# Tivo Online and Picture Quality



## rumndumber (Jan 22, 2016)

I am a recent Tivo Bolt + 2 minis (thank you woot, great timing) convert from many years of windows media center. The simplicity of Tivo (especially the single remote for WAF) was the deciding factor, plus media center has been left for dead for several years by misguided microsoft management and a unified DVR/Streaming interface fits in well in my family.

As I've explored the app options (IOS and Kindle Fire HDX tablet) I became intrigued by tivo online (I believe this is the replacement for the tivo desktop application). pc building has always been a hobby, and with decent 3 year old desktops available for free, I thought Tivo online would be a great way to make every laptop and desktop just another screen that could be used.

I was sorely disappointed to find the pq is definitely degraded compared to the various app based solutions. My kindle fire and ipads look fantastic, the tivo online based pq is blocky (looks low bitrate) and slightly pixelated. Are my pc's not set up correctly or is this just "how its going to be"? These are all newer PCs and there is plenty of bandwidth.

I've also tried IOS airplay to my apple TV, and it looks great, for about 10 seconds before it dies. mirroring the ipad screen works perfectly, but mirroring won't fill the screen regardless of the app. I've bought a cheap miracast dongle to try with another TV and it should arrive next week. I did have a soon to be sold cheap asus meemo tablet that I tried with a chromecast, but that solution wasn't workable as the tablet lacked enough hardware power to provide smooth playback.

I don;t have to have this working perfectly. Woot sales and ebay minis are fairly cost effective and I am very impressed with the mini/bolt combination.

Any pointers on getting TV on computer based screens is appreciated. my house is fully ethernet wired and I have an older (but still excellent) apple extreme wifi router.

Thanks!


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## BigJimOutlaw (Mar 21, 2004)

Have you tried a different browser?

The video transcodes at the same bitrate and resolution as it does on mobile devices (720p at about 2.2mbps), so it *should* look decent, however some browsers are apparently better at dealing with the Flash Player than others.

I've seen the pixelation too. For me Firefox looks the worst, Chrome and IE are sort of "eeh", and Microsoft's Edge handles it the best (smoother edges) even though the browser itself is a little flaky.

You could try turning Flash's hardware acceleration on/off and restarting the browser, but that might not do much good.


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## rumndumber (Jan 22, 2016)

thanks big jim. I thought this was flash after poking around. You would think they would have used something different.

Good comments though. Have not upgraded to win10 yet (mostly to retain media center on all my pcs).

Will keep poking around.


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