My wife records live shows and waits 1/2 hour or so she can fast forward thru commercials, or parts she’s not interested in. I doubt she’s the only one who does this.
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TiVo Streaming Apple TV App Will Be Limited to 720p at 30 FPS
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TiVo has to stay within the Digital Millennium Act, so they have a tough go. I strongly suspect DirectTV negotiates for content and distribution, however I have no specific knowledge.
Not making excuses for them. I'd just like to think they have bigger plans than they can implement.
I doubt that....but if they are doing that then they will be the next Blockbuster.
That's one reason I use Infuse instead of Plex: there is no reason to encode to MP4 - it will play the original MPEG 2 video/AC3-5.1 audio. Saves time/computer work (and fan noise), as well as preserving the 5.1, properly in sync audio.
This doesn't shock me at all...it's a technical limitation. They are using the "stream" functionality (hardware-based transcoding) that is built into most of their modern TiVo STBs. At one point, they sold an add-on "TiVo Stream" box for owners of older TiVo units. Do a search for that, and you'll get the rundown of the hardware technology that's involved. Basically, it can do on-the-fly transcoding, which was pretty decent for the time. But there were/are limitations, so getting perfect-quality 1:1 transcoding isn't really an option. They would need to offer a new box with newer technology to do that, and the market probably doesn't exist for them to spend the R&D on that.
I guess I'm in the minority, but I'm just happy that they're finally planning to offer an official app for the Apple TV. I don't think my wife will notice 720p as a problem, but I do hope that they've maxed out the bitrate as much as possible. I'll wait and see before I assume the worst.
All that said, I'm finding these days that I use my TiVo as my 2nd option, and my Apple TV as my default choice. In fact, if I did an inventory of the shows that I watch on my TiVo, I suspect that I could watch any and all of them via my Apple TV via subscriptions that I'm already paying extra for. And I already have a lifetime subscription for my TiVo, so I won't be saving any money by getting rid of it (I guess I could see if I could get anything for it on eBay).
I guess I'm in the minority, but I'm just happy that they're finally planning to offer an official app for the Apple TV. I don't think my wife will notice 720p as a problem, but I do hope that they've maxed out the bitrate as much as possible. I'll wait and see before I assume the worst.
All that said, I'm finding these days that I use my TiVo as my 2nd option, and my Apple TV as my default choice. In fact, if I did an inventory of the shows that I watch on my TiVo, I suspect that I could watch any and all of them via my Apple TV via subscriptions that I'm already paying extra for. And I already have a lifetime subscription for my TiVo, so I won't be saving any money by getting rid of it (I guess I could see if I could get anything for it on eBay).
HDHomeRun tuners from SiliconDust don't actually do any transcoding (except for the EXTEND models, but the CONNECT series and other tuners all just stream in native format) – they just send the raw MPEG-2 data stream to the decoder/app. In the case of Apple TV, this is perfectly fine, as the hardware supports this (i.e. native app or some other tuning app such as Channels or Plex). I suspect the real issue is that TiVo is using the same decode engine across all platforms, which includes Roku, and of which Roku unfortunately does NOT currently support native MPEG-2 decode. So TiVo is making the rather poor and lazy decision to go with the lowest common denominator.
Somewhat correct... The lack of MPEG-2 support on iOS/tvOS/macOS was mostly a software limitation. iOS/tvOS 11 and macOS 10.13 finally opened up native MPEG-2 decode (don't recall atm if this is just a sw decoder or if it is done in hw, but in either case, the devices capable of running these OS' are easily able to decode all ATSC streams without too much effort). As alluded to above, I can think of two reasons why TiVo is making the decision to transcode the content to H.264 rather than just stream the native MPEG-2 (which has been proven by numerous other apps to be quite possible on the Apple TV):
- Lowest common denominator if they are using the same decode engine across all platforms
- 1080i content – since the majority of ATSC channels are in 1080i format, these channels would have to be deinterlaced when displayed through a STB such as the Apple TV to look 'right' (i.e. no combing artifacts) on people's TVs. There are two methods to accomplish this: a) do what SiliconDust does in their app and deinterlace in the app – this is usually just a cheap field-drop deinterlacer employed so the net result is only 1080p30 at best; b) do the deinterlace in hardware during transcode at the server side – this is what it sounds like TiVo is doing, but they are doing it in the most bare-bones manner. My guess is that they are first dropping one of the fields from 1080i content and then scaling down the horizontal and slightly scaling up the vertical. For 720p native content, they are likely just dropping every other frame.
The real solution would be for TiVo to maintain the source picture properties for native 720p channels, as this is already progressive and 60fps. For 1080i, they should be doing a field separation and ordering, then scaling the resulting 1920x540 image to 1280x720 at 60fps. But I suspect that there may be some truth to their comment that there is a lack of resources available on their current boxes to support this 1080i conversion in real-time as a JITT (just-in-time-transcoder service).
