Streaming with the TiVo Premiere

I just picked up a TiVo Premiere because of the recent price drop and the fact you can still add Lifetime. All and all not a bad deal although I think most of its interface is rather dated but the image quality exceeds the Dish DVR I had (compared OTA HD).


My biggest surprise is that I can stream native DVDs to it effortlessly. I hate transcoding DVDs since my Mac Mini is unpowered and the quality of the image appears to suffer with the settings I use.


Of course there isn't menu support for DVDs but TiVo will play the native VOB with DD5.1 which I found interesting. I simply use pyTiVox to transfer them to the TiVo. With Western Digital's Livewire (powerline) the files show up instantly and I can even view them while the file is being transferred.


Since there isn't menu support I "cat *01*.VOB > Episode1.VOB" to combine each episode (or movie) into one file. You could play one after the other but this is just a little fancier. TiVo's scaler isn't the best I have seen however it's better than some of the streamers I have used in the past.


If you use a PC streambaby will automatically transcode files to a codec that TiVo supports but it doesn't support TiVo Premiere (only the older models at this time).


Certainly not the fanciest or most elegant solution but for someone with modest streaming requirements it more than works. Also you can use all of TiVo's trickplay features which makes playback a lot nicer.