How fast is the HMO multiroom option?

Thanks everyone for your feedback! I do video editing as a hobby and was
stumped as to how much of a delay there would be as the TIVO site gives off
the impression that you can just start watching it in another room. I knew
that wasn't possible, given the piddly bandwidth of a WirelessB connection.
I figured there would be a delay like there is when you stream video from
the net, but was just curious to hear this from actual users versus the hype
on their website. Thanks!

Are all of you guys using this via a Wireless setup or have you connected
your TIVO to a hardwired network?

Now, if they'd only USB2 enable these puppies, life would be good.

"Chief Wiggum" wrote in message
news[email protected]
Depends on the quality it was recorded at....

if it's basic quality, you can watch it real time (after an initial delay)

anything else, and you have to wait to buffer it a bit before you can
watch
it.

Even at 100mb you can't watch the best quality real-time..


"RM" wrote in message
. net...
If I'm using a WirelessB USB Network connector to connect two tivos to
my
home network, I'm curious how fast the multiroom feature is. If I were
to
tape a show in one room and watch it in another, on another tivo, can I
start watching is right away or is there any lag to the transfer? Can
anyone who is using this option with WirelessB provide some insight?

In article ,
said...
Brad wrote:

DirecTivos are never encoding anything. They only decode.

Nor did I say they did. I only used the DirecTivo as an example to show
that the hardware should not be a limitation in reading two streams, and
writing one at the same time.

But there's a huge difference between writing a DTV feed and writing an
analog feed in both processor and disk usage.

"Brad" wrote in message
news:[email protected]
In article ,
said...
TiVo "Best quality" has a bitrate of 5800 kb/s (correct?), 100 Mbit
ethernet should theoretically be able to push through roughly 17 times
that. Even 10Mbit ethernet should be able to push through 5800 kb/s.

The problem is that Tivo is already busy recording and playing a show at
almost all times whether it's just the buffer or an actual scheduled
recording. Now you're talking about 2 reads and a write simultaneously.
The system probably can't keep up at that speed.

The hard drive shouldn't have a problem keeping up. 5800 kb/s x 3 is less
than 3 MB/s, which is well within the capabilities of even the slowest drives
currently available, even after you consider seek time to continually jump
between three locations on the disk.

The CPU might be a bottleneck, but it's mostly playing traffic cop, letting
the DMA controllers and the video codec chips do the real work. I'd have a
hard time believing it couldn't keep up with the reads and writes. The
network drivers, on the other hand, might be a bigger issue, since it's
unlikely a USB NIC is doing much to offload the network processing. And then
there's the issue of the bus speed, which for USB 1.1 is 12 Mb/s theoretical,
and half that (optimistically) practical.

When USB 2 drivers are added, the units that support USB 2 might be able to
push faster than realtime "Best" recordings.

Ken

Brad ) wrote in alt.video.ptv.tivo:
It's been in the news recently: a bunch of "USB 2.0" devices
on the market max out at 15 to 22Mbps. Very few devices
come close to the theoretical max.

That's usually the fault of the device and not the bus.

Absolutely. My external hard drive enclosure gives me benchmarked reads
and writes of about 15MB/sec, which is well over 120Mbps. Since this
includes all the file system and OS overhead, the raw speed is almost
certainly faster.

Also, since the drive is connected inside the enclosure with a max 33MB/sec
IDE interface, that's going to limit things a bit.

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Jeff Rife |
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