The Tivo's NIC only operates at up to 100Mb and seems quite leisurely. It'll transfer an HD program between boxes faster than the bit rate of the program, so if you stream from one to another, viewing in real time, you'll need to get some distance into the program before you'll be far enough ahead to skip the first ad break. As time progresses, the transfer gets far enough ahead that it's no longer an issue when you come to an ad break. Sorry, I've never timed how long a full transfer takes. It's quite slow, but not really a big problem.
I've got 3x Tivos and the HN package, and have transfered a dozen programs at once (they queue up) and it all happens quietly in the background without fuss.
It appears the TiVo might record the raw stream (.ts). If that's the case you're looking at 1-8GB/hr. My HTPC's SD recordings are around 1GB/hr and HD about 4GB/hr.
The speeds people see (in my 5min of research) seem to vary wildly (17.5Mb/s-90Mb/s). Even so, that's 7.5-40GB/hr.
Typically from my experience the program can transfer faster than what you can watch it (between tivo's), an hour program typically takes around 20 mins to transfer.
If transferring from your PC transfer times can be a lot longer, it depends on the codec used by the video file and how grunty your PC is as it does the conversion to the tivo format, typically If transfering from the PC I just start the conversion and give it a while before I start watching.
One final one - the Auto Transfer function. How does this work?
Is it as it sounds so that any title on Season Pass is automatically transferred to another Tivo on the network without manually having to select it each time?
I think the auto transfer is only from a tivo to your PC, you can preselect which encoding format (optimized for each particular device) and when the tivo records it, it is then automatically transfered to your PC.
From memory the home networking package may not be needed if all you are doing is transfering between tivo's, I think it is only for transfer between tivo's and your PC.
gregmcc: I think the auto transfer is only from a tivo to your PC, you can preselect which encoding format (optimized for each particular device) and when the tivo records it, it is then automatically transfered to your PC.
From memory the home networking package may not be needed if all you are doing is transfering between tivo's, I think it is only for transfer between tivo's and your PC.
No, you do need the HN package to send between TiVos.
Yea, auto transfer is only from TiVo to PC. You also need to register your PC (in addition to the HN package account) to the TiVo account for your TiVo to be able to play content directly from your PC. I have tried several times to get this feature to work, but with no success. So, the PC (for me) ends up as additional TiVo storage. When I want to play the content, I have to transfer it back to the TiVO via the HN package or watch it on the PC via Windows media player. Real pain. PS: Content is DRM locked
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