# Can I stream to Tivo Premiere?



## jsrober (Mar 8, 2010)

Hi,

I have a series 1 box that's around 10 years old. Lifetime service really paid off!

I've been discouraged by the Tivo price/features for a few years, but Premiere has regained my interest.

I rip all my DVDs to ISO's. I have a few terabytes of them on my Windows computer on a shared drive. I use Xbox Media Center (XBMC) to play them on my HDTV. I love XBMC!!!!

If I get a TiVo Premiere, will I be able to play ISO's from the shared drive on my Windows computer? XBMC even downloads movie information and a cover image for each ISO automatically. Can Tivo do this?

XBMC can also view pictures and play music files from network shares. Can Tivo Premiere do this?

I'm trying to decide if I it's really worth the money to upgrade to Tivo Premiere or just build a Media Center PC for roughly the same cost. Windows 7 Media Center can run the awesome Media Center GUI and run XBMC.

Thanks,
John


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## riekl (Jan 29, 2001)

jsrober said:


> Hi,
> 
> I have a series 1 box that's around 10 years old. Lifetime service really paid off!
> 
> ...


You can stream to your Tivo from your PC, but not in ISO format (at least i'm not aware of a plugin that will do it) and Tivo definately wont' go get more content for you for them.

Windows Media center with a cable carfd will give you far more functionality then sTivo (stagnant Tivo 

Oh and the Premier can't really do anything your Series 1 from 10 years ago can't .. Sad isn't it ? (hence my sTivo comment)


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

riekl said:


> Oh and the Premier can't really do anything your Series 1 from 10 years ago can't .. Sad isn't it ? (hence my sTivo comment)


really? just why have you decided to keep posting utter nonsense that has zero basis in reality about the premiere??

I smell two trolls here, the other being the OP and his thinly disguised XBMC spam


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

riekl said:


> You can stream to your Tivo from your PC, but not in ISO format (at least i'm not aware of a plugin that will do it) and Tivo definately wont' go get more content for you for them.
> 
> Windows Media center with a cable carfd will give you far more functionality then sTivo (stagnant Tivo
> 
> Oh and the Premier can't really do anything your Series 1 from 10 years ago can't .. Sad isn't it ? (hence my sTivo comment)


Since when has an S1 TiVo been able to record HD?


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

jsrober said:


> Hi,
> 
> I have a series 1 box that's around 10 years old. Lifetime service really paid off!
> 
> ...


pytivo can stream and/or push and/or pull (although honestly I get confused as to which is which- to me it just works to play back my other vidoes so i dont know which is which). Pytivo has a plugin that takes things in the iso format if I understand correctly (I dont use it that why so unsure).


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## Stormspace (Apr 13, 2004)

jsrober said:


> Hi,
> 
> I have a series 1 box that's around 10 years old. Lifetime service really paid off!
> 
> ...


The quick answer is no. The only way at present to get a DVD to a TiVo is to rip the DVD to mpeg2 using illegal means and serve up the mpeg2 to the TiVo using TiVo Desktop or a similar application. No other features are included for Art or Movie information.

Pictures and Photos have been available for a number of years. TiVo desktop does a good job if serving those to the TiVo, but other apps exist to do that as well.

As for the no change in 10 years...Well that's untrue. There are several features that have been added that never made it to the S1. Most are pay features, but a few aren't. TiVo really did a good job adding features to the Series 2's.


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## jsrober (Mar 8, 2010)

ZeoTiVo said:


> really? just why have you decided to keep posting utter nonsense that has zero basis in reality about the premiere??
> 
> I smell two trolls here, the other being the OP and his thinly disguised XBMC spam


I'm the OP, and I'm not a troll. I do love XBMC, but I'd really prefer to be able to have one box (Tivo Premiere) do all the DVR stuff and the ISO playback stuff. If it can't, I can keep the XBMC, but I'm not a troll.


