# Improved Live TV Streaming Coming Soon?



## sbiller (May 10, 2002)




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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Just to be clear I have no inside knowledge about this. It's merely an educated guess based on what I know about the iOS app and the Mind RPC protocol.

The way it works now makes sense based on the current limitations of the Mind RPC protocol. But once the TiVo software, and by extension the Mind RPC protocol, is updated to allow live buffer streaming to the Mini there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do the same thing with the Stream.

Dan


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## sbiller (May 10, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> Just to be clear I have no inside knowledge about this. It's merely an educated guess based on what I know about the iOS app and the Mind RPC protocol.
> 
> The way it works now makes sense based on the current limitations of the Mind RPC protocol. But once the TiVo software, and by extension the Mind RPC protocol, is updated to allow live buffer streaming to the Mini there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do the same thing with the Stream.
> 
> Dan


It made complete sense to me when I read it. I hope you'll forgive me for creating a new thread. This is probably in the top five list of things I would like to see improved with the Stream.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

The top one for me is Android support.


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## sbiller (May 10, 2002)

aaronwt said:


> The top one for me is Android support.


The second one for me is 'improved audio volume' on transcodes. It sounds like we should start another thread on 'what's next for the Stream'.


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## ducker (Feb 21, 2006)

There seems like there are a number of little areas that could be improved... Background downloads would be at the top of my list. Queing up a bunch of shows to pull down and I have to leave my ipad on/open/and plugged in as to not run out of power? seems like poor implementation to me. (ie. taking on the steam stuff to the app, with out adding more code to work in the background)


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## button1066 (Sep 4, 2012)

My TiVos are regular two tuner premieres and watching live TV is already made difficult because of the popup messages asking me if I want to continue watching the current channel or allow another recording. Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports or news when something big is breaking and it's not that big of a deal to me to have those available on my iPad at home when I could just watch them on a regular TV.

In other words I think its always good when a company offers extra features but in this case I just don't see that it's worth putting too much effort into it.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

ducker said:


> There seems like there are a number of little areas that could be improved... Background downloads would be at the top of my list. Queing up a bunch of shows to pull down and I have to leave my ipad on/open/and plugged in as to not run out of power? seems like poor implementation to me. (ie. taking on the steam stuff to the app, with out adding more code to work in the background)


This is an Apple limitation. This is not up to TiVo.


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## ducker (Feb 21, 2006)

innocentfreak said:


> This is an Apple limitation. This is not up to TiVo.


Which aspect? the fact that the only thing that can download in the background is the app store? Otherwise the app has to be active?

Horrible.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

ducker said:


> Which aspect? the fact that the only thing that can download in the background is the app store? Otherwise the app has to be active?
> 
> Horrible.


Yeah. Apple has a limitation on how long an app can download in the background. It is something like 10 minutes.

This is why one of my suggestions is to allow the user to setup season passes so anytime the app is open it would automatically check for those shows on the TiVo and prompt for download.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Yes Apple does not allow 3rd party apps download for more then 10 minutes in the background. It's a crappy limitation for some thing, like the TiVo app, but it prevents 3rd party apps from sucking up all your battery by downloading when you're not even aware it's doing anything.

What might be cool is for them to have a manual setting in the options area where you could grant background download privileges to specific apps. 

Dan


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> What might be cool is for them to have a manual setting in the options area where you could grant background download privileges to specific apps.


Which goes against Apple's KISS mentality so I doubt that will ever happen.

What Apple could do is allow apps to continue downloading in the background as long as the device is plugged in.

Of course none of this prevents TiVo from actually downloading 10 minutes in the background instead of stopping. That would handle cases if the user wants to do something like check his/her mail for a few minutes while downloading.


