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Here is a good avsforum that talks about copy protection on DTV. It seems that DVI (Digital Video Interface) may be the future and may render current HTDV's obsolete. DVI is one of the copy protection schemes for HDTV (along with a firewire one).

I like it... they do often review obscenely priced equipment, but they at least admit it's obscenely priced, and they review "low end" equipment (the past 3 issues have each had a near or sub $10k projector -- with the reviewer looking forward to even less expensive models in the future) fairly often.

In general there's a half dozen or so paragraph sized reviews on a couple pages and then between 4 and 10 full fledged reviews in the body of the magazine. They have several regular columns, the best of which I consider to be the one on Home Theater design/building and PCinema (there's better info on avsforum, but SGHT is doing a good job of bringing a cutting edge technology that will revolutionize home theater to more people).

Of course, the best way to decide is to check it out yourself. Peruse a few issues at a local bookstore or go to your local library and see if they have it in the stacks or on microfiche.

Much of this work has been done already, although it's not nearly as straightforward a hack as the others I mentioned. The following thread contains a discussion about getting a Replay 3xxx unit working in Canada.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&a mp;threadid=36362

In addition to finding and parsing channel data yourself (this guy has offered in the past to share his learnings on reverse engineering the network requests made by the Replay)...

You need a line simulator and either a linux box (for noauth PPP access) or Win2K Advanced (for the extralong username used by the Replay). Or I guess you could take out the drive and modify the user name, but that's even trickier.

So depending on how adventurous you're feeling -- go find yourself an old Replay or Showstopper and get hacking.

And if you're feeling *really* adventurous, maybe you can build some generic foreign nomenclature translation hack to allow mapping from any channel guide data source to the Replay format.

I have the same problem, I hit play too soon and then I have to sit through part of the last commercial or two. Although there is a way to adjust the amount it corrects, see the thread here.

-S

-S

Meanwhile, a bug in UTV has caused many subscribers to lose access to multiple DirecTV channels and some UTV features. Those users have been without access to those channels for two weeks now. Microsoft thinks they have a fix, but it will take a couple of weeks to get it rolled out to all UTV users. Read about it in this AVS Forum thread.

Yep, Microsoft has certainly thrown all their capability behind their digital home push. Buggy PVRs and broken Xboxes. No wonder Bill is started to make noises about using XP as the center of their digital home. Their efforts at convergence boxes continue to come up short and without an OS monopoly to force people to suffer through their miscues, it's just not working.

Works fine here. Although this link is a little shorter and has what appears to be a session ID removed.

I looked for a simple, factual link and couldn't find one

Of particular concern is that current displays which do not implement a copy protection standard (because one has not yet been fully settled on) will be unusable with future digital sources (tuners, cable boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc.) which do implement HDCP or whatever.

Mitsubishi says:

We will engineer and manufacture the upgrades necessary so the television you purchase today can be made compatible with near-future advances in digital television and digital interconnectivity. Specifically, we promise that you will be able to have your television upgraded, at a reasonable cost, to include an off-air HDTV tuner, a cable TV tuner (for unscrambled programming), an IEEE 1394 (FireWire®) connection, HAVi system control, and 5C copy protection.

I seem to recall a while back there was an uproar about the original wording of the Mitsubishi promise, something to the effect of the upgrades not costing you more than $1000 (it now reads "at a reasonable cost"), and that the upgrades would be made only if feasible. That particular link, I cannot find. It probably was on the AVS Forum.

I am close to purchasing a new HD-ready set myself and I've been following the market closely for the past few months.

First, you'll probably want to read some of the threads on the AVS Forum in the HDTV Hardware (a lot of good set top box info here!) and HDTV programming forums. Another good source of info on specific sets is the Home Theater Spot. Finally, if you want some perspective on the industry check out Mark Schubin's Monday Memo. It's published weekly.

I think it's a pretty good time to buy because:

• Prices on sets have fallen dramatically.
• Programming is really starting to become available. Cable & Broadcasting says there is 500 hours of HD available in the US per week.
• The picture does look tremendous!

Almost none of the sets or set top boxes you can buy today have a DVI or Firewire interface. These interfaces will enable set top box to talk to the TV and decide if it is a display device that is allowed to get the full 1080i resolution of a HDCP encrypted broadcast.

