BitTorent Content On Your TiVo
Late yesterday, I received an email from Michael Alderete letting me know that he has put together a tutorial on how to play BitTorrent content on your TiVo. Here’s a summary of the article taken from the email that Mike sent me:
The article covers installing and configuring TiVo Desktop software on your computer, downloading video from the Internet using Miro, converting it to a TiVo-compatible format with VisualHub, and transferring it to your TiVo for playback. Currently the instructions are Mac-only, but a reasonably savvy person could easily figure out how to use them on a PC, with slightly different software (pointers are given in the article).
I just checked out the article and I have to say that I am impressed with the quality of the content and the level of detail that Michael put into his article. Check it out if you are interested in being able to download BitTorrent content for playback on your TiVo.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:59 pm |
While many of the concepts presented in this tutorial were not new to me, there is plenty of good information presented here. While I’m not that interested in downloading video from BitTorrent, I was interested in the settings suggested for VisualHub. I already had VisualHub on my machine but I was a little vexed about what settings I should use to get the app to output good High Def quality video compatible with my Series 3. The settings suggested in the tutorial are good ones.
I downloaded a High Def trailer on the 1098 Ducati and converted it to MPEG 2 with VisualHub using the settings suggested by the author and the result was quite good. The only thing I found was that I also had to specify the resolution, for this video that was 1920 x 1080. This is not listed in the tutorial. When I transcoded the video the first time, even though the source was 1080, VisualHub output the video at 640 x 480.
The conversion process was slow on my 2.16 Core Duo Macbook Pro the 49 second clip took 17 minutes to convert at the best MPEG 2 quality settings using 2 pass encoding. I might try to back off the quality setting one notch but I would rather have the quality and just let conversions run over night.
Now I have a way to convert just about any video file for playback on my Series 3. I’m going to be seriously considering adding an external eSATA drive to my TiVo in the near future. Who needs and XBox360 or an AppleTV. The Series 3 TiVo has just become my Media Center extender. Photos, Music, and Video in full 1080 High definition. Sweet.