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## sbiller (May 10, 2002)

morac said:


> Which goes against Apple's KISS mentality so I doubt that will ever happen.
> 
> What Apple could do is allow apps to continue downloading in the background as long as the device is plugged in.
> 
> Of course none of this prevents TiVo from actually downloading 10 minutes in the background instead of stopping. That would handle cases if the user wants to do something like check his/her mail for a few minutes while downloading.


The best iOS podcast player, Downcast, supports the 10 minute background downloads. It works well. It notifies you if the 10 minutes expires without the download finishing. It also notifies when they finish.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

When you reopen the app does the counter reset?

Dan


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## sbiller (May 10, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> When you reopen the app does the counter reset?
> 
> Dan


Yes it does.

http://support.downcastapp.com/customer/portal/articles/476090



> Episode Downloads
> iOS allows third party apps to perform miscellaneous background tasks for up to 10 minutes. This means that the download queue can continue to download episodes while in the background for the allotted time. Once the background time limit is reached, the download queue will be paused. It will resume, based on your Auto Download settings, when Downcast is opened again.
> 
> Note: As of iOS 5, when your iOS device's screen locks, it will send foreground applications to the background.


http://www.dangelus.com/teknocratik/?p=189



> Some apps offer push notifications as a way to let you know that a new episode is available for listening. However, downcast doesnt offer this service. It does use push notifications to let you know, when the app is in the background, whether it found any new shows to download and whether it finished downloading those shows or it had to pause downloading them due to hitting the 10 minute download limit. Apps are only allowed to download something in the background for 10 minutes in iOS and the OS will deliberately stop any activity the app is performing if it goes over the limit. I found, for my uses, that these push notifications were pretty handy.


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## radish (Dec 21, 2001)

morac said:


> Which goes against Apple's KISS mentality so I doubt that will ever happen.


You've seen the notification center config screen, right? They gave up on KISS with iOS 5


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

radish said:


> You've seen the notification center config screen, right? They gave up on KISS with iOS 5


Well that was more or less copied from Android, so I blame Google. If you want to pin something on Apple you should have used the multitask bar as an example.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

TiVo should offer the option to download in the background for the 10 minutes and then alert the user when the download is paused via a notification. That way the user can just manually navigate back to the TiVo app to restart the 10 minute clock. 

Dan


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## ShayL (Jul 18, 2007)

Dan203 said:


> Yes Apple does not allow 3rd party apps download for more then 10 minutes in the background. It's a crappy limitation for some thing, like the TiVo app, but it prevents 3rd party apps from sucking up all your battery by downloading when you're not even aware it's doing anything.
> 
> What might be cool is for them to have a manual setting in the options area where you could grant background download privileges to specific apps.
> 
> Dan


It is a bummer that the stream itself can't queue up downloads and store the output of the transcoding. Then the client can just transfer the output down for storage.

I guess that stream itself is only the transcodes and passes the output down to the client for it either show or store.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

ShayL said:


> It is a bummer that the stream itself can't queue up downloads and store the output of the transcoding. Then the client can just transfer the output down for storage.
> 
> I guess that stream itself is only the transcodes and passes the output down to the client for it either show or store.


The Stream would need internal storage for that to work.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

The Stream itself has no internal storage. It's just a middle man who's sole purpose is to convert the TiVo native MPEG-2 stream to an H.264 stream that the iPad can actually play.

Dan


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> The Stream itself has no internal storage. It's just a middle man who's sole purpose is to convert the TiVo native MPEG-2 stream to an H.264 stream that the iPad can actually play.
> 
> Dan


Has anyone used an h.264 recording with the stream yet?

Sent from my HTC ReZound using Forum Runner


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I tried with a video I rented from Amazon, just errored out. My cable system doesn't actually broadcast any H.264 channels so I can't test that.

Dan


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> I tried with a video I rented from Amazon, just errored out. My cable system doesn't actually broadcast any H.264 channels so I can't test that.


Since Amazon videos don't stream anyway, it's not surprising that it didn't work. What's more surprising is that it even gave you the option to attempt to stream an Amazon video.


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