TiVo Community Forums Archives - Series 2 Future Features

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Series 2 Future Features
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Posted by: saharasurfer

I'm very curious about what the members here have heard (rumours, things more concrete than rumours, expectations, etc) and think about this topic:

I did find this thread here that discusses the probability(?) of using one the USB's to enable broadband access to the daily update.

Other features I'm wondering about :

* The serial jack: tivo.com says it's for future use. Does this mean it's totally disfunctional right now? Can the series2 as shipped today control a DirecTV receiver (without IR !) or not?

* Is there talk of the series2 USBs being used for USB external hard drives or (even better) allowing access to a drive on the LAN? If the tivo software could format an external HD, a lot of hacking could be avoided and a few more extended warantees might be sold.

Please let me know what you think ... and add features you want to hear about. (I've only mentioned ones that were near and dear to me although I've heard about gaming, video-on-demand, etc.)

Posted by: Avian

The serial jack is there on the old TiVos too, it controls any DirecTV box with a serial or homecontrol port. It however will not control Cable or DishNetwork boxes.

The USB port has been talked about being there for external storage too.

Posted by: jtallon

Is USB (12 megabits per second before overhead) fast enough for full-motion video ?

At lowest quality Tivo video is about a gig an hour. At highest, it's about 4-gig an hour (right ?). Figure after overhead you really get 10 megabits per second out of USB, that's 1.25 megabytes per second. That'd be 75 megabytes in a minute, or 4.5 gigabytes per hour. So I guess the transfer rate of USB might be fast enough, but not by a whole lot.

Anybody else have better math skills than me ? What is the max transfer rate of a USB 1.1 hard disk in gigabytes per hour ? Is it fast enough for Tivo ?

Posted by: saharasurfer

quote:
Originally posted by Avian
The serial jack is there on the old TiVos too, it controls any DirecTV box with a serial or homecontrol port. It however will not control Cable or DishNetwork boxes.

The USB port has been talked about being there for external storage too.

Thanks for the reply. I knew the series1 serial port was functional for DirecTV (and not for cable and dish-net.). I'm specifically questioning the accuracy of tivo.com's specs for their series2 unit, which describes the serial as for "future use". Because they don't elaborate upon that, to me this implies it's not working at all, even for existing series1 features. I was hoping for clarification on that. [I was actually hoping that someone with a series2 and DirecTV (NOT DirecTivo) receiver would come along and say that the series2 serial was currently functional for that setup.]

Posted by: mishagray

quote:
Originally posted by jtallon
Is USB (12 megabits per second before overhead) fast enough for full-motion video ?

At lowest quality Tivo video is about a gig an hour. At highest, it's about 4-gig an hour (right ?). Figure after overhead you really get 10 megabits per second out of USB, that's 1.25 megabytes per second. That'd be 75 megabytes in a minute, or 4.5 gigabytes per hour. So I guess the transfer rate of USB might be fast enough, but not by a whole lot.

Anybody else have better math skills than me ? What is the max transfer rate of a USB 1.1 hard disk in gigabytes per hour ? Is it fast enough for Tivo ?

BEST quality video is about 8Mbs. So 12Mbs would be fast enough, but it doesn't leave much room to spare.

But USB based hard-drives are not very common. A more common feature would be to play Tivo recordings that are stored on another Tivo (via Ethernet). I think this is really just a simple extension of the iVOD initiative that they have already mentioned.

iVOD is where you will be able to purchase Video On Demand over a high bandwidth internet connection.

Another USB feature mentioned is exchanging MP3 and photo between CD players and digital cameras etc. This would turn the Tivo into a true multi-media management server.