TiVoToGo goes slow
Scarily enough the ancient 14 hour TiVo we have kicking around Engadget HQ is way too old for TiVoToGo, but Obvious Diversion had the good sense to buy their TiVo in the 21st century and thus were able to take full advantage of the new feature which lets you copy shows stored on your TiVo over to your PC. Unfortunately, they discovered the hard way that while the software was easy to install, actually copying a one hour TV show from their TiVo to their laptop took a lengthy five hours. The culprit? The TiVo box is connect to their home network over 802.11b WiFi, which made the transfer rate murderously slow compared with what it would have been over Ethernet, and incredibly enough TiVo doesn't yet offer any drivers for 802.11g adapters, something which would help ameliorate the problem. To be fair, transferring any kind of video between two different machines over 802.11b is going to be slow—it's not like this is a TiVo-specific problem—but if TiVo is going to pitch their DVRs as digital entertainment hubs, they've got to realize that Ethernet simply isn't always an option. Support for 802.11g has got to be around the corner, but here's an idea: save everyone a lot of trouble and just build WiFi directly into the boxes.
[Via TVHarmony]