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## jsrober (Mar 8, 2010)

riekl said:


> Windows Media center with a cable carfd will give you far more functionality then sTivo (stagnant Tivo


I agree with your sTivo sentiment. I haven't cared much about HD which is why I've been satisfied with my S1 box for so long. Tivo has added a handful of features, but nothing I've cared much about or that has been worth the price of an update (especially with lifetime service). Now that I care more about HD, I'm back to seeing if the Premiere is worth it.

I don't think it is, but given my options I think I might buy it anyway. I have Comcast and the signal drops every couple of days. I have to power-cycle the modem to fix it. I've got a new modem, I've had Comcast droids come out to fix it, but it's still broken. I think if I switch to FIOS I'll have better service. So going to FIOS kills my S1 Tivo since there's no analog. So my choices are FIOS DVR (sucks and expensive), Tivo Premiere, and Media Center PC. Since the Centon card isn't available yet and I'm concerned it will be late and buggy, I'm not inclined to wait for it. Therefore, I think Tivo Premiere is the only option.

My wife uses the Tivo, I use the Media Center (clearqam), and we both use the XBMC to watch movies.

If a computer running Media Center could watch streaming LiveTV from a Media Center with cable cards, I'd really love Media Center. Without this, it's annoying (expensive) to have to buy a cable card device for each Media Center PC. I'd like to be able to use my various computers (with ample RAM, CPU, and video card) as Media Center Extenders. I hate MS for not making this work.

But this is getting off topic...


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

jsrober said:


> If a computer running Media Center could watch streaming LiveTV from a Media Center with cable cards, I'd really love Media Center.


the Ceton card is supposed to be shareable across a network - so you maybe still can use those PCs - just not as a streaming client.


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## brettlyman (Aug 4, 2009)

One "beef" I have with my current tivo HD is that you can't "stream" videos from a PC, you can only "transfer", which causes problems if the video is HD because it takes a long time to transfer, and therefore you cannot watch it right away.

So, if I can add-on to the question of this thread, can the premier actually "stream"?


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## orangeboy (Apr 19, 2004)

brettlyman said:


> One "beef" I have with my current tivo HD is that you can't "stream" videos from a PC, you can only "transfer", which causes problems if the video is HD because it takes a long time to transfer, and therefore you cannot watch it right away.
> 
> So, if I can add-on to the question of this thread, can the premier actually "stream"?


Streambaby - new streaming application


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

MichaelK said:


> Pytivo has a plugin that takes things in the iso format if I understand correctly (I dont use it that why so unsure).


Not ISOs -- it wants a directory structure with VOBs and IFOs. You'd have to mount the ISOs first.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

ZeoTiVo said:


> the Ceton card is supposed to be shareable across a network - so you maybe still can use those PCs - just not as a streaming client.


From what I recall, Ceton followed up on that initial report and said sharing wasn't permitted under the CableLabs' DFAST licensing agreement.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

Yes in a sense. You can't split tuners tied to a cable card. You can still put two Ceton InfiniTV 4 in one PC and assign 4 tuners to one and 4 to the other. You just can't split the 4 tuners with 2 to one PC and 2 to another.

They have been trying to get cable labs to change it and if they ever do it can be addressed with an update.


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## brettlyman (Aug 4, 2009)

orangeboy said:


> Streambaby - new streaming application


I'm unable to get streambaby to work. I followed the setup instructions, directory browsing works great, but every video I try to play, with different formats, with or without spaces in the path, hangs with "Please Wait..." displayed on the TiVo, even for small files <10MB in size. But that's an issue for a different forum.

I think the answer that I have received is that TiVo Premier will *not* stream files from a PC natively, you have to use a third-party program. Which also works with TiVo HD, so I do not yet have a good reason to upgrade to premier, since the rest of the functions I care about are already in place in the TiVo HD.


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## orangeboy (Apr 19, 2004)

brettlyman said:


> ...I think the answer that I have received is that TiVo Premier will *not* stream files from a PC natively, you have to use a third-party program...


That is correct. The files need to be formatted to compliant video & audio specs to stream without transcoding, or transcoded "on the fly", which I think Streambaby does. If transcoding is required and you have less than a robust PC hosting Streambaby, then you will get delays.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

brettlyman said:


> I think the answer that I have received is that TiVo Premier will *not* stream files from a PC natively, you have to use a third-party program.


