GigLan and Tivo?

[mnorman]

Do any of the known tivo/lancard configurations include a lan card with Gigabit support?

I was thinking this would be nice for archiving material collected on the unit effeciently.

[Darren King]

Hi.

Not possible I'm sorry. The TiVo is a 40MHz CPU and the maximum you are EVER going to get out of a series 1 TiVo is in the order of 14Mbps. All the wired networking cards do connect and get detected as 100Mbps devices but will never be able to get anywhere near that.

[petestrash]

Even if the motherboard could handle the thoughput, the ATA33 interface for the harddisk tops out at around 30 MB/s asssuming the drive was doing nothing else.

But if your wanting to dump a lot of shows off it might be worth pulling the harddrive and putting it into a pc and extact directly from the drive.

See http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23192 for details.

Peter.

[mnorman]

good plan, tks a lot

[mnorman]

I wonder if you could cut out a usb port out the back and install inside an ata to usb interface inside, then just plug the laptop in and suck it down at usb2 bandwidth.

You would probably confuse the hell out of the drive if you had the motherboard and usb interface accessing the drive simultaneously so you'd probably have to have a seperate power supply to the disk for when using the usb interface.

Just trying to think of any easy way to not have to open up the box to archive quickly and easily.

[mnorman]

forget usb2 speed, you'd still be limited by presumably as high as ata100..

don't know if hobotivo's 80 or 160 or both support ata100 though.

[mnorman]

80GB at 14Mbps = 13 hr if i calc correctly

QQ

near 2 hours at 100Mbps

tolerable

are those the sort of numbers you guys are finding when archiving?

how proprietary is the hardware in the tivo box? would a custom build of the software on a linux PC be realistic to overcome limitations such as this?

Sorry for such noob questions.

[Darren King]

I wonder if you could cut out a usb port out the back and install inside an ata to usb interface inside......You would probably confuse the hell out of the drive if you had the motherboard and usb interface accessing the drive simultaneously so you'd probably have to have a seperate power supply to the disk for when using the usb interface.

You would have more than that to contend with, like for starters how do you have the TiVo ASIC chip and the USB interface connected onto the same IDE bus at the same time? Even with the TiVo powered off (which it WILL have to be) the TiVo ASIC chip does not magically go into what is called "tri-state" and will drag down the competing IDE interface.

Nope, sorry. Only way you are going to suck the data off at any considerable speed is to remove the hard disk. You could get enterprising and install a removable drive bay however. Won't look pretty but it will solve half your problems......

[Darren King]

don't know if hobotivo's 80 or 160 or both support ata100 though.

The 80GB drive is a second hand one out of a TiVo. Would have been factory fitted. Might be ATA-66 given the usual Maxtor/Quantums I have seen of that vintage.

The 160GB units are brand new Seagates. At LEAST ATA-100 and very possibly Ultra ATA. You have missed out by 24 hours as I had a HoboTiVo unit in for PAL tuner modding that I sent out this morning. Wait a few days and I can tell you for sure as I get them regularly.

[Darren King]

how proprietary is the hardware in the tivo box?

Near the edge connector where you plug in the network card are the words "Proprietary And Confidential TiVo, Inc". Apart from the few of us fortunate enough the schematics are not for public access on the hardware front. This includes the big ASIC chip - the chip with the TiVo logo on it (also known as the "Media Switch" - which is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. That is they are custom, and nobody has the details on exactly how they work. Most of the rest is off-the-shelf parts but you will still need to reverse engineer or reverse compile the boot PROM (eg the BIOS) too.


would a custom build of the software on a linux PC be realistic to overcome limitations such as this?

On the software front there is a good reason why the OzTiVo software has menu items not applicable: It is because "MyWorld" (the TiVo application software) is still a not so well understood application. There is no publicly available source code for it and all the hacks that have been done to make the TiVo work have been with total re-writes of modules that control the hardware - not the overall "look and feel" of the software which is by and large not accessible anyway.

If you are wanting to "archive" so much information are you sure a TiVo is right for you? Sounds like a DVD recorder is more your speed, or you might consider a PC running Myth TV or maybe even FreeVo. Not sure if that is also what you are wanting but has to be a better alternative. By and large people don't buy TiVo's with in mind the notion of transferring bulk material from them. Maybe the odd program here and there, but not on the scale you are talking.

[petestrash]

I think you are trying to over complicate things.

Go with Darren's suggestion, I use an external HDD caddy on a TiVo I use for testing. $20-30 for a pair of caddies and cradles, one for TiVo, one for the PC. It ain't pretty, but works a treat.

I know of people who use a pile of caddies for archiving shows, they just stick in the drive with the show/series they need when they want to watch it.

I can't believe you have found that much to archive off TV :)

Peter

[mnorman]

Thanks a lot for the info, I don't really know what I want yet, but I'll try a TiVo to get started and see how I go. I'm just thinking ahead trying to anticipate needs and potential solutions.

[mnorman]

Pete, It's entirely possible I'm a compulsive horder ;p

tks for your tips too :)

[petestrash]

I agree with Darren, If your aim is for archiving a lot of shows then TiVo is probably not the best choice for you.

A PC runnning either one of the linux based media centres or Microsoft MCE2005 would be a better option.

Peter.