Pkerr100, tune your TiVo to an unused channel and put it in standby. Plug your laptop into your router and try again.
You can search the list archives for a couple of discussions about this from a year or so ago, but here is what I remember. Jay is correct that setting up a direct Ethernet connection can be done if at least one of your devices is auto-sensing or you use a crossover cable. But there is no benefit to doing that over running both through a wired router. If you are working with two wireless clients then there is a benefit to bypassing the router for reasons explained below. There is a benefit to using a wired Ethernet connection rather than wireless, and it's not because wireless is slower than wired. Wired connections are full-duplex like a telephone. Voice data can be transmitted and received at the same time. Wireless connections are half-duplex like a CB radio or speaker phone. They can send or receive, sowhen your router is transferring data between two wireless clients it switches between send and receive mode hundreds if not thousands of times a second. This effectively halves your bandwidth. On top of that, if you have another wireless device transferring data at the same time it gets a slice of the available wireless bandwidth too. Because of all of this, setting up a peer-to-peer wireless connection between the TiVo and a PC does have is advantageous. Aside from small acknowledgment packets the device sending gets all the bandwidth. Or use a router with one wired and one wireless device. That way too the wireless device gets all the wireless bandwidth. You will want to make SURE that all your wireless clients are connecting at 802.11g. If any - it only takes one - are connecting at 802.11b the router has to drop to 802.11b mode which slows every device on your network down. On any wireless TiVos, just use the TiVo brand adapter rather than one of the listed compatible ones. Trust me or ask anyone, it's the best tool for the job. The TiVo adapter works much, much better because it has hardware built into it that offloads some of the network processing from the TiVo. Our TiVos are actually pretty anemic little boxes that are highly engineered to do their purpose. It doesn't have the juice or engineering for fast networking. (My old Netgear adapters were slower, made me reboot my TiVo, and supported only weak wireless encryption. The TiVo adapter is rock-solid, fast, and secure.) So tune the TiVo to an unused channel and if possible put it in standby mode when copying. This frees up resources that the TiVo can use to process your networking request. I have a wireless TiVo, a wired TiVo, and a wired PC. I don't use TiVo ToGo anymore, but I sometimes copy files between TiVos. If I tune my wireless TiVo to an unused channel and put it in standby, then tune my wired TiVo to an unused channel and copy a show, it *almost* copies a highest quality show fast enough for me to watch in real-time. I let it go for 5-15 minutes depending on the show length and then start watching it so I have enough in the buffer to skip commercials. One question that I'm not sure that we ever answered is how fast two wired clients are over a wired and a wireless client. You would think that it would be faster since wired is so much faster than wireless, but because the TiVo hardware itself is more of a bottleneck other than your network (duplex aside) you actually may not benefit from using wired all around. I never got around to testing this to answer for myself because I don't especially feel like running an Ethernet cable through my attic if I don't have to. IIRC there are some very significant speed gains to be had if hack your TiVo to use gigabit Ethernet with jumbo frames enabled but that's pretty hardcore. Hopefully that makes sense and I didn't leave anything out. ________________________________ From: Jay Abraham <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2009 9:36:47 PM Subject: Re: [TiVo Central] Tansfering Tivo shows to my laptop... If you have the ethernet cable going right from the Tivo to your laptop without going through a router or bridge, you are creating another network. I believe this will only work if you have an ethernet cross-over cable or your PC can auto-sense (I have a Mac which does auto-sense so you don't need a cross-over cable.). It would be easier if you just had the Tivo ethernet cable to router ethernet cable to your laptop but this all depends on the physical distances in-between the locations. The wireless connection should be fast enough especially now with 802.11n capability. I don't know how old your wireless router is but even one of the old routers which are 802.11b are 11Mbps which is 1/10 the speed of most ethernet networks. The 802.11g are 1/2 the speed of ethernet and if you are on 802.11n, you shouldn't be at all slower than wired ethernet. One thing you might need to consider is the actual wireless speed and not the rated speed - the location of the Tivo and your laptop may be affecting the transfer speed. Check how strong your wireless signal strength is at both the locations. Hope that helps. Jay On Feb 14, 2009, at 6:03 PM, pk...@parway. com wrote: > Ethernet cable is going right from the Tivo to the laptop. Is that > doable? > > -----Original Message----- > From: Glen Farney [mailto:glen.farney@ snet.net] > Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2009 04:03 PM > To: tivocentral@ yahoogroups. com > Subject: Re: [TiVo Central] Tansfering Tivo shows to my laptop... > > You should be able to go Ethernet right to the same router you're > getting > the wireless from. Less convenient, but faster IF the wifi is the > choke. > Typically, your broad band connection is much slower than the wireless > itself. > > Glen [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
