TivoToGo for Series 3

[dougo]

Tivo finally enabled TivoToGo (and Multi-Room Viewing) for Series 3 HD models. This means, in theory, that I can transfer recordings from my DVR onto my PC. In practice, though, almost everything is copy-protected, which means you can't transfer them. Right now the only things I can transfer are episodes of Heroes and The Unit and 3 non-HD movies (out of about 50 currently sitting there). I transferred the Heroes episode to my laptop (running Windows XP; the Tivo Desktop program doesn't run on Linux and there's no compatible program that I could find) and it took about 2 1/2 hours (for a 1 hour episode, which is about 7GB). Not sure if that's because my laptop only has wireless G (my router, which the Tivo is plugged into directly via ethernet, has wireless N) or if the Tivo just has low outgoing bandwidth for some reason. Also, apparently my not-quite-three-year-old laptop is too slow to play HD videos smoothly. And I'm going to guess it will be non-trivial to get them to play on my Linux machine. Still, uh... it's a start!

Comments

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

Almost nothing is copy protected on my cable provider (Comcast). The only things I can't copy are things I downloaded from Amazon or TivoCasts.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I have Comcast too. I guess they're more paranoid here in the East.

[feoh.livejournal.com]

This copy protection business is truly alien to me - Tivo must have had to make a deal with the content providers.

I mean, there's a Firewire port hanging off most modern cable boxes - the bits are there for the taking!