Will WinMFS work on Tivo Premier? [Text View]

gweempose

03-04-2010, 10:09 AM

Why isn't this obvious to everyone? The box has been announced, not released.True, but you can't blame people for being excited. The TiVo landscape has been stagnant for so long, now that the next series of boxes has finally been announced, people are scrambling for any bit of information they can get. I think people realize that there are no concrete answers to a lot of their questions. In many cases, they are probably just hoping for someone to make an educated guess. :)

wmcbrine

03-04-2010, 12:16 PM

Educated guess: There is no reason to expect any difference from previous models in this regard. Same disk layout, same filesystems.

aaronwt

03-04-2010, 12:20 PM

My current plan is not to expand stock hard drive on my units. I will rely on my TiVo Desktop PC and my over forty Terabytes of networked storage for keeping shows I want to watch down the road.

gweempose

03-04-2010, 12:46 PM

I will rely on my TiVo Desktop PC and my over forty Terabytes of networked storage for keeping shows I want to watch down the road.Now that's impressive! :up:

MickeS

03-04-2010, 12:52 PM

My current plan is not to expand stock hard drive on my units. I will rely on my TiVo Desktop PC and my over forty Terabytes of networked storage for keeping shows I want to watch down the road.

Holy... 9 TiVos, 40 TB of storage... are you a digital hoarder? :)

fyodor

03-04-2010, 03:50 PM

My hope is that the new device will support PC-Tivo transfer speeds fast enough that video can be backed up to PC storage. Right now you can't transfer back quickly enough to watch in real time unless the video has been transcoded to MP4

F

litkaj

03-04-2010, 04:12 PM

My current plan is not to expand stock hard drive on my units. I will rely on my TiVo Desktop PC and my over forty Terabytes of networked storage for keeping shows I want to watch down the road.

Damn... My new storage box just has 30TB. It can (more than) max out 10Gbe with sequential transfers though. :)

steve614

03-04-2010, 04:27 PM

Holy... 9 TiVos, 40 TB of storage... are you a digital hoarder? :)

Has to be. I've only got 3 Tivos with 1.24TB and a computer with 2TB and I have WAY more stuff than I can watch.

/fellow digital hoarder

:p

jmpage2

03-04-2010, 04:29 PM

Now that's impressive! :up:

Impressive or in need of therapy depending on your perspective I suppose.

aaronwt

03-04-2010, 06:11 PM

Impressive or in need of therapy depending on your perspective I suppose.

I need all the storage for my BD ISOs. I'm getting away from discs and by ripping my BD titles(and HD DVD) to an ISO, I can easily and quickly view it from a media player. ANd it's just like watching it from the disc, only I don't have to deal with the disc. ANd since I have over 750 HD titles(BD and HD DVD combined) I need alot of storage.
Plus I have a lot of HD content that I recorded between 2001 and 2004 from OTA that I want to keep.

jmpage2

03-04-2010, 08:33 PM

I need all the storage for my BD ISOs. I'm getting away from discs and by ripping my BD titles(and HD DVD) to an ISO, I can easily and quickly view it from a media player. ANd it's just like watching it from the disc, only I don't have to deal with the disc. ANd since I have over 750 HD titles(BD and HD DVD combined) I need alot of storage.
Plus I have a lot of HD content that I recorded between 2001 and 2004 from OTA that I want to keep.

You don't have to justify yourself, whatever floats your boat. I can't fill up 4 tuners personally, so the thought of needing 18 of them is a bit mind boggling.

I also haven't found a high quality way to play ripped BD ISO images so I have not gone that route yet with my far more modest BD collection.

aaronwt

03-04-2010, 10:08 PM

You don't have to justify yourself, whatever floats your boat. I can't fill up 4 tuners personally, so the thought of needing 18 of them is a bit mind boggling.

I also haven't found a high quality way to play ripped BD ISO images so I have not gone that route yet with my far more modest BD collection.

