In reply to:
A shame there's no datasheets for the chipset in the TiVo
There are, but you reportedly have to pay Sony in the order of $US5 million to get them.
Thats probably why there are none available for free - I imagine the NDA requirements for something like this would be pretty onerous and the penalties for premature disclosure extremely high.
There is rumoured to be some very serious processing power in ther MPEG 2 encoder in the Tivos and Tivo aren't even using a half of the capabilities of the Sony chipset inthe Tivos right now.
What about the Encoders in the ReplayTV models? How good are they?