Geekfishing Blog

Well, I got the Tivo-to-go up and running at the weekend and thought I'd share a few thoughts. Overall it's a super idea - you can offload hours of programs off your measly 80GB Tivo box and burn dvd's, watch the shows on a laptop on an airplane and generally archive all the good stuff.

Well, that's the good news, now for the gotcha's :
-Make sure you have s/w 7.1 or higher on your tivo box - this can take over a week for tivo to get around to sending to you after you request it.
-There is a bewildering array of 802.11 USB dongles that you can use for networking to your home network and an even bigger array that are "Not Compatible" for reasons best known to the folks at Tivo. I mean, the darn thing is USB so why on earth over 50% of the wifi USB dongles out there can't be used is a mystery to me. I had to buy three of them and plug and pray. The website isn't up to date with the latest versions of the wifi USB devices and there are even incompatibilities within the same product families so be real careful - sheesh !
-It only supports USB 1.1 so it takes over an hour to transfer a 30 min show - so don't bother getting 802.11g since the max you can squirt out the back is 12Mbps. Still need to test a hard ethernet cable.
-Performance on the tivo box has got rather jumpy since I networked the box - especially while downloading 8 episodes of the New Yankee Workshop.

So that's it - a few pitfalls but a good improvement in the service.