I'm sorry, but, what does that even mean? It's a PC; you always have to use a program to do anything on a PC.


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## orangeboy (Apr 19, 2004)

wmcbrine said:


> I'm sorry, but, what does that even mean? It's a PC; you always have to use a program to do anything on a PC.


I may be wrong, but I think this poster wants TiVo to have a NFS/DFS/SMB client to browse a filesystem for videos, and not necessarily an explicit server application on the PC. At least that's one way to interpret the post!


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## immagikman (Sep 14, 2007)

orangeboy said:


> I may be wrong, but I think this poster wants TiVo to have a NFS/DFS/SMB client to browse a filesystem for videos, and not necessarily an explicit server application on the PC. At least that's one way to interpret the post!


Why doesnt Tivo have these features? I have all my DVD's ripped to ISO, I currently use a Patriot Box Office unit to stream the video from my NAS units to my TV, if Patriot can do this in a tiny box, Why can Tivo not do the same?

If you had one unit to do everything you could make a mint....Tivo should pick this ball up and fly with it.

(Not a troll, I own 3 Tivo HD units, 2 Tivo S2's and one Tivo S1 so Ive invested heavily in Tivo, I just want it to handle my media better)


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## Gavroche (May 27, 2007)

jsrober said:


> I'm the OP, and I'm not a troll. I do love XBMC, but I'd really prefer to be able to have one box (Tivo Premiere) do all the DVR stuff and the ISO playback stuff. If it can't, I can keep the XBMC, but I'm not a troll.


I have to agree with you about XBMC... I LOVE it... but I'm also with you on being able to have just one box.

I'm less than impressed with the Tivo Premiere, but that's simply because it offers no real advantage over the Series3/HD platform. OK, there are a few nifty extras, disk space meter, the new interface (which compared to XBMC is crap), but in general there is no reason to upgrade if you already have an HD-capable Tivo.

In your situation, though, I'd go for it. You'll find a world of new features if you're upgrading from a Series 1! (I also had a Phillips Series 1 for years... bought it when they first came out!)


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## Gavroche (May 27, 2007)

wmcbrine said:


> I'm sorry, but, what does that even mean? It's a PC; you always have to use a program to do anything on a PC.


I don't think so... unless we're just arguing semantics.

I have several network devices that can detect and play media from SMB shares... so in this situation... no, you don't need to install any kind of application on the host PC. (Well, you need an OS )

In my own personal experience, though, these types of devices are very limited in what formats they will play.

I'll stick with pyTivo! (Which by the way, works like a charm on my new Premiere. Thanks again, man. I've been with your pyTivo fork for a long time and as far as I'm concerned it's one of the best reasons to get a Tivo. YOU ROCK!)


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

> Orangeboy: I may be wrong, but I think this poster wants TiVo to have a NFS/DFS/SMB client to browse a filesystem for videos, and not necessarily an explicit server application on the PC.
> 
> 
> immagikman said:
> ...


I can't tell you what is in the mind of TiVo Corp, but I can think of many possible reasons they would choose not to support other methods of streaming/transferring:

1) Fear of being sued by content owners
2) Lack of time or money to develop such options
3) Lack of time or money to offer continued support for such options

They probably can't use the "not enough CPU power" on the DVR or no decoding support as excuses (not that they have, just saying the Premiere addresses those now).

I am personally quite disappointed that the Premier has no NFS/SMB/etc. And even more so that it hasn't expanded formats for video so transcoding can be eliminated or reduced (transcoding requires a lot of horsepower, slows down everything, and can seriously degrade picture quality).


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## immagikman (Sep 14, 2007)

crxssi said:


> I can't tell you what is in the mind of TiVo Corp, but I can think of many possible reasons they would choose not to support other methods of streaming/transferring:
> 
> 1) Fear of being sued by content owners
> 2) Lack of time or money to develop such options
> ...


