TiVo Series3 conundrum

[CSMatt]

Good news; from now until the end of the year, TiVo is allowing Lifetime subscribers to migrate their Lifetime subscription to a new Series3 tuner. The bad news is that the Series3 must be purchased from TiVo directly, so expect to pay the full price of 800 dollars. I believe that there is also an additional 100 dollar transition fee as well.

[bluedragon1971]

Also, don't expect it to play AVI's, Divx, or anything like that - at least not supported. I'd expect it to play anything in your iTunes library - so anything that iTunes plays, iTV will play. Apple's not too hard to figure out about some things.

 

 

You are contrdicting yourself there. First, it is QuickTime that needs to support a file format, not iTunes (which uses QuickTime for playback). Second, there is no reason to think that iTV won't play DivX, WMV, or whatever other type of file you have so long as you have the correct codec installed. The way I understand it, the iTV box will simply be streaming the video from your Mac, similar to the way AirTunes works now with an Airport Express. If the Mac supports the video file, then iTV will too.

[plympton]

You are contrdicting yourself there. First, it is QuickTime that needs to support a file format, not iTunes (which uses QuickTime for playback). Second, there is no reason to think that iTV won't play DivX, WMV, or whatever other type of file you have so long as you have the correct codec installed. The way I understand it, the iTV box will simply be streaming the video from your Mac, similar to the way AirTunes works now with an Airport Express. If the Mac supports the video file, then iTV will too.

 

But, you remember when Airport Express came out, it only streamed from iTunes, and the hacks that were (are?) necessary to stream ANYTHING else? Apple has a history of intentionally degrading products in order to push their philosophy / bottom-line. I have no doubt that iTV will support iTunes streaming seamlessly, purchases from iTunes, etc. Accessing iLife libraries, sure, but playing back non-MP3, non-AAC, non-MP4 files.. I have my doubts!

 

iTV has the codecs it supports - NOT iTunes! Transcoding on the fly to a single codec for iTV is absolutely NOT the way they're going to go. It'll be done in hardware via a firmware/chipset combination. The overhead involved is WAY too great (ever usr Compressor to convert from AVI -> MP4? Takes a TON of CPU horsepower. On some machines it can't even be done real-time!)

 

(the hardware, of course, would probably support it - it'll probably be some modified off-the-shelf chipset)

 

-Dan