While I was preoccupied in Canada, TiVo released a public beta of TiVo Desktop 2.4. Notable new features include the ability to broadcast “HD” photographs (1280×720) from computer to Series3 TiVo and the ability to transcode several video formats (other than DivX) for transfer to and playback on Series2 units. A less glamorous, but useful, feature allows the software to map beyond the default TiVo folder.
A few gotchas… TiVo has labeled this Preview software, though they document about a dozen known issues (hence my Public Beta label). The ability to transcode video (for TiVo playback OR in the other direction for iPod and PSP playback) requires a Plus codec license: $25. Sorry Mac owners, this is a Windows-only release — Perhaps Roxio will incorporate similar functionality into a Toast update.
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Why are Series3 users being frozen out of all the Series2 features? This is really starting to aggravate me.
What's the hate for divx?
"the ability to transcode several video formats (other than DivX) for transfer to and playback on Series2 units. "
Why can you use several other video formats (not sure that they are?) and not DivX (and thus I also assume not XviD?) It just seems like those would be the two better codecs for quality and compression purposes.
I'm very interested in how HD JPEGs show up on a Tivo Series 3 using this new software. If someone can report on that, via Comments or otherwise, I'm sure we'd all appreciate it.
Some things I'd like to see some info on:
-- whether there's still an unused black box around the image (current Tivo Desktop doesn't use the full height or width of the screen)
-- how does it handle undersized or oversized images? Does it scale them properly? Are there options for how you want to scale over- or under-sized pictures?
-- What happens if you have a 1080 TV? Is the output mode reset to 720? Or does it scale the image to 720, then up it to 1080 for display (thus possibly making the image look crappy, depending on how they scale it)?
Surely I'm not the only person in the world looking for a device that can display decent, hi-res HD JPEG image slideshows, without barfing at a horrendous implementation of the concept? I mean, come on, CE manufacturers, how hard can implementing HD JPEG slideshows BE?