While many have fixated on TiVo’s new sluggish, incomplete HD UI and possibly limited feature set, TiVo Community über contributor bkdtv (aka K. Fowler) has more quantitatively analyzed the TiVo Premiere’s beefy new hardware. In addition to running through the chips and specs, he’s also conducted a number of speed benchmarks under the “classic” UI.
Those of you not bit by the CCI byte (Cox Communications, Time Warner, and Brighthouse are offenders) might still have reason to consider a TiVo Premiere. As all data transfer speeds are significantly improved across the board. We’re talking 3x, 4x, 5x. Making HD multi-room viewing and TiVoToGo transfers much quicker than real time. Additionally, this speed boost will be felt and appreciated when downloading Amazon VOD content or uploading video to the Premiere. bkdtv has just started analyzing data transfer rates under the newer, processor intensive HD Flash-based UI. While he’s not ready to render a verdict, he’s seeing about a 25% reduction in those transfer speeds.
The benefit requires a Premier unit on each end?
Dave do you know is this over a wireless adapter or over a wired connection? I have been wondering if they put in a Gigabit network jack or if they are sticking with the 100 Mb connection…
Ryan, Good question. For everything other than MRV, no. For MRV, I’m not sure, but imagine there’d be a boost could sending content to an existing HD or S3.
Brad, I believe it’s all wired and they are not using Gigabit. The prior bottleneck(s) wasn’t the NIC, but the processing power.
But I’ll let bkdtv elaborate…
I never understand why this question gets asked so much. If you have a 100Mbps connection and you’re only pulling 10Mbps through it, what makes anyone think that a 1Gbps connection would be any faster? It seems like common sense to me, but what do I know.
Anyways, it looks like the TiVo premier has enough throughput to stream at least three HD shows at once. So lets hope it gets leveraged to negate the Copy Once flag. That ability and collaborative tuners would be enough to make me look at TiVo again.
Yeah I am not sure I am following your logic. I have Gbps in the walls of my house with a Gbps routers. I have multiple TiVos and computers hooked up to this network. In my book, I would like to transfer at those speeds in between computers/Tivos, hence the question… Unless you are saying that a TiVo does not output any faster than 10Mbps, which your point would then make sense and answer my question as well….
I would have hoped they would have put Gigabit ethernet on it with the additional hope that they could send/receive over 100Mbps – maybe not up to 1Gbps, but still, it’d be nice for a box like this who’s primary data is large files (HD Video) to be be able to send/receive it as quick as possible.
Thanks for the information. It definitely is worth a read.
I was definitely hoping that Tivo would have gone to a streaming system for MRV to avoide the CCI issue. Valley rumors that is “soon to come” in an automatic update to the TiVo premier but I’ve seen nothing yet. I’ve got a lot of customers who have multiple TiVos in a back closet that cannot share content home wide through my BOCS system until this is fixed.
Great link Dave thanks (and thanks @bkdtv)!
Looking at the power savings I might get from using a Premiere instead of an HD, it looks like 38W – 25W = 13W assuming my Tivo is recording ALL THE TIME. Suspect it isn’t, but lets ignore that. .013KW x 30 x 24 = 9KWh for the month. Which for what PG&E charges me for my most expensive power is $0.24/KWh. So it might save me $2.24 a month. If I bought the $299 unit, it would pay for itself in only 11 years! Okay, forget that argument…
As for transfer rates, it looks like Tivo HD to Tivo Premier MRV transfers are NOT any faster based on the Tivo Community forum postings… and I’m not really clear on what the Premier to HD transfer rates would be. Presumably 16-29Mbps or so, since limited by the HD, but since I usually get more in the range of 16Mbps over MoCA and would really like more like 29Mbps more of the time…
It’s my understanding that the TiVo records in mpeg2, which is disappointing. Is there any planned update or workaround that would allow the TiVo to record in mpeg4/h.264? Seems like that would be more ideal for storage, streaming and exporting to portable players.
Updating the software to take full advantage of the dual-core processor and using a more efficient video codec would significantly improve this box with no extra hardware needed.
The cable providers transmit MPEG2 video, so this it an optimal solution for digital cable – no transcoding or degradation of picture quality is needed.