I’ve tried a variety of programs to get TV shows off our Tivo and onto my iPod, mainly so the kids can watch some of their favorites while traveling. The Tivo, which sits in our bedroom far from the nearest wireless access point, was connected to the Internet and our home net via a Netgear USB wifi doohickey that had been recommended by Tivo. Well, it worked fine for downloading program listings but the connection was never really strong enough for moving fat video files around. I had tried both the free TivoDecodeManager and Roxio’s Tivo Transfer program but both choked endlessly waiting for files to finish downloading. Whenever I checked the wifi strength, Tivo reported it was terrible.
Eventually, I realized that the problem was the snail-like transfer speed so I decided to go from wireless to wired. I grabbed an extra Netgear Powerline switch, which provides ethernet over electrical wiring, and plugged it in by Tivo. But when I went to run an ethernet cable from the switch to our Tivo, really a Toshiba RS-TX20, I discovered the Toshiba had no ethernet outlet. So I jumped over to Amazon and, after consulting the fine customer reviews to see which adapters would work with Tivo, orderd a cheap Belkin USB ethernet adapter. I plugged everything in today and it just works. Plus, my TV shows are downloading at a tolerable if not amazing pace of 1 gigabyte per hour.
Leave a Reply