Finally got my TiVoToGo update, that was just about 10 days after it was announced

I've been forcing connection to TiVo service a lot seeing reports on the TiVo Community forum about how that was successful for some but they probably got it from the first 1000 random releases. I believe I got the update through the priority list but we'll never really know

Woke up this morning and checked the TiVo, it had a message about the new update, checked the software and the version is finally 7.1-X. I think the TiVo rebooted by itself during the night

I went to my computer and launched TiVo Desktop but it said it could not connect to my DVR. I checked for similar errors on the board and found out a connection to TiVo service would get the missing Media Access Key or MAK (which said temporarily unavailable before), and voila

I record my shows at Medium Quality, meaning the 40-hour DVR can only hold some 24 hours of show. I picked some random stuff to clean up the DVR and the ETA is frightening, 24 shows for 52 hours. While it is an overestimate, 802.11b is pretty weak

TiVo Desktop actually gives estimates on transfer times. For example, at Medium Quality, it takes 1h29min for a 30min show (619 MB). A 1hr show would take almost 3 hours... ouch. The estimates are overshooting in general though, by about a factor of 2. I made some tests that showed the transfer are in the order of 200~250 KB/s

Here are some changes on the DVR after the updates, the Now Playing section has new network logos, in particular for me: Bravo and PBS. Someone complained that they look worse than before (NBC). The grid display is supposed to be faster, so is the updating of Season Passes

You can cancel a transfer but it won't resume, that's a bit of a bummer. If you choose to download again, it will make a copy and affix a (2) to the filename. Shows transferred do not get deleted from the DVR. There are no ways to readjust the order of the queue list of shows to be transferred

You can actuallty start playing a show that is still being transferred, but with these transfer rates, you probably catch up to it before it finishes

A kind of bugger feature, shows transferred to PC cannot go back on the TiVo, now what the heck?

When I double-click on a show on my computer, WMP10 starts up and asks me for a playback password (created with the MAK and TiVo Desktop), that's pretty annoying already

TiVo heads have found a neat little trick to access the shows from your browser, simply open the url

https://< tivo ip address >

user: tivo - password: < your MAK >

This is pretty hot because it means any OS are supported as long as they can connect to the TiVo webserver, this makes moving shows a non-issue, but playing still requires Windows

To note, TiVo made it so you can only download one show at a time


Update - EvilLabs has a quick conversion tutorial for the .tivo files