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The split is closer to 70/30 for 1080i vs 720p, but this is right on. I know of only a few lesser-subscribed channels that offer native 1080p broadcast, and even then, those channels aren't always passed on by the SPs (service provider) to their customers at native 1080p. Regarding the MPEG-2 aspect of things, if a channel reaches your home in HD MPEG-2, then that is usually a very high quality signal (by broadcast standards at least). However, most SPs don't deliver in MPEG-2, as they do not have enough bandwidth on their network or just don't want to deliver that much bandwidth through their network (it's pretty costly). So they take the source signal they receive from the broadcaster and transcode it into a much lower bit rate H.264 stream. Not only that, some SPs employ a form of transcoding called statmuxing, whereby multiple channels are put into a pool and a 'overseer' controller tries to make decisions in real-time as to how to best allocate available bit rate assigned to the pool to each channel. This is precisely why you may see noticeable artifacting on some channels on most traditional cable delivery services, as there may be up to 12 channels or more fighting for bit rate in a 38Mbps pool.
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TiVo has been in the market for far too long to put out something so half baked as this. This is unacceptable. Period.
Don't disagree. This is just pure laziness on TiVo's part. There are solutions to workaround this which they obviously don't want to put the developmental resources into.
Only legitimate excuse I could guess at is that they probably feel like 99% of the content that is recorded and watched is either primetime broadcast or films (unless recording sporting events for later viewing is really something people do way more than myself). In which case, the 30fps truly won't matter. I'd be more concerned in that case with the resolution being stuck to only 720p.
Amazing that the IPO's, and their customers are so far behind the tech.
We run two $80 antennas pointed in cross directions and We get 30-40 channels of which half are 1080p. We live far away from any major city.
There are lots of low cost streaming options like Netflix. Then there's the free for all of the magic boxes, (Mac Minis), to run your 4k TV.
Why give these guys your money beyond a high speed internet hook up ? a2
We run two $80 antennas pointed in cross directions and We get 30-40 channels of which half are 1080p. We live far away from any major city.
There are lots of low cost streaming options like Netflix. Then there's the free for all of the magic boxes, (Mac Minis), to run your 4k TV.
Why give these guys your money beyond a high speed internet hook up ? a2
1080p is not part of the ATSC pre-3.0 spec (ATSC 3.0 will also require new decoders or STBs/tuners), and there are only a very limited number of stations in the US even testing ATSC 3.0 broadcasting (in the single digits I believe), so the what you're viewing is actually 1080i that has been converted to 1080p or 720p either by your tuning/decoding app or TV.
It's not necessarily the tech that TiVo is 'behind' on. They have proven that they are capable of delivering better quality with other first-party solutions. It's more the desire to actually spend the extra effort to do what is right by their customers. I believe, based solely on my understanding of how they are approaching this – and how many others in the industry have similarly approached this, that this limitation is less about not having the tech and more about "what do we think will be good enough for most of our customers such that the opex is warranted."
To an extent, TiVo is actually not far off on only delivering up to 30p. For the majority of broadcast content out there, this is perfectly acceptable, as the source content usually isn't above 24p (when shot and edited). It is only made 60p or 60i through pulldown or telecine conversion when broadcast, but no new 'real' frames are actually inserted in this process, so it is still technically 24p. Thus an encode of an original 24p source that was broadcasted at 60p or 60i and then halved in frame rate to 30p will not net a noticeable drop in motion resolution (as those original 24 fps will be 100% retained). But depending on the bit rate and/or quality of the encoder used, there could very easily be a noticeable drop in image resolution, especially on larger TVs.
In the case of sports however, which is usually shot and edited in true 60i or 60p, then the decision to drop to 30p will likely be very noticeable and is a bad call IMHO. On the flip side, 30p is still what the vast majority of sports is unfortunately broadcasted at on OTT networks (FOX, MLB, and ESPN being good exceptions; CBS and NBC being on the woefully behind side), so for those used to watching sports on their iPads, mobile phones, or computers, this won't feel too far off what they've seen elsewhere. But for the pure TV-experience viewer, this will certainly appear to be somewhat unnatural and limited, as there will not only be a likely drop in image resolution, but there will also be a more serious drop in motion resolution.
This was all somewhat acceptable I guess about 3-4 years ago, and if TiVo launched this feature at that time then so be it, but the industry has thankfully been moving away from that to true 60p for sports at least for the past few years. It would have been smart for TiVo to actually build an algorithm that can adapt to the source content being played – checking if the source content had telecine or pulldown and only outputting 30p to save 'resources' for the majority of time, but automatically switching to 60p output when it detects there are actually 60 unique fields or frames per second.