Yeah me too. It is so frustrating to know that the technology is there, but is not implemented. If Patriot can create a tiny box to stream .iso's and nearly any other format straight from a NAS, Im pretty sure Tivo could do it with no greater fear of law suit or expense. I'll note that I purchased every one of the DVD's I ripped to iso for storage on my NAS....so its not like Im advocating piracy.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

immagikman said:


> Yeah me too. It is so frustrating to know that the technology is there, but is not implemented. If Patriot can create a tiny box to stream .iso's and nearly any other format straight from a NAS, Im pretty sure Tivo could do it with no greater fear of law suit or expense. I'll note that I purchased every one of the DVD's I ripped to iso for storage on my NAS....so its not like Im advocating piracy.


The reason Patriot can make such a small box is because your PC is doing most of the heavy lifting.

While the TiVo Premiere is much more powerful than the HD/Series 3, it isn't equal to the power of a PC. Don't forget the TiVo isn't just streaming unless when it is streaming you would disable recordings, transfers, playback, and live buffers.


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## immagikman (Sep 14, 2007)

innocentfreak said:


> The reason Patriot can make such a small box is because your PC is doing most of the heavy lifting.
> 
> While the TiVo Premiere is much more powerful than the HD/Series 3, it isn't equal to the power of a PC. Don't forget the TiVo isn't just streaming unless when it is streaming you would disable recordings, transfers, playback, and live buffers.


Wrong answer. The Patriot Box Office does not in any way use my computer.
I have the Patriot unit sitting on top of my AV rack, attached to an ethernet port in the wall which streams directly from my ReadyNas NV Pro unit. (which is also attached to the network through a switch) The patriot box will stream .iso files, .wav, .mp3 and just about anything else I throw at it.

The only items involved are a NAS device, The Patriot Box office box and my TV....oh and the Switch which is the backbone of the wired network in my house. I can also attach a USB drive directly to the Patriot unit as well.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

innocentfreak said:


> The reason Patriot can make such a small box is because your PC is doing most of the heavy lifting.
> 
> While the TiVo Premiere is much more powerful than the HD/Series 3, it isn't equal to the power of a PC. Don't forget the TiVo isn't just streaming unless when it is streaming you would disable recordings, transfers, playback, and live buffers.


That is an invalid comparison. The TiVo contains and uses a dedicated (hardware-based) video/audio decoder. The main CPU doesn't have to do much work at all, as long as it is playing supported codecs/containers/bitrates (which is all it does).

In the case of what we have to do now with a computer & TiVo, since TiVo refuses to support any but a very few codecs/containers/bitrates, it is likely the video you want to stream/watch from your computer is not in the correct format (certainly none of MINE is). So it has to be transcoded (and on-the-fly in the case of streaming). THAT takes a *tremendous* amount of CPU. Unless you have a very expensive computer, most can just keep up with transcoding SD. HD is out of the picture. I tried to transcode HD video from mpeg2 to 264... a 30 min program took 13 HOURS (of course, that was high quality, two pass, and going from a simple to complex codec).


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

jsrober said:


> I rip all my DVDs to ISO's. I have a few terabytes of them on my Windows computer on a shared drive. I use Xbox Media Center (XBMC) to play them on my HDTV. I love XBMC!!!!


I did a similar thing, setting up a digital library of all of my DVD images on a NAS server attached to the network. For a while I used pyTivo to push shows onto the Tivo for viewing, but that was a bit cumbersome and I didn't get to retain features like the DVD menus.

Eventually I purchased a Brite-View Cinematube. It's a pretty cheap device ($100 or so) and will play just about any format you can throw at it without needing to convert them ahead of time. It'll talk to a file server over samba, or to a USB device that's directly attached. The best thing about it is that if you have the full ISO image of your DVD with menus,etc intact, it will allow you to navigate the DVDs just like a DVD player would. It's small, quiet, cool, and energy efficient. In conjunction with my existing NAS server it allowed me to achieve the equivalent of a DVD jukebox.

Finally, if XBMC works for you to do what you want, then why are you looking for alternate solutions?