This won't be a problem if your set has a built in tuner that does HD or if your manufacturer is promising to upgrade your set to meet whatever standard gets decided on (and you don't mind replacing your set top box). That's why you probably ought to check out the Mitsubishi sets before you make a final decision. I don't work for them, invest in them, etc. I just like the fact that they are promising to upgrade whatever set you buy from them today via a plug in module that they'll sell for less than $1000.

Anyway, that's my 2 bits. Good luck!

Of course, you need to be able to get the stations (either OTA or Satellite/Cable), but the coverage range is also increasing with cable companies now offering HDTV feeds.

Add to that the benefit of being able to watch DVD in WideScreen, progressive output and its fabulous.

I definitely recommend a look at AVS Forums for much more information. I would also highly recommend getting the set ISF Calibrated after you have it for 100+ hours running. Makes a drastic difference in the picture quality.

BTW - AFAIK, the 2006 deadline (or whatever the year is) is for stations to be broadcasting DIGITALLY, which does NOT mean HDTV, just Digital. We all know digital can look like crap and worse than analog with too much compression (DirecTV and DishNetwork on some channels for instance).

-Frank

You can actually find reasonable projectors for much less (both LCD and DLP), although granted, minimum standards for acceptably "reasonable" are highly subjective. I think AVS Forum has already been mentioned in this thread, and there's also Projector Central and Home Theater People, which is related to Projector People.

Although many flame wars seem to occur over this topic, I think the general concensus is that if you can deal with a heavy, furniture-sized piece of equipment in the middle of your living room, then old CRT projectors give you the best picture quality bang for the buck. However, most people find the convenience of modern, small LCD/DLP projectors too hard to pass up.

There's more of an even split between the LCD vs. DLP camps. There's a pretty good article comparing the two technologies at Projector Central (although they don't seem to mention the "rainbow" effect that some people find too noticable and annoying in DLP's - search in the AVS Forums for discussions on that).

Anyways, in terms of reasonable projectors under $5k there's at least the following (with ~street prices):

• NEC VT45 $2000 LCD SVGA
• Epson Powerlite 50c $2000 LCD SVGA
• InFocus LP340 $2500 DLP SVGA
• NEC LT150 $2500 DLP XGA
• NEC VT540 $3000 LCD XGA

So even if SVGA is under your "acceptable" threshold you can still do pretty well under $5k (see Projector Central again for a discussion of how much better XGA is than SVGA).

There are three HD cards out right now. The Hauppauge, the Access DTV and the Telemann. All three have recording ability. The Access DTV is probably the slickest, but the recordings are serialized to the individual board. The Hauppauge's software lags behind the other two. The Telemann is the one I'm going to pick up. It has good software, the recordings are trasferrable between boards, and the Users of AVS Forum have developed DV Transfer, a program to archive HD on Digital8 or DV tapes.

The price of all three is around $399. Cheap compared to any stand-alone HD tuner, and it functions as a recorder.

Frequently-asked questions:
http://www.avsforum.com/hdtvfaq/HDTV-FAQ.htm
http://www.nwlink.com/~rxg/hdtv.html

Reviews, tips, tweaks, etc:
http://www.hometheaterspot.com
http://www.avsforum.com
http://www.keohi.com/keohihdtv/index.htm

Frequently-asked questions:
http://www.avsforum.com/hdtvfaq/HDTV-FAQ.htm
http://www.nwlink.com/~rxg/hdtv.html

Reviews, tips, tweaks, etc:
http://www.hometheaterspot.com
http://www.avsforum.com
http://www.keohi.com/keohihdtv/index.htm

I believe so, or at least I recall someone working on some a year ago when it first came out. Check AVS Forum in the HTPC forum. Search there and you should find out the driver situ.

I'd give the real answer, but my workplace proxy blocks AVS.

Hook up the Live to some real speakers. No. Not those. Virtually nothing you can buy that are advertised as "computer speakers" qualifies. I'm talking about an actual preamp/amp/receiver and some good home theater or music speakers.

The Live is very, very noisy. The connector for digital output conforms to no standard known on earth (yes, you can often connect it to other gear and it will work, but the voltage on the thing is totally out of whack). There's also absolutely no dejittering or noise protection on the digital output.

