I've been using a Scientific Atlanta 8300 for about year now and last month we got a Samsung plasma so it's time to upgrade to HD. I'm a Cablevision customer in the NYC area. After my experience with with recording I'd like to save some things on the DVR for "posterity" which are now stuck on 8300 unless I play them to another recording device. Way too tedious. I want to be able to move/save recordings (video & audio) to/from my PC which has a pair mirrored 1TB drives now just for this. I also have a Sanyo HD video cam which records in a variety of h.264 resolutions. My Samsung can play those directly via it's USB port but ideally I'd like to be able to play these as well from my hard drive via the TIVO.

While the Samsung does have some DNLA capabilities it appears that this is not very well implemented.

After speaking with an acquaintance who has a TIVO it seems that the latest HD TIVO boxes may be able to provide what I'm looking for. This person uses mostly an Apple TV box so I'm not certain he's adequately explored this route as a feasible possibility.

So I've installed a gigabit line to the TV from my PC and am ready to experiment. I don't want to get into putting one of these servers on the network as I'm hoping that the TIVO can just "pull" the file and play it on the TV or home theatre as well as deposit recordings there as well.

I've scanned the documentation for the TIVO and it's not exactly giving me a complete understanding of what it will and will not do.

So,

1. Will any of this this work and if so which parts?

2. Will the files deposited on my PC become TIVO proprietary content?

3. Will TIVO handle the h.264 format?

4. What should I look out for?

Feel free to point me to another threads if this has been asked a million times before.

Thanks.

Be sure to see the AVS TivoHD FAQ (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11126048&postcount=2).

The TiVo does not allow you to download recordings from digital cable channels flagged with a CCI bit. I don't have Cablevision, so I don't know what they digital cable channels they flag. At a minimum, you should expect them to protect the premium movie channels, such as HBOHD.

2. Will the files deposited on my PC become TIVO proprietary content?The recordings are saved on your computer as MPGs within a .TiVo wrapper. The .TiVo wrapper is easily removed, discussed in the FAQ.

3. Will TIVO handle the h.264 format?TiVo added support for H.264 and VC1 in the 11.0 software, but it is still particular about what kind of high-definition H.264 files it will play. I can't say for certain whether it would play the files from your Sanyo HD camera. Others would know more about this than I.

I don't want to get into putting one of these servers on the network as I'm hoping that the TIVO can just "pull" the file and play it on the TV or home theatre as well as deposit recordings there as well.The TivoHD is based on the same, relatively low-performance Broadcom CPU as the DirecTV and Dish Network DVRs, so you should not expect it to stream and play high-bitrate video without any delay.

You can transfer videos to the TiVo (or stream them using Streambaby) at a maximum of 8-10Mbps. You won't be able to watch anything with a higher bitrate in realtime; you'd have to wait for part of the program to transfer before you begin viewing.

If you are looking for a media player to stream high-bitrate HD recordings to your TV, without any wait, then there are better solutions like the Popcorn Hour A110 (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1060708).

Thanks so much for the informative reply. Let me digest this for a while.