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October 19, 2004

DirecTV Tivo with Recordable DVD

Has there been any talk of a DirecTV reciever that has tivo and a recordable DVD all in one package.
-- josh

October 19, 2004 in DirecTiVo, DVD

Answers

I haven't heard any talk that they're developing one, but it'd be a great idea. I'd buy one in a second, but I strongly suspect DirecTV and Hollywood don't want folks to keep shows around. They've been working on making Pay Per Viewed TiVo'd content expire after a set number of days instead of letting you keep them as long as you want.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 19, 2004 9:10:24 PM

This is unlikely. The satellite stream is not DVD Video compliant. The unit would have to have the power to transcode the signal to burn a DVD.

A simpler solution would be if DirecTV got with the times and supported networking on the DirecTiVo units, and picked up TiVoToGo so you'd be able to pull recordings to a PC, transcode, and burn.

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 19, 2004 9:57:30 PM

The satellite stream is MPEG2. Converting it to DVD format is not an expensive operation at all, and it's no more difficult than on a standalone TiVo. The real issue is that DIRECTV doesn't want their signal being copied in its original quality.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 19, 2004 10:56:49 PM

It isn't hard - but the HW in the current reference platforms is too weak to do it reasonably. 200MHz MIPS CPU and 32MB RAM, IIRC. Same reason TiVo doesn't transcode recordings moved over with MRV to burn on their DVD-RW units.

Of course, they could design a unit to do this from the ground up - the easiest way is probably to put in a dedicated encoding processor to do the transcoding.

Posted by: MegaZone at Oct 19, 2004 11:11:49 PM

But it is not transcoding at all. It's just a simple conversion of the stream. It's not uncompressing and recompressing it.

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 19, 2004 11:15:10 PM

For reference, observe how TyTool works. It can convert the video from a DIRECTV TiVo (or any TiVo) to a DVD VOB as fast as it can stream over the network. It's not doing any transcoding at all, it's just changing something about the specifics of the format of the stream--headers, etc.--into standard MPEG2 format from the weird internal TiVo format. And it's not really using any CPU--it's bound by the network. Doing real transcoding, like converting to XviD, takes much longer.

I think the real issue with transferring the video from a non-DVD TiVo to a DVD TiVo is that they just didn't bother to build in the mechanism to convert the weird TiVo "ty" format to standard MPEG2 (which would require reserving space to write the result).

Posted by: Dan McGuirk at Oct 19, 2004 11:24:54 PM

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