# speed up hd transfers between tivo hd and pc: MoCA?



## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

I've been poking around various internet places, including this forum, and am coming to the conclusion that MoCA won't speed up transfers between a tivo hd and my pc. Is that the case?

I get about 9Mbps now over wireless using kmttg, slightly better when using wired ethernet (maybe 5%); router is a D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit. Roughly 3 hours to transfer a 9 gig hd program.

Someone said the only way to improve this was by changing the prom to (somehow) enable direct transfers. True?

Thanks,
Mark M.


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## dlfl (Jul 6, 2006)

Your picture is pretty much correct -- the bottleneck is the THD itself. Premieres transfer several times faster, BTW. They say you can speed it up by putting both tuners on channels that are not tuned, so the CPU and HDD aren't loaded by writing to the 30 minute buffers. I've never bothered with that and doubt the improvement is major.

Someone else can speak about PROM mods.


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## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

Thanks for your help. Hmm .. several times faster? That adds up to a lot of hours saved! But I doubt I'll kick over the bucks for a new premiere with 1tb and lifetime service just for that. Then again, if I sell my hd xl ...


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## steve614 (May 1, 2006)

dlfl said:


> Someone else can speak about PROM mods.


[cough]lrhorer[/cough] 

Although I don't think a prom mod would help in this situation. As mentioned, the bottleneck is the processor and network capability of the Tivo.
Transfers do go a little faster when both tuners are tuned to a non-existant channel, but not enough to make a *real* difference (IMO).


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## lew (Mar 12, 2002)

Putting both tuners on channels you don't receive will make a noticeable effect on transfer speed. KMTTG has an "autotune" feature which will do that for you. MoCA should give you approximately the same speed as wired, your case 5% but some people may be getting interference and will do much better.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

steve614 said:


> [cough]lrhorer[/cough]


Gesundheit.



steve614 said:


> Although I don't think a prom mod would help in this situation.


Yeah, it can, quite a bit. Using backported USB drivers and a Gigabit USB / Ethernet adapter, Jamie P. achieved transfer speeds up to 117 Mbps.

Even with stock Ethernet drivers, my S3s can manage over 45 Mbps using the Ethernet port under TyTool. Similar results can be obtained using MFS_FTP. The THD is slower, but can still manage over 38 Mbps.



steve614 said:


> As mentioned, the bottleneck is the processor and network capability of the Tivo.


Yes, but TTG bogs down primarily because the TiVo is transcoding the files on the fly from .ty or .ty+ to .TiVo. Eliminate the transcode by employing tserver or MFS_FTP, and the transfer goes much faster.

That said, for the most part I mostly forego the very large gains in performance allowed by TyTool / tserver in favor of the huge feature gain of kmttg. Since almost all of my transfers occur while I am asleep or at work, I really don't care how long they take.



steve614 said:


> Transfers do go a little faster when both tuners are tuned to a non-existant channel, but not enough to make a *real* difference (IMO).


Well, better than 10%. That is significant, if not radical.


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## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

You've all given me a lot to look into and think about. I appreciate it! 

Keep 'em coming if you have them, else thanks for what I've got.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

markmarz said:


> Thanks for your help. Hmm .. several times faster? That adds up to a lot of hours saved!


"Several times" is a bit of exaggeration. It's about twice as fast. I just ran a quick test and I can transfer a file from my Elite to my PC at about 18Mbps. But still half the time isn't bad if you transfer a lot.

Dan


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## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

Huh. Do you know if the Elite transfers at the same rate as an ordinary peasant Premiere? An Elite is it out for me because no OTA.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

My regular premiere isn't currently hooked up, so I can't say for sure. (I'm hooking it back up this weekend, so I'll try to remember to test again after I do) It's possible the Elite is slightly slower since it is maintaining 4 active live TV buffers. Although from my experience on other TiVos the live TV buffers only have a marginal effect on TiVoToGo speeds so I wouldn't expect more then a few extra Mbps from a standard Premiere with two less buffers.

Dan


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## fyodor (Sep 19, 2006)

If you go to the Premiere forum there's an FAQ that discusses transfer speeds.