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## brettatk (Oct 11, 2002)

Just thought I'd throw out there (I didn't see it mentioned as I skimmed the replies) that if your S1 has lifetime, you are most likely eligible for a one time transfer of it's lifetime to a new unit. That is unless you want to keep your S1 alive, then you'd of course have to pay for lifetime on a new Premier. Most people probably do not realize this and it could effect your decision to upgrade knowing you wouldn't have to dish out money for a new lifetime sub.


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## immagikman (Sep 14, 2007)

From the looks of it, it is entirley possible and an easy upgrade for Tivo to allow their units to act much like the Patriot Box Office or, the Bright-View unit or one of several other small DLNA boxes....you dont need to change formats on the fly, just enable to codec for .iso's , .mov and .wmv would likely be enough. Its not a matter of abillity, it appears to be an issue of "Will" Seriously if Tivo remains behind the curve on media portability it will die.....and I dont want my investment to die.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

does anyone know what the chipset in the premiere can handle natively by way of codecs?


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## GregryBoy (Mar 1, 2007)

There have been a few questions asked for which I see no posted reply. I thought I would spend a moment contributing my knowledge in case it helps anyone:

TiVo Series 4 boxes can natively stream both MPG2 and MPG4 files. I am not sure of the exact specifications required, but from my experience the range of acceptable files is wide enough to include most files in these formats from most sources. TiVo does not provide software or support for streaming such files from local network shares; they use it only for NetFlix and other such online providers. However, the latest version of Stream Baby (0.29) works just fine, though an occasional restart of your Tivo and/or server will be needed from time to time. 

This third party software makes the Tivo much more useful, and I don't understand why Tivo, Inc. doesn't seem to understand how many people are not buying their product because they don't know about Stream Baby's existence. If not for Stream Baby, I would NEVER have bought any of my recent Tivos -- but with it, the box becomes a very robust player capable of handling almost anything. (Stream Baby will convert files that can't be played natively on the fly, and does so at a speed that keeps up with real-time playback, even when it's running on an old P4 1.8 GHZ with 512MB Ram. On new machines it's even better.)

Please note that everything said above refers to streaming. Programs like Tivo's Desktop software and pyTivo do NOT provide streaming capability. Rather, they copy (and convert if needed) video files to the TiVo. In some cases you can view while the copying is still in progress, but it's not true steaming. Also, all files copied to the TiVo must be in MPG2 format. The MPG4 files can be played natively, but only when streaming. This is yet another result of bad decision-making on the software side, and could be easily addressed in future updates of the software running on Series 4 boxes. History suggests that this will never happen, with decision makers at Tivo remaining confident that users of their product lack sufficient intelligence to even understand the concepts involved. 

Tivo has made a great piece of hardware, with utterly insufficient software and product support tools. We all owe the authors of freeware like Stream Baby a debt of gratitude for all the work they've put into projects like this without receiving a single cent of compensation. 

If Tivo wants to exist ten years from now, however, they will have to change their own fundamentally flawed understanding of what their product is and how people wish to use it.


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## orangeboy (Apr 19, 2004)

Good info! Just a couple things though:



GregryBoy said:


> However, the latest version of Stream Baby (0.29) works just fine, though an occasional restart of your Tivo and/or server will be needed from time to time.


I have not had to restart my Premiere for anything other than software updates. Are you sure Stream Baby is the cause for the restarts?



GregryBoy said:


> Also, all files copied to the TiVo must be in MPG2 format. The MPG4 files can be played natively, but only when streaming.


Not entirely true. Both pyTivo and Stream Baby allow you to "push" compatible mp4* files. This is accomplished by setting your TiVo account email address and password within the applications, and allowing the TiVo servers at the mothership to schedule the transfer of the video from your computer to the TiVo, similar to how RSS feeds are handled.

*I noted mp4 in place of mpeg-4 to better classify which files are compatible. The (HD) TiVo DVRs support mpeg-4 part 10, which uses the h264 video codec. Mpeg-4 part 2 videos can contain DivX, Xvid, Quicktime, which are not compatible with the (HD) TiVo DVRs. So like how all squares are technically rectangles and all rectangles are not squares, all mpeg-4 are not technically compatible. It is true that both pyTivo and Stream Baby choose to convert to the Mpeg-2 format when _non_ compatible videos are found.


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