A recent report on c|net highlights the unhappy experiences of many TiVo owners; who, after an autumn update to the recorder's firmware, are finding serious flaws in the quality of the files transferred to computer and DVD.
TiVo is the company who set the standard and gained an avid community base in the hard disk-based video recorder market: not just for the quality of the hardware box, but especially the flexibility of the electronic program guide. Through this very active community support, hardware upgrade procedures and other useful user modifications have kept the TiVo going throughout several step-changes in the PVR market. One of the more useful features of the TiVo is the ability to transfer recordings to computer, where they can be edited and burned to DVD for personal use.
However, since autumn 2007, the relationship between the community and TiVo have become pretty strained after a bit of a disastrous firmware update. In preparation for adding another official feature to the TiVo box, it seems that changes were made to the way that recorded files are stored on the hard disk, and which are not able to be correctly handled by the Roxio Toast package after transfer to computer. Despite subsequent Roxio updates, the problem still persists for some users and even now, well into February, all the incompatibilities have not been addressed.
Customer Fred Jacobs said "When I tried to burn a new episode, the result was a DVD with constant audio breaks and skips, like someone was turning the sound on and off every half-second. Worthless. Also, I now have no way to archive my own shows on DVD. I just have to delete them, sometimes before I even have time to watch them. After five months of this, I just feel like a sucker."
Roxio product manager Patrick Nugent says the company has been working on fixing the syncing issue. "The reason the problem is not consistent among all Roxio Toast and Popcorn users, he said, is unclear. There are many factors that cause recordings to be different from one another, such as fluctuating variable frame rate in HD broadcasts, especially around titles and commercial breaks and even differences from channel to channel." Nevertheless, one could point out that presumably these factors were present before the autumn TiVo update, when Toast apparently handled the files satisfactorily.
So unfortunately it looks like the familiar scenario where the customers are caught between two companies; each of which tends to blame the other. Whether TiVo will manage to retain the substantial goodwill of the community base is another matter; and several members have pointed out that TiVo is still advertising its service and file transfer abilities as if nothing has happened.
You can read the full article on c|net here, and for interested readers the community forum thread dealing with the issues is here.