The DACs are low quality, which makes a big difference if you're not using the digital output (see above).

Most people putting together home theater PC's used the Live only because nothing else was available. That changed last year when M-Audio made the Audiophile 24/96 available. It has high quality 24 bit/96 KHz 2-channel output and a good digital output for 5.1. Apparantly the latest version has 4 input/output 24/96 channels now.

Best resource for information is the HTPC forum on AVS. I haven't been reading there recently, so I don't know what the real story is on the Audigy.

Personally, I found the review linked to be pretty useless. They didn't actually talk about sound quality at all, at least not beyond the absolute basics.

Stop whinging and whining. You get software upgrades, not just guide data, from TiVo. And the hardware is already subsidized; you can buy a lifetime sub if you want. Check out: http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi

Others have pointed out how you are wrong; that's not to say that TiVo software could not use some more improvements and tweaks, but TiVo does pay close attention to feedback from its customers, and to comments on the TiVo forum. TiVo is only going to get better.

This did change, a while ago. The TiVo service used to be recommended, now it's required. See this message to the TiVo Forum.

I would suppose the boxes with the built in satelitte recievers would have the best quality. There is a ton of conversion involved here. The built-in box has no conversion involved.

Non-intergrated/2 boxes MPEG2 Satelitte Stream -> VBR Decoded to FBR -> downconverted to analog output -> cable to pvr, signal loss, interference, etc -> MPEG2 Vbr Conversion -> MPEG2 Decoding -> Out to TV

Intergrated box MPEG2 Satelitte Stream -> VBR already encoded, data alreay MPEG2 compressed, saved directly to disk, video remains unedited and uncompressed. -> Downconversion to analog -> Out to TV

Rumor has it that next month, EchoStar (parent company of DishNetwork) will release a HD PVR. Of course, that would require a huge drive, but there is also news that Dish ordered a slew of 120gb drives from a large storage sompany. So, more room for plain-ol broadcasts, which dont take up nearly as much room. The box has been dubbed the DishPVR 721. Oh yeah, it runs linux.

More news and stuff on the Echostar Knowledge Base. There's lots of stuff on the AVSFORUM dish network board with other info.

Personally, what sold me on Tivo when I got it a year and a half ago was the great community at the AVS Tivo Forum. More info than you could ever want and a very supportive bunch for all kinds of questions. The Tivo FAQ is a good place to get answers to the basic questions first, though.

Someone on the AVS Tivo board suggested that this may be a gambit by both TIVO and SonicBlue to validate their Patents.

When you think about it, it comes at an odd time (with TIVO being awarded more patents.) This person suggested that SonicBlue would sue TIVO over certain patents, TIVO would countersue, both would settle and cross-license and the patents in question would have precedent in the court system. Both could then turn on MS and demand licensing fees for the validated patents.

Hopefully something like that is happening.

Your pretty quick to just dismiss the value of a PC in a home theater system. Your points are valid but only because the better solutions are not obvious. I still firmly believe that you're better off purchasing a dedicated DVD player but the experience of using a computer on a TV can be greatly improved as follows:

1) Remotes
There are many options here and many of them are better than kludgy. I personally use a cheapy Packard Bell Fastmedia remote that can be purchase for between $9-15 online or at computer shows. It consists of a cheapy receiver and a remote. There are even better solutions out there especially for a geeks home theater. Some contain IR receivers and transmitters, allowing you to customize macros and control more than the computer and the components. The biggest problem with these solutions are not the remotes themselves but A/V equipments general lack of a singal standard for connecting multiple devices together to act as one devices (would be nice to power on the DVD player and automatically select the input, audio configuration and picture adjustments).

I personally use a program called Girder to control my win box. Another popular program for linux is Lirc.

2) Sound Quality
Newer sound cards have improved drastically in terms of SQ but you are correct, the minijack is less than ideal and computers in general add noise to the mix. For a better solution connect you computer to your A/V receiver using one of the digital audio inputs. This removes the possibility of the minijack or the computer itself adding noise to the analog signal (most newer A/V receivers have digital inputs that use an internal DAC). Mp3s may not be the ultimate in high fidelty, but for most pop music its good enough and having a huge library online for casual listening is worth the trade off.

