New Tivo premiere play files from HD?

No, the usb is only for the wireless adapter. See tivo's web site. Also the e-sata port is only for the dvr-extender hard drive too.

So does this mean you can not add a external drive to increase the storage? I am thinking about a Tivo but don't know much about their capabilities yet, just started researching them. Not sure if that is what a "dvr-extender hard drive" is.

It means you can add an external hard drive (TiVo indicates a specific one from Western Digital, not sure if any others are supported.) The hard drive then becomes "married" to the device, expanding capacity by a terabyte. It cannot be used to move video from one TiVo to another, or anything else really. It just adds capacity.

You can get the videos off of TiVo using its network capability. You can strip off the TiVo wrapper and have an mpeg that can be encoded for other purposes, such as portable device viewing, etc.