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## WDWPassholder (May 25, 2012)

This thread has some good information, I have been experimenting trying to get a more consistent completion of copies of TiVo programs to my iMac. Tried both Roxio Toast and kmttg. I also tried kmttg within Parallels Window virtual machine. I have been trying all these methods because the transfer process will not stay successfully running forever unwatched. 

Finding out about the Help menu option to Restart the TiVo was nice, but still would like to know if there is an easy way to check something to know whether it needs to be restarted. I think I caused myself problems by trying multiple different software options at the same time. When one method had a problem, I tried another instead of trying a restart.

This thread discussed the AutoTune option of kmttg. Since that option is set up for only two tuners, and I have four, unsure whether it would work as intended on 2 of my 4? I did try it at one time without success, but it may have been at a time when I needed to restart the TiVo. 

Most recently I have been trying various options to get the Auto Transfers to work using kmttg. I use the kmttg documentation to try to learn about doing this stuff, but struggling with some of it. Anyone know of some better doc, or visual help, YouTube or other? 

Also, is there an automated way to copy the final encoded file to my iTunes directory? I use Home Sharing of iTunes to Apple devices: Apple TV (2 &3); iPad.


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## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

I believe you've hijacked my thread, sir.


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## WDWPassholder (May 25, 2012)

Sorry, I was reading several threads, making notes of things to try, and probably replied to the wrong thread. I was not familiar with what MoCA was until I checked wikipedia recently. I am using ethernet for my connections, so I am not able to help your research of MoCA. I found the replies in this thread to your question helpful though, I am interested in speeding up transfers and getting more consistent results of hd transfers. Thanks for asking questions, I appreciate seeing the variety of tangent answers that help newbies like me learn.


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## dlfl (Jul 6, 2006)

dlfl said:


> Your picture is pretty much correct -- the bottleneck is the THD itself. Premieres transfer several times faster, BTW. .......





Dan203 said:


> "Several times" is a bit of exaggeration. It's about twice as fast. I just ran a quick test and I can transfer a file from my Elite to my PC at about 18Mbps. But still half the time isn't bad if you transfer a lot.
> 
> Dan


My "several times" was THD vs. Premiere (as the quote above shows).

The detailed performance evaluation done by bkdtv and reported in the Premiere forum here (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=444083#A4) gives average download bitrates of 9 Mbps for THD and 32 Mbps for the Premere, i.e., 3.4X faster. This is for the Premiere transfering mpg -- not ts which is even faster. Perhaps later results have shown a smaller Premiere advantage ??

The older S3 is faster than the THD (13 Mbps) and from your test results it looks like the Elite is slower than the Premiere.


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## markmarz (Feb 3, 2002)

dlfl said:


> The detailed performance evaluation done by bkdtv and reported in the Premiere forum here (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=444083#A4) gives average download bitrates of 9 Mbps for THD and 32 Mbps for the Premere, i.e., 3.4X faster. This is for the Premiere transfering mpg -- not ts which is even faster. Perhaps later results have shown a smaller Premiere advantage ??


Just downloaded a 7.7gb 105 minute show on my new used Premiere XL to a local hard drive in 28 minutes. Peak download speed was 41.1Mbps, avg 36.5Mbps. This is terrific compared to my HD XL which averages roughly 11Mbps when autotuning before transferring.

All transfers over wired gigabit using kmttg as mpg. Note I wasn't able to autotune the Premiere because it was recording at the time. With these speeds I'll need an additional incentive to hack my HD XL; perhaps it's time to sell.

This is the main (but not only) reason I bought the Premiere; thanks aaronwt!


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## Surrealone (Dec 8, 2006)

Not sure about all the numbers it seems to be alll over the place. But I have tried a few diff things First was WiFi Tivo G adapter about 6 or 8 MBPS then powerline 10 to 12 MBPS and now my problem has been solved with MoCa 30 to 40 MBPS. I would love to hardwire but it is not in the cards for me with good CAT6 and GIG switching none of the matters the slow part is the Tivo itself. The max speed you can get from Coax with short distance under 200ft is around 125 MBPS they say you can go more but will see packets drop


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