3) Video Quality
This is as much a fault of the computer as it is the fault of the TV. Most TV-Out capable video cards have pretty crappy picture quality, in fact I've yet to see one that knocked my socks off. Dedicated VGA converters generally do a better job, but are expensive and probably still won't give a picture as good as a $200 DVD player. But for the lucky few who have HDTVs there is hope. Some HDTV's come standard with a VGA or RGB interface and this is the ideal solution for hooking up your computer to such a set. For me, my HDTV doesn't have a VGA connector so instead I have to use a VGA->Y/Pb/Pr (component) transcoder. Using one of these transcoders provides a signal cleaner than any VGA out I've ever seen plus it allows me to use HD resolutions.


I don't recommend using a computer as a primary source in a home theater, but having a PC in the mix can be quite useful. Being able to control an entire home theater, being able to play mp3s and being able to play mame on a large tv make pretty compelling reason to throw a CPU into the cabinet. The AVSForum - HTPC (Home Theater PC) forum has many people who have a PC connected for various reasons.

You obviously have not done serious research into the use of the PC as a home theatre system. I have, and I can tell you that there are entire communities dedicated to the effort.

1

Soundcard: M-Audio AP 24/96 (none of that SB Live/Audigy crap) Did I mention that the entire point is to use SPDIF out to your $3,000 surround processor? (e.g. Lexicon, Classe, B&K?)

Video: GeForce 3, modified with high-quality video out filters. Or: Radeon.

IR: never been a problem. Never will be. Open sores software available, too.

See AVSForum for details.

Moderators: parent is being an idiot, please mod him down.

I don't know the model number but it is a Philips 30 hour unit.

I haven't specifically tested the SVHS input because the digital cable boxes here don't have an SVHS out (cheap bastards). Now I'm curious though, I'll have to look into it.

You can find out pretty much everything about Tivo at this forum.

FWIW I have a ReplayTV 3030 and the SVHS i/o works fine, I use it with a Dish Network sat system.

I recently put one together to co-exist with my home theater setup in the living room. A low end machine... 800 MHz Duron, 32MB Radeon, Hauppauge WinTV card (for video capture), 512MB ram, 80G HDD... the whole thing set me back about $700. I painted the case and all front panels black... it fits in quite nicely with the rest of my stereo.

With that system I can now capture video, compress it to mpeg1 (or mpeg2) for burning onto VCD and/or SVCD. I'm copying many of my most played CDs over to it, so I'll have an audio jukebox. I can play non region 1 DVDs. I can read /. on my TV. I can listen to internet radio stations. Pretty much anything I could do before on my office PC, I can do here... but now it's intergrated with my Home Theater.

We had a holiday party last week, so I ripped all of our holiday CDs, downloaded some other songs, recorded some of the "seasonal" music channel on the satellite, created a playlist, and threw it into random mode... and all day the thing happily churned out Christmas music from a fairly large library.

Money well spent so far...

-S

I thought it was interesting that the author said that more people where adding DVD players and surround sound speakers to their home computer in hopes of makeing it their new home theater. I think a lot of people are bringing their computer to the home theater in the family or media room and converging it that way.

One of the best sources for info on how to build and tune a Home Theater PC (HTPC) is the AVSForum

They have an excellent FAQ, a dedicated HTPC forum, and lots of pros.

I thought it was interesting that the author said that more people where adding DVD players and surround sound speakers to their home computer in hopes of makeing it their new home theater. I think a lot of people are bringing their computer to the home theater in the family or media room and converging it that way.

One of the best sources for info on how to build and tune a Home Theater PC (HTPC) is the AVSForum

They have an excellent FAQ, a dedicated HTPC forum, and lots of pros.

Head over to AVSForum for a look at their HTPC (Home Theater PC) section, they already have some interesting sources.

These guys are, of couse, looking to build a pure home-theatre PC system (turns out software line-doubling is far cheaper than hardware line-doublers for their DVD players), but the problem with housing their PCs is the same. They've been looking into various cases and solutions that are worthy of sitting on their AV rack for a long time, and have come up with some good looking cases, as well as leads on where to source them.

