TiVo Community Forums Archives - Scheduling from the Internet

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Scheduling from the Internet
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Posted by: lars011

I read on the Tivo website that with the Series 2 it was possible to Schedule a show to record from the Internet, but I could not find out how. Is this a coming attraction, or did I just miss a link? Also, any word if in the future you will be able to call your house to record a show since its connected to the phone line?

Posted by: drmcm

This is a future attraction. Not yet officially implemented (although the underground folks have had TiVoWeb running for a while). TiVo hasn't specified exactly how this would work, but I'd presume it would best is your TiVo was connected to the net (USB to ethernet) so that your TiVo could either regularly check or actively be sent new scheduling information you've entered on the web. Or for DTiVo boxes you could imagine this info being sent via satellite. It would be somewhat lame to have to wait sometimes for more than a day for the next phone call to get your web scheduling.
-Mike

Posted by: Francesco

http://www.tivo.com/0.9.asp

Posted by: DarkHelmet

There are some interesting messages in the MFS resource database. In my case (DirecTiVo 3.1):

code:ResourceItem 867825/679 {
      Id             = 131756
      String         = {The following internet request have been received:

%s

Please look at the To Do List and Recording History to determine what will be recorded}
    }
    ResourceItem 867825/680 {
      Id             = 131757
      String         = {Internet Request Received}
    }

I hope they fix the grammar before turning it on. :)

I'm guessing that when the daily dialin happens, it will be sent any internet requests and will then evaluate them locally.

I do not expect this to happen on the DirecTiVo releases as the daily dialins happen every 3 to 5 days or so now.. There would be too much time
delay for this to work. I doubt they'd use the satellite feeds to broadcast the requests to every box and then let them pick out their own instructions.. they would use up their 30 minute service download block if the internet request stuff took off. Secondly, DirecTiVo is purely a DirecTV service now, if anything happened, it would likely happen from the directv.com web site rather than tivo.com. I do not expect that to happen unless it turns out to be popular on the standalone boxes. TivoPony has already commented that the internet stuff isn't part of the HDVR2 contract which is why there were no USB ethernet drivers..

Posted by: grecorj

Funny, I already have remote scheduling capabilities on my TiVo. Here's how it works:

"Hello, hon? Can you record the 7 o'clock SportsCenter for me? I'm running late. Great. Thanks!"

Posted by: grecorj

quote:
Originally posted by DarkHelmet
I doubt they'd use the satellite feeds to broadcast the requests to every box and then let them pick out their own instructions.. they would use up their 30 minute service download block if the internet request stuff took off.

But obviously DTV has enough bandwidth to "hit" your box to make permissioning changes and such. Why couldn't they "hit" your box to force it to make a call to pick up any internet instructions? Then you would receive an email confirming the change and letting you know if there were any conflicts along with an updated To Do List. Sounds simple, right?

Posted by: aciurczak

Grecorj -

I think you're on the right track. And it also becomes a potential revenue source. If I were them, I'd allow people say, 10 forced calls a month (on top of the every other day calls that are already happening). And maybe charge 50 cents for any one on top of that. This way everybody gets the feature for free. DirecTV isn't on the hook for an excessive number of additional calls. Users get their boxes updated right away, on command. And if people go crazy with it, DirecTV makes a few bucks.

Posted by: DarkHelmet

quote:
Originally posted by grecorj
But obviously DTV has enough bandwidth to "hit" your box to make permissioning changes and such. Why couldn't they "hit" your box to force it to make a call to pick up any internet instructions? Then you would receive an email confirming the change and letting you know if there were any conflicts along with an updated To Do List. Sounds simple, right?

Sure, but one difference. DirecTV stream messages to the receiver/decoder hardware and to the access cards. The tivo side is not involved in this at all. That part of the stream is self contained within the receiver side of things. Also, these messages are a fairly small proportion of the available bandwidth on each transponder.

However, that message stream doesn't go to the tivo side of the fence. What tivo gets from the satellite is by tuning to a temporary, low bandwidth "channel" and sucking down what is normally the video stream and then processing it after completion.

A normal channel seems to carry about 1GB of data per hour (yes, it varies anywhere from 0.5G to 3GB per hour, I know), and I'm assuming they dont dedicate a full share of data to the tivo service data download. I'd be suprised if it was even 1/10 of the size of a normal channel - but for an illustration lets suppose that it is 1/10. That's 50MB for that half an hour, assuming that it is raw data and nor something encoded to look like video just like the 'Advanced Paid Programming' looks like on discovery channel. If it is encoded, then it is probably a lot less.

Hmm. OK, so maybe they can afford to do this. :)

But it doesn't change the fact that tivo are talking about it for tivo series 2 boxes.. and directv haven't even dropped a hint about it. And that TivoPony stated that the HDVR2 development excluded "internet support".

I'd love to be wrong. But I'm glad I've got tivoweb for now.