

Here is the way I do it now... I'm using CableCard, but it would work just as well with Tivo HDs using Antenna connections for broadcast ATSC (it does not work for TivoHDs with clear QAM because Tivo doesn't support QAM mapping without cablecard).

I have 2 Tivo HDs - a total of four tuners. I have season passes, wishlists and guru guides that pick up my recordings.

On a Windows Home Server I have a combination of AnyDVD, VideoRedo, DVD Decrypter, kmttg, pyTivo and StreamBaby installed. Anything I want to automatically archive is set up with kmttg to be automatically pulled from the Tivos and automatically processed - staged into folders that pyTivo and Streambaby present back to the Tivos.

I have scripts that I use for ripping movies and TV episode compilations to the video shares for pyTivo - as nearly automatic as they can be.

Unless you need 4 tuner season pass arbitration, it sounds like LiquidTV is overkill that is not really necessary - it adds expense and does not do the job as well from what I can see.

Even if you do want 4 tuners in the back end, there are better solutions for the HD Homerun - check out the instructions page at silicon dust's website. There are better options that are either completely free, or at least don't require an annual subscription, to create a back-end recording solution.

[cowboydren]

Question #1, No, I won't have more than one TiVo HD. I only have one TV, but it gets very heavy use when it's on. I am a bit of a TV addict, though it will be reduced when I clip the cable. I've noticed, that there are a number of times when I need three or more tuners, even on OTA channels. I've already had to cull from the season passes because my 722 only has three tuners. This is why Question #2 is a Yes. If two TiVos could automatically load balance, I wouldn't need the LiquidTV, but I find LiquidTV preferable for managing one large list of timers to trying to manage two lists myself.

I like the Homerun because it seems to be the most robust solution. I could get the same effect for half the cost with two $70 dual-tuner USB sticks, but the Homerun is so much nicer. The annual cost of LiquidTV seems to be the same as the annual cost of a second TiVo, so I think I'm winning the subscription war with six tuners for the price of four. :D

Off-hand, can you think of an OTA recording solution that is as robust and reliable as TiVo for running on a quad-tuner backend? There is WMC, but I'd have to have a copy of Vista or 7 to run it; I have unused XP Home and Pro licenses already, which is one of the draws for LiquidTV.

[cowboydren]

I still like the idea of a complete, single-branded solution, but...

I'm starting to answer my own question, and BeyondTV 4 looks pretty attractive. Built-in commercial abatement (scans for scene changes, makes chapter marklets), h.264 compression, and HDTV-to-DVD archiving, and up to 8 tuners on one $99 license. Reduces the amount of software I have to buy.

But I don't know if I could use pyTiVo to share the entire recorded TV folder, nor do I know for sure if a TiVo HD can play them back (it seams that the files are DivX 6 compliant). I'd still use AnyDVD/DVDShrink to archive my DVDs and serve them to the TiVo HD, probably from another folder. I'd still use a TiVo HD for the rest of the things that a TiVo does, like Recommendations, Netflix, and Rhapsody, not to mention recording Chiefs games and watching live TV when it's needed.

[wombat94]

I still like the idea of a complete, single-branded solution, but...

I'm starting to answer my own question, and BeyondTV 4 looks pretty attractive. Built-in commercial abatement (scans for scene changes, makes chapter marklets), h.264 compression, and HDTV-to-DVD archiving, and up to 8 tuners on one $99 license. Reduces the amount of software I have to buy.

But I don't know if I could use pyTiVo to share the entire recorded TV folder, nor do I know for sure if a TiVo HD can play them back (it seams that the files are DivX 6 compliant). I'd still use AnyDVD/DVDShrink to archive my DVDs and serve them to the TiVo HD, probably from another folder. I'd still use a TiVo HD for the rest of the things that a TiVo does, like Recommendations, Netflix, and Rhapsody, not to mention recording Chiefs games and watching live TV when it's needed.

That sounds like a solution that would work better, IMO. I've used Beyond TV before (long time ago - probably 5 or 6 years ago) and thought it was a good option.

I definitely agree that the HD Homeruns are a great option - and probably the easiest/most cost effective way to get high quality tuners for ATSC/Clear QAM.

I don't know if the DivX6 compatible h.264 will work on a Tivo - but that wouldn't preclude you from scripting another solution to compress the MPEG2 after BTV has done the commercial detection/cut.

In my experience, there's no reason that pyTivo couldn't serve the data back to the TivoHD.

Actually, thinking about it, there is merit to LiquidTV in your scenario - I would assume that the tivo recordings made by LiquidTV will have full tivo metadata available to them - since they can be seen by other MRV Tivos on the network, it has to be there. Using BeyondTV or another solution may not give you robust metadata - there may be solutions out there, but I've never looked at it.

Ted

[cowboydren]

metadata, metadata, metadata....Do you even know how you curse me with your taunts?

[Allanon]

I would skip Liquid TV due to the subscription fee and go with a low cost or free PVR software solution such as SageTV, BeyondTV, or GBPVR. These PVR software packages allow for free EPG data and have commercial skip built in or a third party plugin. Also they can handle more than one tuner. The PVR software will record the program to a folder which can be a Tivo Desktop Plus auto-transfer folder so video will automatically get transfered to the Tivo.

[JasonRossSmith]

Mythbuntu?

[cowboydren]

Mythbuntu?

Aw, hell no. ;) I'm a certified Linux administrator; been using it since 1996 on machines from desktops to 128-node computational clusters. I'm a big fan of Free software, but I am NOT going to waste my life trying to make Mythbuntu, or anything else involving MythTV run.