The bottom line is, I think TiVo is doing a very good job of making both the viewer and the network happy. The sonicBlue box can share over the internet out of the box - on the TiVo, mods are necessary that put this out of the reach of Joe Blow on the street. And TiVo underground has "secret" remote sequences.. once of which gets you a 30 second skip button on your TiVo. I've actually gone back to using the Fast Forward button instead. The automatic backup when you exit makes it easier.

Just look at the Tivo -- what benefit does a Tivo owner have because the kernel is GPL'ed -- has anyone rebuilt their Tivo linux kernel to fix a bug in it? I doubt it.

http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum5/HTML/005423 .html

I know TiVo is more expandable with the HD space and all, but is it better than Ultimate TV?

I only have a TiVo, and I'm not positive I'm talking about TiVo vs. UTV here, or mixing some of these up with TiVo vs. ReplayTV. Sorry.

• UTV only works with DirecTV. TiVo comes in a DirecTV flavor (that can now record off of two channels like UTV), and a "Stand Alone" flavor that works with DISH, cable, or an antenna (and mixed, like antenna plus cable or antenna plus DISH -- very important if you get normal networks via antenna).
• DirecTiVo has two "live buffers", UTV only lets you do PIP.
• TiVo does a way way way better job tracking schedule changes, and letting you decide which shows to get when there is a schedule change. (TiVo basically tracks the show name, or other search, and lets you assign a priority, UTV looks for a show that is on at "about eight" with the name you gave it)
• TiVo can be asked for it's current TODO list of stuff to record, to make sure it is going to do what you want.
• UTV has a 30 second skip button, TiVo has a 60x FF with self correction. They both take about as long to use, but many people like the 30 second skip
• TiVo has TiVomatics (during a commercial if the right crap is put into the VBL an icon pops up, pressing select will ask if you want to record "Show X", which is normally the show being advertised (or sponsored by Lexus), you can schedule it as normal, or cancel...or you can not press select and never see the screen -- it works even during FF), UTV doesn't.
• TiVo can be asked why it didn't record something you thought it should
• Unless you disable it, TiVo can record stuff it thinks you might like onto otherwise unused space (really unused, a show you recorded three months ago, and said "save for at least three days" is more important then a show TiVo thinks you might like because you liked other shows with the same actors, writer, and director).
• TiVo lets you opt-out of their "information gathering", and tells you what they gather if you decline to opt-out. MS does not.
• TiVo demands you use a phone to dial in and get program info (well DirecTiVo gets that off the air now, if you aren't recording something at 2am). UTV lets you use any ISP you like.
• UTV's interface is slicker
• TiVo has operating funds for a year or two (plus whatever Sony pays them), but is not currently self sustaining. MS can buy everyone on earth a UTV before going bankrupt :-)
• I like TiVo, I hate MS...

Anyone had/used both and can give us an honest opinion?

Yes, he posts on a lame non-slash web BBS type thing once in a while. I think he is DrStrange. He has three TiVos, a Replay, and a UTV. He does balanced reviews (tells you what each unit is best for, not just what TiVo does well). I looked for the exact post, but couldn't find it. If I had I would have skipped doing my own list.

Can be found here.

What's more, the service is emminently hackable so if they really did go down it wouldn't be hard to build a listings service that kept the unit functionality going in spite of a company closure. Several people have claimed to hack this already, though code is not readily available last I checked (for obvious reasons). Either way, I've got my daily calls going over my ethernet network, so it wouldn't be hard to sniff out the necessary bits or put some work into documenting the MFS partition formats and inserting it directly from a source like XMLTV.

So, for a fun project and damn useful toy, grab yourself a 20 hour Tivo cheap (see AVS TiVo Forums for pointers to cheap deals at Wal-Mart, Target, etc.), a big harddrive (most any 5400 rpm will do), and a hard drive bracket and ethernet adapter (here's a good tutorial). Then have fun with a device that's both well suited to the task (stable, nice tv based user interface, very sharp picture) and gives you a chance to sink your teeth into some fun hacks.

FWIW, I've been spending a lot of time hacking up my own media-box project of late and I really think that it isn't yet a viable option. Dual booting Debian/WinME with a AIW Radeon and SB Live Platinum 5.1 gives you the ability to do everything a TiVo can and more, but the interface, stability, and interoperability leave a lot to be desired. On the up side, its great to be able to play DivX, MP3, Emulators, etc. in the living room A/V system. Wonderful as a system oriented towards archived playback, music, and games, but don't buy one thinking its going to be nearly as useful in place of a TiVo.