The new media players can play the BD ISOs just like when a disc is played in a BD player.
They will bitstream the advanced audio and send out the 1080P24 video just like a stand alone BD player will.

gweempose

03-04-2010, 10:46 PM

As much as I love the idea of buying a ton of BDs, ripping them, and streaming them across my network, I've been hesitant to do this. In fact, I haven't bought very many BDs at all, because I firmly believe the future lies in VOD. Having owned a Vudu box for a while now, as well as being a Netflix subscriber, I can clearly see where the technology is heading. The real wake up call for me came when I started using Rhapsody several years back. All of the sudden I had access to virtually any song I wanted to listen to for only a small monthly fee. To me, this was utter bliss, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the same thing would happen with video.

Believe me, I can certainly appreciate the desire to own a huge catalog of titles. I used to have more than 500 LDs, and I took great pride in my collection. Sadly, those LDs are long gone now. Most of them were sold off on eBay, and the rest were given to my brother. I think my LD collection was an eye opener for me. Once DVD came along, most of my collection was suddenly rendered obsolete. I then had to decide if I wanted to upgrade my collection to DVD, and when I thought about it, I realized that most of the movies in my collection were only viewed once. Heck, some were never even viewed at all.

yukit

03-05-2010, 02:05 AM

I am crossing my fingers that 2TB internal drive upgrade would be supported by Premiere, but we will probably need to get the XL version for that (just like THD & XL)

Bsteenson

03-05-2010, 02:50 AM

Back to the thread topic ... were there no Premiere beta testers who might have checked on expanding internal storage and now might be able to give us a hint as to whether or not it's possible.

Also, I realized after I had placed my order for a new Premiere that I'm not sure pyTiVo will work with the new box, either. My enjoyment of TiVo would be seriously compromised if I couldn't transfer movies etc. from my computer to TiVo (and don't tell me about TiVo Desktop. Paid for the Plus version, hated it, never use it.)

jmpage2

03-05-2010, 08:16 AM

The new media players can play the BD ISOs just like when a disc is played in a BD player.
They will bitstream the advanced audio and send out the 1080P24 video just like a stand alone BD player will.

The only one I have found that can do this in any kind of seamless fashion is the Popcorn hour, and it doesn't seem to get a lot of love.

litkaj

03-05-2010, 08:25 AM

The only one I have found that can do this in any kind of seamless fashion is the Popcorn hour, and it doesn't seem to get a lot of love.

That's because the C200 is expensive as hell and they have a history of releasing flaky firmware without regression testing.

Have you tried the Western Digital TV Live? I haven't tried a BR ISO (though I'm told it works) but it plays all the rips I've made assuming they're L4.1-compliant.

MickeS

03-05-2010, 08:29 AM

jmpage2

03-05-2010, 08:33 AM

That's because the C200 is expensive as hell and they have a history of releasing flaky firmware without regression testing.

Have you tried the Western Digital TV Live? I haven't tried a BR ISO (though I'm told it works) but it plays all the rips I've made assuming they're L4.1-compliant.

I will probably just wait until XBMC can handle BD ISO images (I use it with DVD images now and it works fairly well) natively. Thanks for the info though, I wasn't aware of any boxes other than the C200 that could do this.

Bsteenson

03-05-2010, 08:45 AM

Even if there are any beta testers here in the forum, they're probably still bound by the NDA until the release.

That's why I was asking for a hint ... wink wink, nudge nudge ...

wmcbrine

03-05-2010, 11:26 AM

Also, I realized after I had placed my order for a new Premiere that I'm not sure pyTiVo will work with the new box, either.It will. Better, even. Or so I'm told.

ZeoTiVo

03-05-2010, 11:35 AM

Back to the thread topic ... were there no Premiere beta testers who might have checked on expanding internal storage

it seems logical that any company would want people testing the product as is versus doing unsupported things and wasting testing resources.

puffdaddy

03-05-2010, 11:50 AM

WinMFS, as it stands now, will not work with the Premier. The new partition for the sqlLite database breaks backwards compatibility.

JamieP

03-05-2010, 01:15 PM

WinMFS, as it stands now, will not work with the Premier. The new partition for the sqlLite database breaks backwards compatibility.Sounds like you have access to one. Would you be willing to post the partition list from pdisk or from winmfs, assuming those tools can still read the current partition table structure?

