TiVo New Features Survey
Remember the TiVo To Go feature announced at CES last month? It looks like TiVo is doing some quick market research before they ready their betas. They're hosting a New Features Survey open to all. If you ever considered taking video off of your TiVo to archive or share with a friend, by all means take the survey today.
They ask about several features including the ability to move programs from your TiVo to your PC, the ability to burn DVDs on your TiVo or on your computer, the ability to edit video on your tivo to cut portions out, and the ability to move videos from your computer to your TiVo.
Matt: Thanks for the heads-up on the survey. I had no idea they were looking at allowing us to move video *to* the box over the network. If they can make it handle MPEG1 & 2 without transcoding, they will have (a) effectively killed my desire to buy a connected DVD player, and (b) ensured that I'll be buying one or two additional Series 2s and retiring my pair of Series 1s.
Posted by: Roger Benningfield | February 22, 2004 at 09:20 PM
Yeah, wouldn't that be insane? I think the hard part is coming up with legal reasons for a company to enable this technology. Personally, I'd love to watch movie trailers and other things I download from the internet, not just pirated first-run movies (which is what I would assume most people would use it for).
Posted by: Matt Haughey | February 22, 2004 at 09:24 PM
Legal is easy - a lot of people have home video on their PC now. It is something many vendors *push* for PC sales - edit your home videos on your PC, burn a DVD, etc. This would just add 'send it to your TiVo for playback on your TV'.
Posted by: MegaZone | February 22, 2004 at 09:35 PM
I can't really think of a good reason to put video on the box, well, except for internet videos, but that's not compelling enough. The one feature that will make or break this, is exporting with editing / burning to dvd. I mean, I could save every episode of Good eats to a DVD and not have to even consider buyin the 30$ a show dvd's from foodtv.com. W/ out editing, or dvd storage, it's a waste of time, I won't watch tv on my computer, I've got a 32in hdtv for that purpose. But that's just me.
AO
Posted by: AO | February 23, 2004 at 06:43 AM
This sounds perfect!
Posted by: Joel | February 23, 2004 at 08:52 AM
I think it'd be great if we could watch CinemaNow or Movielink movies on TiVo.
Posted by: Brad | February 23, 2004 at 09:38 AM
I don't get why this idea is so crazy or considered illegal. Right now you can get a $50 USB TV Tuner w/capture and save all the video you want to your PC and record as many DVDs as you want. Why is Tivo so flummoxed by this?
Posted by: pb | February 23, 2004 at 03:58 PM
I do all this already with DVArchive and ReplayTV.
Tivo want some tips, they could do worse than check out some DVArchive forums to see how people have been using PC streaming and archiving for years now...
http://dvarchive.sourceforge.net/
http://dvarchive.cdp1802.org/dvarchive_faqs/
http://www.planetreplay.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=15
Posted by: meehawl | February 23, 2004 at 04:01 PM
I filled out the survey, but added in the comments that asking these questions of DirecTivo users was just jerking our chains, *again*.
The series 2 DirecTivo still falls behind the standalone in new feature implementation, and when DirecTV took it over, some features were dropped ( like advanced wishlists ). At some point they need to start calling the DirecTV offering "Tivo-like" if the differences get any greater.
Posted by: Mike | February 24, 2004 at 11:59 AM
True, the DirecTiVo line is starting to show it's age, in light of no HMO and the likelihood that it'll also miss out on TiVo To Go.
Still - true digital recording off an integrated satellite receiver, with dual tuners, makes it a more elegant product than even a Series 2 TiVo. If you have DTV it's the only way to fly!
So in the meantime, I've hacked my Series 1 DTiVo box to allow me to program it via TiVoWeb, and extract recordings via TyTool. It offers me all the cool features with none of the sacrifices. Well, all the features except HD. When that becomes affordable, I might have to give up some of my hacks... hopefully by then the "official" feature set will have caught up!
Posted by: Josh | February 25, 2004 at 10:56 PM
You mean you haven't noticed? Every large corporation is interwined with another so to stay in the club, they have to offer some sort of DRM.
Thanks to Linux, China and smaller companies, we have a way around that. TiVo has already pointed they're joining the DRM bandwagon so why wait? - get a card or an external box.
Posted by: jbelkin | February 26, 2004 at 01:57 PM
Whatever. Anyone with a brain already has their Tivo content on their hard drive. Personally I do it through an Archos 340.
Posted by: bill brasky | February 26, 2004 at 04:09 PM