I have been a TiVo user since about 2002 (I think?), and my current TiVo recently died, it was old! I’m sure it just needed a new hard drive, but I wanted to try something different so I just got a Dual Lite.
One thing that surprised me a bit is not having the thumbnail preview during fast-forward while time shifting. While watching the Buffalo Bills game tonight (ugh!) I found it somewhat annoying not to have the ability to easily FF through parts of the game as the thumbnails aren’t displaying.
I understand now that the thumbnails are processed after the program has completed recording, assuming one of the tuners is available. Presumably there is a GPU there that is required, which makes sense.
Wondering for future releases, if it’s possible to do some processing of the video during recording with the other tuner if it isn’t in use? Seems like it should be possible, but I’m obviously not familiar with the hardware architecture.
The TiVo units also require a specific device, namely the TiVo Mini ($200 a piece) to watch the DVR in another room. The Tablo can stream to virtually every device. That is why I kicked the TiVo to the curb…LOL.
The video is re-encoded from the native MPEG2 to h.264 video which is streamed in segments for live TV. There is already a slight delay between the live TV you’d watch directly connect to your HDTV tuner and Tablo. So add thumbnails to the mix would likely delay things even further.
As the feature works now, only completed recordings are processed for preview thumbnails.