Tivo To Go - Slow Transfer Problem

[netsurfer]

I am writing this to see if my “Tivo To Go” transfers between my Tivo and my PC are running at the fastest possible speed. Please feel free to double check my logic and math. Did I make any mistakes? Here we go.

So, we start with the router. It has a speed capability of 100 Mbps.
Because a megabit is one million bits this means the router is capable of one hundred million bits per second. That is 100,000,000 bits per second.

How many bytes is equal to 100,000,000 bits? Well, a byte is eight bits but I am pretty sure that like modems, ethernet also requires a stop and start bit to figure out which of the eight bits are supposed to be grouped together to make up each byte. Therefore, 100,000,000 bits should equal 10,000,000 bytes. (10 million)

How many bytes does it take to make a megabyte? 1,048,576

So therefore, a 100 Mbps router can transfer 9.536 megabytes per second.

Now, twice I have downloaded to my PC from the Tivo and monitored with Tivo desktop. In 120 seconds I got 107 megabytes both times. That equals .892 megabytes per second.

If I am supposed to be getting 9.536 megabytes per second but I am only getting .892 megabyte per second then the speed is only 9.35 percent as fast as it should be.

Right away that leads me to believe that either the Tivo ethernet port is the old standard 10 Mbps or that my PC ethernet card is not connecting to the Tivo at 100 Mbps. It could even be some kind of problem with my router. Looks like I need to start checking those things out.

Is anybody else getting faster speeds than .892 megabytes per second?

Does anyone know if the Tivo uses 10 Mbps ethernet instead of 100 Mbps?

Am I missing something here?

[netsurfer]

Ok, some progress to report. I went into my settings for the ethernet card in my computer. It was already set to "Auto detect".

From the drop down menu I chose 100 Mbps/Full Duplex.

Now my download does 220 megabytes in 120 seconds so that is a little more than twice as fast as the 107 megabytes in 120 ceconds.

But if my calculations in my first post are correct, then this speed still represents only about 20 percent of what it should be.

[jayhawk069]

My transfer speed is about the same -- 800K-900K/sec. It's the encoding speed after the transfer that drives me crazy. If I had known about this I would have thought twice about shelling out 100 bucks for Toast Platinum.

[CuriousMark]

Read the FAQ.
Your Qestion is in Section II at Question 11.

Depending on your TiVo model, your speeds may not be out of line.

[netsurfer]

Originally Posted by CuriousMark

Read the FAQ.
Your Qestion is in Section II at Question 11.

Depending on your TiVo model, your speeds may not be out of line.

CuriousMark,

Thank you so much for your post. I believe you saved me countless hours in trying to troubleshoot my network. Now I know that the 20 percent of speed I am getting over my 100 Mbps network is normal for Tivo. I went and confirmed that the Tivo files downloaded to my PC are with a .tivo extension so the following info from what you pointed me to is very good to know.
___________________________________________

TiVoToGo throughput is less than MRV throughput because the TiVo must use its CPU to multiplex the recording on disk into MPG format so it is compatible with most computers. With MRV, multiplexing to produce a file in MPG format is unnecessary.

* Series3

Under ideal conditions, the TiVo Series3 can transfer files to a PC or Mac at up to ~20Mbps on a 100Mbps network.

Thank you

[netsurfer]

Originally Posted by jayhawk069

My transfer speed is about the same -- 800K-900K/sec. It's the encoding speed after the transfer that drives me crazy. If I had known about this I would have thought twice about shelling out 100 bucks for Toast Platinum.

Thanks for confirming my speed. Yesterday, I used VideoReDo to try burning a DVD. Because it needed to convert it from 1920 x 1080 to the same format used by DVD's (720 x 480 I think) it told me that a one hour program was going to take 1.5 hours to encode. I have a 2.53 GHZ processor so this encoding process must be pretty labor intensive.

I guess it is best to let our PC's do these operations while we sleep. Especially on two hour long recordings.