# Support lossless audio formats



## wer (Jun 28, 2007)

The ability to publish music to the Tivo is very nice, but the fact that it only supports MP3 is very limiting. I like the convenience of being able to access all of my music via Tivo, but some music, especially classical, is noticeably degraded when converted to MP3.

If a lossless audio format were supported (AAC-lossless, Flac, WAV, WM-Lossless) then I would be able to use the Tivo as my primary audio source. And I'm not talking about on-the-fly transcoding to MP3 as the "Universal Audio Plugin" does. I mean actually streaming lossless audio to the Tivo for optimal sound quality.

This would make a Tivo much more useful to have, as it would take the place of a dedicated jukebox-type component such as Escient's Fireball, Sonos' product, or other hard-drive based players.


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## NoCleverUsername (Jan 29, 2005)

Unfortunately, the reason why the TiVo only supports MPEG audio is a hardware limitation. That's why other formats have to be transcoded in the first place. The audio is being played by the TiVo's MPEG decoder chip.

The TiVo doesn't have the processing power to use software codecs.


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## megazone (Mar 3, 2002)

It could be better - the DVD units can handle Dolbly Digital/AC-3 audio, and the S3/HD can handle a few advanced codecs - such as AAC, WMA, etc. So they could enable better formats than MP3 on the platforms that handle it, then put intelligence in desktop to stream supported formats as-is or to transcode other formats to the best support format.


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