Seems like with partition 14 in use, there would still be two more free (15 and 16) that could be used with the current style of two partition zone additions, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that winmfs won't work. Have you tried it?

vstone

03-05-2010, 02:45 PM

puffdaddy

03-05-2010, 02:50 PM

Seems like with partition 14 in use, there would still be two more free (15 and 16) that could be used with the current style of two partition zone additions, so it isn't immediately obvious to me that winmfs won't work. Have you tried it?Agreed regarding expansion. Backup and transferring an image won't work unless you manually transplant partition 14.

MickeS

03-05-2010, 03:03 PM

Agreed regarding expansion. Backup and transferring an image won't work unless you manually transplant partition 14.

While the current WinMFS doesn't work for backup because of this, it sounds like it is an issue that could be taken care of, correct? Just adding one more partition to the backup/truncate procedure?

innocentfreak

03-05-2010, 03:45 PM

This might even be the perfect time for Spike to rewrite MFSlive and WinMFS. I believe somewhere on his forum he mentioned this would happen one day to address some things but he hadn't yet because it would break backwords compatibility.

JamieP

03-05-2010, 04:16 PM

Agreed regarding expansion. Backup and transferring an image won't work unless you manually transplant partition 14.So perhaps it would work to do a dd copy of the whole disk to a larger disk, followed by expansion with mfsadd or mfslive.

If the only change is a new use for partition 14, I'm thinking it shouldn't be too hard to update the tools to copy that partition in addition to the other non-MFS partitions.

It will be interesting to find out if they are still using the "Apple" partition tables with the 32bit sectors offset/count limitations. I hope they move to GPT or something else that can support larger partitions. That will require tool changes too, but it will be worth it, if they address the partition and disk size limitations.

Bsteenson

03-05-2010, 06:25 PM

It will. Better, even. Or so I'm told.

SWEET!:up:

garys

03-05-2010, 06:56 PM

I will probably just wait until XBMC can handle BD ISO images

Now if I could run XBMC on my Tivo.... I'd pay for the privilege.

jmpage2

03-05-2010, 08:49 PM

Now if I could run XBMC on my Tivo.... I'd pay for the privilege.

The real shame here is that eventually there will be "one box to rule them all" in the home entertainment hub.

This box will DVR your recordings, stream recordings from a multitude of sources as well as playback of your home library.

All integrated effortlessly.

It's not looking like the TiVo will be that box but I think the Premiere is worth me betting on TiVo for another year or two while things continue to shake out in the industry.

innocentfreak

03-05-2010, 09:57 PM

If Microsoft wanted to do this I think they could today. I realize they tried before, but now with the 360 and Windows 7MC and Ceton they could pull it off.

They would only need to build the hardware and tweak some software. With the 360 they already have streaming set up and ready to go. The 360 when combined with Win 7 can stream just about any file and has access to things like Netflix instant in HD.

They would just need to separate the Media Center portion out of Windows 7 and the 360 and put it in a box that plugs into the TV. Ceton is already working on the tuners so it could even be assembled off the shelf these days.

While HTPC purists would stick with HTPCs, this machine would be as simple as plugging in the cable card and hooking up a 360 or a TiVo.

aaronwt

03-06-2010, 07:45 AM

The real shame here is that eventually there will be "one box to rule them all" in the home entertainment hub.

This box will DVR your recordings, stream recordings from a multitude of sources as well as playback of your home library.

All integrated effortlessly.

It's not looking like the TiVo will be that box but I think the Premiere is worth me betting on TiVo for another year or two while things continue to shake out in the industry.

I seriously doubt there will ever be one box. For things like Netflix, the box needs to be locked down. I figure at best there will be two boxes. But I have yet to see any box that comes close to meeting all my needs, and I don't see anything on the horizon either.

SullyND

03-06-2010, 08:10 AM

While HTPC purists would stick with HTPCs, this machine would be as simple as plugging in the cable card and hooking up a 360 or a TiVo.