... rjs

This sort of thing is asked all the time in the Tivo and Replay forums at avsforum.com. You'll have to filter out the posers and the zealots (not like on Slashdot, with it's high concentration of well informed, balanced, mature and non-dogmatic dialog) but there's far more well-informed PVR information there than will be found here.

Arguments can be made for or against either companies long-term viability and trying to guess now who will win is probably futile. Both will likely last at least until their current models become obsoleted by newer ones, either their own or someone elses so whatever you buy today you'll probably feel the need to replace soon no matter what happens to the company. Best advice is to find the one the features you like and buy it.

A feature comparison from someone who owns both.

Here are a bunch of resources for ReplayTV:

The AVS discussion forum. This is the leading site for discussion of ReplayTV. They also have a TiVo forum.

The ReplayTV Hacking Project at SourceForge.

A site for hacking the ReplayTV Remote Control

extract_rtv, a tool for extracting the MPEG files from the ReplayTV

It's there. Check out this thread for the combo.

Also, FWIW, the 2.5 version of the TiVo software includes a backdoor to enable 30 second skip. Check out the AVS Forum and I'm sure you'll be able to find it. Almost all DirecTiVos have been updated to 2.5, so they have this feature right now. Stand alone TiVos won't see 2.5 until about January ufortunately due to some delays with VBR encoding.

Also, what about dual tuners? Having a second tuner is invaluable, as it allows you to record two shows at once. So far, I haven't seen any mention of dual tuners on the RP4000. DirecTiVos have this ability right now.

I'm not even convinced that Sonicblue can pull off the features they are promising. The "Send Show to Other RPTV User" has so many copyright issues I won't even get into it. Plus, who really wants to spend at minimum $700 on a RPTV when you can find DirecTiVos for as little at $129 with new DirecTV service. Add in the $250 TiVo lifetime sub, and you're still about $300 ahead. Hack your box, and you can have over 120 hours of recording time, and still be underneath the cost for the base RPTV 4000 model.

I'll stick with my TiVo. UTV came along with big promises, and has largely failed. Replay won't have me convinced until they actually get the thing working with all the features functional.

I don't think they have the engineering resources to figure out how to install a bigger hard drive and an ethernet card.

They obviously can't install modems that work.

ReplayTV PROMOTIONAL CODES!

Some are geared at existing ReplayTV customers. Others are for 'people in the industry'. But they were freely given over the phone. I worked with this guy and got some codes corrected, so they now work properly.

I took the $100 off and no payments. (That'll make it easily financable over a few months.) Note! Most of these promo codes are for all but the most basic model.

You can hack TiVo to work with PAL, but not the new TiVos. The new TiVos come with several checksum routines that forbid the modification of TiVo's kernel (and some key files). This has effectively killed the PAL hack.

Go to the TiVo Message Board and search the underground forum (maybe the archives, this is an old topic) for PAL. The hack only works on software version 1.3 if I remember correctly. The newer TiVos have the file checking PROM code and will go into a reboot loop if you try to do this. And no, you can't just flash the PROM to an older version, it's been tried. ;)

It's funny... it seems as if ReplayTV has been scouring the TiVo message boards and looking for complaints from the underground. Every single one of these features are things that have been worked on or at least discussed in the TiVo Underground. Seems like the TiVo employees aren't the only ones browsing the bulletin boards in their free time.

Things of this nature have been discussed for a long time, but eventually discarded as being impractical. Now, here it is in box form, and it's even more impractical than I would have ever imagined.

First of all, I spent $250 on my 20hr TiVo, and then an additional $300 in hard drives for a total of ~144 hours recording time in 120gig of storage. This combined total is CONSIDERABLY less than their 40hr unit, and comes with over 3x more storage time. This, alone, proves that it's not worth it. And $2000? For a PVR? Don't even get me started. I would MUCH rather buy a video card with TV in and the PVR-like services that video cards are being bundled with now. Then I could record to my heart's content... not that I've ever been able to accumulate 65hrs of content on my TiVo to date...

