Announcing: TiVo Stream! Now available

Advertisements

WOW! I totally misread this. So this only works in your home wifi network? Yeah I think I and everybody else is better off with the slingbox.

My slingbox is actually perfect on my home network, it's when I'm in somewhere like a hotel is where it gets dropped connections and stutters on wifi. It doesn't work at all on the airplane wifi.

 

The more I read about this, the less I want this. So now you can't even transfer copy once shows to your portable device? This basically does the exact same thing as the free Cox cable app, so basically Tivo is catching up with services that other cable companies provide instead of being ahead of the game, the only difference is that many of those cable companies give you this for free whereas Tivo is charging you for it.

And as far as transfering shows go. Probably 95% of the programming on my cox provider is copy protected. I hate to say this but your best bet is to buy a slingbox and then if you want to transfer something try downloading the show off the piratebay.

 

Well it's a dumb point. There is a difference between 5 year support and little to no updates. Everyone with a pulse acknowledges the advantage apple has with supported updates

 

Definitely. Apple is still updating the OS in a 3 year old phone (3GS) in a market with 2 year lifetimes, while some Android phones bought last year aren't getting updates.

Case in point:

2012 is still the year of Gingerbread


It is somewhat comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended) though since it's up to carriers to push out updates to Android, while iOS is pushed out directly from Apple.

In any case, it's likely the Stream app was originally coded for iOS for multiple reasons:
1. The iPad is the tablet with the most users currently.
2. The TiVo iOS app is currently more mature than the Android app so it's likely easier to update that first and then port over to Android.

 

Advertisements

It does irk me that my iPad which I bought just over a year and a half ago cannot be updated to the new OS.

 

My mistake, I thought the original comment was about TiVo. Yes, in general iOS devices are much more likely to get updates than Android devices. That's the benefit to deal with a relatively small number of high volume devices.

 

For all you developers out there, I just tried a new Tivo Stream. Its' initial MAC address is the same - 00:13:74:00:5c:38

 

What do mean by "initial" MAC? You should be able to see the MAC of the Stream by logging into your router and it should be unique.

 

It is unique after the initial set up of the Stream is complete. But a brand new one first iD's itself with what I called the pseudo MAC. See earlier in this thread for the poster that first noticed this.

 

More than likely it's simply that TiVo forgot to change the default MAC address (which contains a company ID), since the MAC address isn't sent out in TCP/IP packets and never makes its way out over the Internet. The MAC is only available locally (via ARP). The only thing the default MAC would tell you is whose parts/chips TiVo is using.

 

Yes, but your theory is far less interesting than the idea the pseudo MAC could somehow be used to gain control over the box.

 

It's probably just the way the network chip works. It presents the chip manufacturer's MAC until the chip firmware is updated with the device manufacturer's MAC. TiVo could have done that in advance but it's not really necessary unless you expect to have multiple Streams going through setup plugged into the same switch at the same time.

 

I think you are making some unwarranted assumptions regarding what this box does and doesn't do. Reading the small print at the bottom of the Tivo Stream page, it appears the Tivo Premieres are providing the actual streams - this box is essentially just forwarding them.

If (and I say this seriously, not snarkily) you can point me to information showing that I am in error, I would appreciate it. But I don't believe the Tivo Stream box is doing any encoding at all.

 

You are in error. TiVo records in native 1:1 mpeg 2 from the source, which can be many gigs in size. The iPad and iPhone can't accept or play mpg 2, they need to be .h264. The stream will transcode the mpeg2 to mp4, a native format to the idevice in a more manageable file size without quality loss. The premiere can't do any of this, the hardware is not capable.

TiVo can record mpeg4, I believe only fios has 3 or 4 channels that are mpeg4 but the hundreds others are mpeg2, but TiVo can't convert them locally to mpeg4 in order for them to be streamed to the iPad.

This brings up the question, anyone with fios record an mpeg4 channel and side load it to the iPad via the stream to so how fast it happens.

 

Tivo Premieres have been able to stream to other Premieres since a software update that occurred earlier this year. It is unlikely this streaming is being done using MPEG-2.

This streaming is different than the older MRV (multi-room viewing) functionality that's been available since the days of the Series 2. MRV transfers do move MPEG-2 files from one Tivo to another, and are a lot slower.

 

why is it unlikey? premiere to premiere streaming is native. it doesnt transcode to anything. an mpeg2 file from one premiere is streamed as mpeg2 to the other. there is no .tivo decryption, mpeg2 transcoding, then immediate streaming.

MRV is a 1 to 1 copy to another premiere, and i can achieve 80+ Mbps MRV.

 

Yes and H.264 is streamed as H.264 from Premiere to Premiere as well. FiOS had eight H.264 channels in mid May and I think they have added a few more since then. But they are all Sports channels and Spanish channels. I recorded some of the Baseball H.264 channels when they had a free weekend as a test.