With the appliance approach working so well for Windows Home Server, I don't understand why they haven't made a bigger push for it with WMC.

innocentfreak

03-06-2010, 10:35 AM

MichaelK

03-06-2010, 11:17 AM

Hard to make the push when the tuners aren't out there yet. Once the tuners are out there we may see a company do so.

One big issue still could be with WMC tied into Windows 7. While you can set WMC to load when Windows 7 does, it still loads as an additional program and you are still using a PC. Like I said above or somewhere else, I think if MS could separate WMC out so it could be used like pure DVR software and an extender for a PC I think it would work.

not sure they need to separate anything out- just pacakge it up like a windows home server.

it's just windows server 2003 with an overlaid program to hide the guts to the end user- right?

So what's to stop them from just selling windows 7 with WMC that loads automatically at boot, sell that as "windows TV server" and give it to HP and Asus and the rest for cheap enough so they can build custom hardware and sell it for $300 - 400. like the WHS's go for now. Might need to add a hundred bucks or even 200 to juice the drive and add the ceton card- but even at 600 it's not outside the range of a moxi or tivo with lifetime.

Apparently I'm not totally following- but haven't there dual tuner cards for a long while? I thought the ceton was just going to give a 4 tuner card instead of the former 2. But is there not even a real world dual tuner card?

good thing for Tivo that MS seems to be totally idiotic and can't seem to figure out how to much of anything besides desktop (and maybe server) OS, and office suites.

Maybe Google gets into the space to shake things up....

btw - WOW- HP is selling the lx195 for 250 after instant rebate at the moment: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/product_detail.do?product_code=FL702AA%23ABA&aoid=20715&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=FL702AA#ABA)

innocentfreak

03-06-2010, 11:31 AM

not sure they need to separate anything out- just pacakge it up like a windows home server.

it's just windows server 2003 with an overlaid program to hide the guts to the end user- right?

So what's to stop them from just selling windows 7 with WMC that loads automatically at boot, sell that as "windows TV server" and give it to HP and Asus and the rest for cheap enough so they can build custom hardware and sell it for $300 - 400. like the WHS's go for now. Might need to add a hundred bucks or even 200 to juice the drive and add the ceton card- but even at 600 it's not outside the range of a moxi or tivo with lifetime.

Yes it is, but WMC is a separate program inside of Windows 7 instead of just an overlay as far as I know. As a result, my PC even with WMC set to load at startup loads Win 7 first and then a few seconds later WMC. On my WHS, WHS just loads and everything else is behind the seen.

By removing/cleaning out Windows 7 you would also have less things that have to be patched, less things that can get an average user who just wants a box to plug in can get in trouble with. In essence you would only have access to WMC and nothing else from Windows 7 that wasn't necessary for WMC to run.

Apparently I'm not totally following- but haven't there dual tuner cards for a long while? I thought the ceton was just going to give a 4 tuner card instead of the former 2. But is there not even a real world dual tuner card?

There are dual tuner OTA/Analog/Clearqam tuners or some mixture of the two, but not for cable cards. ATI made a single tuner Cable Card that was available as an internal model or an external model. They cost around $250 a tuner and each one requires its own cable card.

The big issue previously was Vista required only OEM builders to be able to build certified cable labs PCs so the home user couldn't do it without a hack so only ATI made them and they weren't popular due to cost. Windows 7 changed this so companies like Ceton and Silicon Dust are now making tuners. Ceton is supposed to be out this month with the 4 tuner and Silicon Dust's external network dual tuner option is for later this year. ATI doesn't even look to be planning to get back into the game, but I believe there was a change in management.

rocko

03-06-2010, 12:29 PM

btw - WOW- HP is selling the lx195 for 250 after instant rebate at the moment: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/product_detail.do?product_code=FL702AA%23ABA&aoid=20715&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=FL702AA#ABA)

Toss in 5 percent cashback from Bing on top of that and you're really cookin'

MichaelK

03-06-2010, 12:42 PM

Yes it is, but WMC is a separate program inside of Windows 7 instead of just an overlay as far as I know. As a result, my PC even with WMC set to load at startup loads Win 7 first and then a few seconds later WMC. On my WHS, WHS just loads and everything else is behind the seen.