The networked video storage... this was never spoken of (out loud) because of the frowning of not only the TiVo sponsors, but the threat of lawsuits to a young company. People seem to have major issues when you distribute copies of programs with no visual loss between generations. At least someone else is here to take the fall that TiVo couldn't.

Skipping commercials was the other big problem. This has always been available via backdoors in TiVo (removed in 2.0.1, rumored to be back in 2.5), but again, never a mainstream feature because of the sponsor problems it would cause. I'm going to be real interested to find out how the television community reacts to these features, and hopefully ReplayTV can be the whipping boy to pave the way for TiVo's next software update.

This will be the only good thing to come out of ReplayTV, the fact that every legal team even eyeing TiVo in the past will all start looking Replay's way now... and if Replay can get away with these features without a problem, expect the apprehensive TiVo to have them Q1 next year. As for me, I couldn't even consider buying a PVR for $700. I almost never bought mine for $250, there's just NO WAY I could justify that much of an expense. Not when I could get at TiVo with better service (just a few less tricks up it's sleeve) for $199 nowadays.

It's funny... it seems as if ReplayTV has been scouring the TiVo message boards and looking for complaints from the underground. Every single one of these features are things that have been worked on or at least discussed in the TiVo Underground. Seems like the TiVo employees aren't the only ones browsing the bulletin boards in their free time.

Things of this nature have been discussed for a long time, but eventually discarded as being impractical. Now, here it is in box form, and it's even more impractical than I would have ever imagined.

First of all, I spent $250 on my 20hr TiVo, and then an additional $300 in hard drives for a total of ~144 hours recording time in 120gig of storage. This combined total is CONSIDERABLY less than their 40hr unit, and comes with over 3x more storage time. This, alone, proves that it's not worth it. And $2000? For a PVR? Don't even get me started. I would MUCH rather buy a video card with TV in and the PVR-like services that video cards are being bundled with now. Then I could record to my heart's content... not that I've ever been able to accumulate 65hrs of content on my TiVo to date...

The networked video storage... this was never spoken of (out loud) because of the frowning of not only the TiVo sponsors, but the threat of lawsuits to a young company. People seem to have major issues when you distribute copies of programs with no visual loss between generations. At least someone else is here to take the fall that TiVo couldn't.

Skipping commercials was the other big problem. This has always been available via backdoors in TiVo (removed in 2.0.1, rumored to be back in 2.5), but again, never a mainstream feature because of the sponsor problems it would cause. I'm going to be real interested to find out how the television community reacts to these features, and hopefully ReplayTV can be the whipping boy to pave the way for TiVo's next software update.

This will be the only good thing to come out of ReplayTV, the fact that every legal team even eyeing TiVo in the past will all start looking Replay's way now... and if Replay can get away with these features without a problem, expect the apprehensive TiVo to have them Q1 next year. As for me, I couldn't even consider buying a PVR for $700. I almost never bought mine for $250, there's just NO WAY I could justify that much of an expense. Not when I could get at TiVo with better service (just a few less tricks up it's sleeve) for $199 nowadays.

They lost MY business because of all the problems...

TiVo modem problems

the new kernel keeps a cached copy of all files on the root partition and performs a checksum on power up. If any actual files in root don't checksum out correctly they are replaced (prior to boot) with the copies (stored in compressed form) in the kernel image. This appears to be end of hacking on DirecTivo boxes.

-Ray

Yeah, the information would say the user watched West Wing and skipped all the commercials. Man I love my replayTV.
For more dialog about replayTV go to the AVSforum. It's a great site with lots of discussion on replayTV, Tivo and Ultimate TV.

It's pretty much agreed among all PVR geeks that this is likely vaporware. The "source" for this info was a survey that Replay sent out asking "Would you pay this much for this feature in a future product?", and then whoever came up with the story took all those features, and decided it was a product announcement. Don't expect to buy one anytime soon.

See the following:
Tivo forums discussion
Replay forums discussion

It's pretty much agreed among all PVR geeks that this is likely vaporware. The "source" for this info was a survey that Replay sent out asking "Would you pay this much for this feature in a future product?", and then whoever came up with the story took all those features, and decided it was a product announcement. Don't expect to buy one anytime soon.

See the following:
Tivo forums discussion
Replay forums discussion