Slow network speeds & lost connectivity

[reticent]

I've got a philips Tivo which works well for the most part. It was sold to me as having a 10/100mb turbonet card and this is what I set it up as when installing the nz tivo images to the hard drive. Copying files from the tivo using msf_ftp, the transfers run at about 1000kb/s or 1mb/s. These speeds suggest a 10mb card rather than a 10/100. Is this common, or are config changes required to get it working at full speed?

Secondly, the msf_ftp works fine for about 5minutes then stops. Not only does msf_ftp stop responding but the whole networking system on the Tivo dies. The tivo will not respond to pings, telnet, tivoweb etc etc. I have to reboot the system to get it all working again. I've experience the same problem using tytools, the copy begins then kills the networking on my Tivo. Any Ideas?

[Wibble]

Copying files from the tivo using msf_ftp, the transfers run at about 1000kb/s or 1mb/s.

1-2MBps is about what you should expect, even on 100Mbps card. 1Mb is usual with tytools. If you tivo is not recording putting it in standby might make it go to 2Mbps. (From personal experience using ms_ftp and the .tmf format).

ms_ftp is quite flacky, make sure passive is disabled on your client and also make sure only 1 connection/thread to the tivo is used. Basically make your ftp client as dumb as possible.



Not only does msf_ftp stop responding but the whole networking system on the Tivo dies.
I've only had that when having multiple ftp connections to the tivo ms_ftp server. If a transfer fails. Make sure the ms_ftp server is still not connected to the client.

[Darren King]

It was sold to me as having a 10/100mb turbonet card

Well, it is like this: The chip on the Turbonet card will support up to 100mbit transfers but the bottleneck is the CPU bus speed of the TiVo limiting speeds to the figures you have quoted and that is as good as it gets like Wibble has already said. The TiVo only has a 40MHz processor and it is doing a lot of other things at the same time.

[reticent]

Thanks for the quick reply, and my apologies for the slow one. I've not had a chance to try passive transfers but I will give it a shot. I'd been told that it was best to use a browser such as IE or firefox rather than an FTP client, I tried firefox and had the same thing. I think it's got an active/passive option so will toggle that to see if I have better luck. Some apps like mfs-ftp, and tivo-web ty streaming should really come working 'out of the box' in my opinion. The whole install/configuration process is easy enough but configuring new apps can be a bit of a pain. The outstanding problems I'm having with Tivox are a different kettle of fish altogether - http://forums.oztivo.net/showthread.php?t=310&highlight=Tivox

[Darren King]

Some apps like mfs-ftp, and tivo-web ty streaming should really come working 'out of the box' in my opinion.

They can't. The people who made these apps have expressed for them not to be made available with the image and we have to respect that.

A trip down history lane for you is here: http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/oztivo/2004-November/019684.html

There is quite a bit of reading in that as to why people should not expect TiVo to be an "out of the box" or "plug and play" consumer device.

[Wibble]

The outstanding problems I'm having with Tivox are a different kettle of fish altogether -

The one I'm using works, it's ccxstream_s1 from ccxstream-1.0.17a_beta, can't remember where I got it from.

I Haven't actually used Tivox, I just use the ccxstream server on the Tivo and browse to the share on the Xbox. It's quite slow loading a program (~30sec l) and the sound can get out of sync.

[reticent]

I'd be stoked if I could get even that working. I've tried ccxstream and mfs_ftp streams in XBMC and they both crash the respective daemons on the Tivo. I dont think i've ever used ccxstream-1.0.17a_beta so I might google up a copy of that. I don't actually watch a huge amount of TV where the tivo is setup so want to get some way of playing it on my Xbox.

[reticent]

Just thought I'd post an update with the results of the changes I made to get mfs_ftp working. I changed the FlashFXP settings from passive to active, and capped the download rate to 800k/s - figured i'd rather have the client dictate the download speed rather than have the transfer saturate the tivo's cpu. It's worked flawlessly since. While it'd be nice to have the transfers a bit quicker, it's just a matter of queuing up the files and leaving it to do it's thing.

[petestrash]

Thanks for posting what works for you, it's always helpful for others.

Peter.