Completely agree on the need to be able to rip an iso of the disc and play the whole thing on the TiVo.

I’ve taken to transcoding the Top Gear episodes to Tivo format myself, since the conversion for the Tivo HD doesn’t really produce a decent product. For some things maybe I don’t care, and the automatic transcodes Tivo does are easier. But for something I care about, being able to select the 16:9 high bit rate profile for the Tivo HD in Videora, just works so much better. It seems like about time for the auto-conversion to be a little more sensitive to the capabilities of the Tivo it targets.

And folders? Anybody remember those?

Personally, I don’t use the Tivo for music, photos or podcasts anymore. I have an Apple TV for that. The GUI on the Apple TV is just lightyears better than the Tivo for stuff like this. Sorry, but its true. Hopefully the new Search feature is a hint of future Tivo GUI changes to come.

All in all I’m still a happy Tivo consumer. 2 x Tivo HD’s and one remaining Tivo DT all on the same network happily talking to each other and my TV. And Tivo Desktop happily churning away converting stuff for my iPod and letting me watch shows I download.

My one real wish would be for a way to watch the WHOLE DVD on my Tivo, meaning not just the main title, but all the extras, captions, commentary, etc. Even DVD images. I wish somebody would support a RIPPED format for the complete DVD and there were some software out there that would create that format with little to no interaction on my part. I have AnyDVD, and while I can decrypt the VOB them merge the 1GB sections, then quick fix that, then convert the whole thing to a Tivo format, and REPEAT for each special feature, its a PAIN. And captions still don’t work. And …

I agree that it would be better in the cloud. I can understand TiVo’s reluctance to commit those kind of server and bandwidth resources to transcoding for a free service though. Still, there are so many things that could be improved. Put the RSS engine in the cloud. Use XMPP to manage the downloads. If the format is H.264 or WMV/VC-1 then HD TiVos can be told to pull it down directly, no PC required. For other formats, and for Series2 users, it would message TiVo Desktop to tell it what to do. This would remove all the RSS crap from TiVo Desktop and eliminate the utter stupidity of having to re-create all your subscriptions if you change PCs or even have to reinstall on the same PC. All registering a new install would do would be to change which client gets the message.

As for the deals, that’s what I mean. I think TiVo likes to be in control of what content gets on the box and negotiating the deals gets them promotional consideration on the other websites and within the podcasts. They’re trying to get ‘TiVo’ in front of as many faces as possible to pump up the brand.

I appreciate the tips.

From there you’ll have to hit up the PS3 forums for help on streaming to a PS3. I haven’t a clue.

Also, AnyDVD (not free)is a great little piece of software for getting around encryption. I’m not advocating you use it to get stuff free (people need to get paid or they’ll stop making content), but that doesn’t mean we can’t have that content in the format that suits our purposes.

Lastly, if you want to convert to a smaller MP4 format, Divx is a great little piece of software for those who are new to the video conversion game. It’ll cost you, but the time you spend trying to get the free options out there to work properly offsets the cost IMO.

Best of luck….

I’ll give pyTiVo a try. And compare that to the results I get on the PS3. Perhaps one will be better than the other….?

I’m new to DVD ripping and encoding, so it’s all a little overwhelming at this point. But fun to learn about the new options out there.

Thanks again for the response.

I don’t own a DVD player (that’s hooked up to my TV) anymore so I rip what Netflix selections I can’t stream to my home PC as an MPG then use pyTiVo to send it on up to the TiVo for viewing. After that I delete the MPG (seriously, why keep them around if you can just order them again if you like), rinse, repeat…

TiVo should be paying the developers of pyTiVo. The amount of value they add to the TiVo experience is huge.

Though I don’t know what that will buy you for a PS3.

Is it possible to burn non-copy protected DVDs to your PC and get them to play on the TiVo?

Still, it would be nice if they wouldn’t leave their personal computer users in the dust with all of the advancements they’re making natively in the new units.

That might be the fault of the TiVo itself and not Desktop, but it doesn’t really matter…Their whole TiVo -> Desktop -> TiVo experience is very sad indeed.