By removing/cleaning out Windows 7 you would also have less things that have to be patched, less things that can get an average user who just wants a box to plug in can get in trouble with. In essence you would only have access to WMC and nothing else from Windows 7 that wasn't necessary for WMC to run.
....

WHS isn't really anything that different than WMC is as best I understand.

the WHS "console" is just a program that runs on top of windows server. You can even minimize it down and use the regular desktop. there's some other services and dll's and what not that run on top of the windows server to do some of the drive magic that windows home server does. Probably some other stuff that tweaks RDP to allow it's remote control. But you can install and run normal windows stuff- I have several programs/services woking on mine.

I use mine headless and never bothered to hook a monitor to it, so I'm not sure if when it boots you see the normal OS for a few seconds before the WHS console takes over the screen.

But basically it seems trivial for MS to get WMC to be a similar appliance. Make WMC start automatically and early. Hide the ability to shut it down or minimize (you can't shut down or minimize the WHS console without some fiddling). Rip out what isn't needed (For example I dont know if all the windows server 2003 components are left in the WHS boxes). And presto chango it's all good.

In fact maybe they should just take the windows server 2003 (maybe go with 2008?) as the base os to make it more stable and slap the wmc program on top like the do with the whs console program. Add in a ceton multi-tuner cablecard. Maybe even steal the data drive spanning services/dlls from WHS so people could expand their boxes put just hot plugging in drives. And away they go.

(In fact just writing that last paragraph I've scared myself that billie and the borg in redmond are about to destroy tivo- YIKES)

innocentfreak

03-06-2010, 12:51 PM

In fact maybe they should just take the windows server 2003 (maybe go with 2008?) as the base os to make it more stable and slap the wmc program on top like the do with the whs console program. Add in a ceton multi-tuner cablecard. Maybe even steal the data drive spanning services/dlls from WHS so people could expand their boxes put just hot plugging in drives. And away they go.

(In fact just writing that last paragraph I've scared myself that billie and the borg in redmond are about to destroy tivo- YIKES)

They would have to go with Win 7 since it is cable labs certified. Also 2003 doesn't have the necessary drivers and no one knows if 2008 will. I just figure the more you remove of Windows 7 the less problems the average user will have on a device designed to be used with a remote and not a keyboard.

Also with WHS as an option you already have automatic backups assuming you aren't plagued by the copy once flag.

Mike-Mike

03-06-2010, 01:45 PM

I need all the storage for my BD ISOs. I'm getting away from discs and by ripping my BD titles(and HD DVD) to an ISO, I can easily and quickly view it from a media player. ANd it's just like watching it from the disc, only I don't have to deal with the disc. ANd since I have over 750 HD titles(BD and HD DVD combined) I need alot of storage.
Plus I have a lot of HD content that I recorded between 2001 and 2004 from OTA that I want to keep.

man I love your posts! I find you super fascinating... I'm mega-nosey on your stuff, why 2001 to 2004?

aaronwt

03-06-2010, 03:53 PM

man I love your posts! I find you super fascinating... I'm mega-nosey on your stuff, why 2001 to 2004?

Between 2001 and 2004 I used a couple of HiPix cards in PCs for my OTA recordings of HD. I had a tower case on my gigabit newtork with twelve hard drives for 3TB of storage for my OTA recordings.
In 2004 I got the DirecTV HDTiVos and basically stopped using my PCs for recording HD except for the occasional HD program or for overflow when four tuners wasn't enough for recording HD(I still had three DirecTiVos that could record SD). And at the time you couldn't extract the programs from the TiVo. later I set it up so I could transfer the content, but by then the S3 was soon coming out which meant I was leaving DirecTV

Later on I got a couple of USB HD tuners to use with PCs, but once you've used a TiVo, it's hard to go back to something else. The TiVo is so easy to use and transfer recordings now. I have no reason to go back to using PCs. Especially with the higher electric costs in my area. I used to run half a dozen PCs 24/7 but now everything goes into standby to save power. ANd the new Premiere boxes are supposed to cut the power by 33% from what the S3 used.