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Sega/Pace Dreamcast Set-Top-Box Revealed.

I think it is this one, but there isn't much information on the games:

IP420

I remember this as one of the great, "let's throw the disgruntled say-it-ain't-so Dreamcast fans a bone so they won't realize they've got a dead platform" stories that the Dreamcast sections of game magazines were running when it was clear that time was running out for the Dreamcast.

Pace make a dual frewview recorder but it doesn't do anything groundbreaking and weighs in at 350 pounds which is a pretty damn expensive and the hard drive is only 20 gigs. You could have an array of 50 quid freeview boxes and vcrs for that money, or build a computer with 3 freeview tuners that could be used for other stuff as well, etc.
i would really like sky plus because it's only a one-off fee if you already have a sky sub (share cable at them moment with 5 other people so it works out v cheap for all the channels). Its a shame about the encrypted video though.

We don't need a standard - we have Pace :o)

Pace pretty much rule the UK cable box industry and are providers for a large portion of the world including the US.

Seriously though we have a totally closed cable system where all channels are encrypted unlike america where basic analogue cable is provided in the clear.

The standard in the UK btw is Euro-DOCSIS - effectively our cable boxes are cable modems with a DVB headend tacked on.

We use a 53Mhz Pace DSL 4000 STBwhich is also decoding the MPEG stream in software and the responsiveness of the EPG is still instantaneous.

If an STB has an EPG that is as slow as you describe it is probably because it's using a carrousel EPG, each EPG data page is broadcast round-robin and the STB is waiting for the page to come around.

Pace have a twin-tuner freeview PVR out now, stocked by argos and Comet.

Not cheap at 350ukp, software is nowhere near TiVo standard, no EPG, and it only has a 20Gb HD but it's on the shelves now and apparently does the job.

I'd buy a second freeview box and a TiVo though! :)

Well we got excited about ATVEF, then MHEG, then MHP, somewhere in there OpenTV developed their own proprietary system, as did Liberate. And that's not even including the TV over ADSL guys...

iMagicTV, one of those TV over ADSL middleware providers uses HTML with 'tv in the browser' as does others like Minerva and Orca...

Don't forget about hardware vendors who are already shipping and this includes the big boys like Thomson/RCA

So why yet another dtv standard.. I'm getting dizzy...

RISC OS is actually owned by Pace Microtechnologies Plc. They acquired it from Acorn Computers Plc when Acorn was broken up. RISC OS is developed by RISC OS Ltd who licence it from Pace and develop it for the desktop machines. Castle Technologies obtained the rights to manufacture and distribute Acorn's Risc PC in the break up but have since started developing their own products.

From the details it's not clear whether Castle are the culprits or RISC OS Ltd. It is unlikely to be Pace as they are not interested in the desktop products. Knowing some of the parties concern I know where my suspicions lie but I'm not saying.

Lots of people here seem to think that Castle own RISC OS, or that RISC OS Ltd own it. This is not true. After Acorn Computers finished in 1998, the set-top box division of it was bought by Pace Micro Technology in June 1999 (Acorn Computers itself changed name to Element 14). This sale included RISC OS.

Pace still owns the copyright to RISC OS. RISCOS Ltd was set up and licenced the code, which has been released as RISC OS 4. This is what you can buy to upgrade Acorn RISC PC computers (and other Archimedes machines, like the A7000).

Castle Technology recently also licenced RISC OS from Pace, completely separate from RISCOS Ltd. This version of RISC OS is being developed for the Iyonix computer and is called RISC OS 5.

This could be an interesting situation, as Castle Technology do not own RISC OS, they only licence it.

Lots of people here seem to think that Castle own RISC OS, or that RISC OS Ltd own it. This is not true. After Acorn Computers finished in 1998, the set-top box division of it was bought by Pace Micro Technology in June 1999 (Acorn Computers itself changed name to Element 14). This sale included RISC OS.

Pace still owns the copyright to RISC OS. RISCOS Ltd was set up and licenced the code, which has been released as RISC OS 4. This is what you can buy to upgrade Acorn RISC PC computers (and other Archimedes machines, like the A7000).

Castle Technology recently also licenced RISC OS from Pace, completely separate from RISCOS Ltd. This version of RISC OS is being developed for the Iyonix computer and is called RISC OS 5.

This could be an interesting situation, as Castle Technology do not own RISC OS, they only licence it.

Tivo faces respectable competition over here (UK). Something like 1 in 4 households have digital television of some kind which comes with EPGs. The digital satelite, cable and DSL providers have video on demand which reduces the need for PVRs. Also many channels have time shifted versions so that if you're late or get interrupted you can catch the program an hour later.
Finally the PVR functionality is being incorporated in to the set top boxes. Sky already have one, the Sky+ box, and there are digital terestrial combined STBs and PVRs on the horizon. Why convert to analogue then back to digital when you can record the digital direct?

Ooops, talking to myself again, going mad!
I meant to put in a link to pace, so here it is. I hope I don't have half a link in the parent, it looks of here (mozilla could be forgiving me).
Also does anyone know reasonably priced cards with decent drivers providing hardware accelerated TV Capture? What about hardware accelerated Video capture? And btw I mean under Linux and full PAL (preferably all audio formats aswell)? No matter how many times I try to find a card I can feel happy buying, I just can't! How come these guys can build Tivo's so cheap? How come no-one is building PC hardware from the same chips etc or if they are is the code all locked away?

If you have a ganders here. You will see that Pace have released a box that allows you to watch one channel while recording another on to hard disk. Plus this box sells officially for £299, but I've seen it on sale locally for £249. If a two tuner box can be launched for such a low price, I can't see cost being the barrier to a 4 tuner recording version. Surely its only a case of getting faster hard disks, before a 4 channel recording version becomes available.

I'm quite happy to stick with my Tivo, but when they launch a box that can record two channels at once I'll jump for it. I'd love to be able to record The Kumars at No 42 and The News at the same time. I give it a year or two before such a device hits the market.

As for the current I am able to view two channels at once on my Mandrake box using two Hauppauge cards, I can only record on one though as the HD strains when I try both. There is a windoze product called PowerVCR and it is made by CyberLink, this compresses video in to MPEG for recording to disk, thus the main bottleneck is processor power and RAM, not HD speed. That is what is needed on Linux, a good realtime analog to MPEG encoder as a stop gap before recording the digital stream directly to disk is possible (drivers, copyright etc).

Pace Micro of Saltaire, England are a major manufacturer of set top boxes. A year ago they entered into an agreement with Sega to add dreamcast technology to their STBs. Pace are now all but tits-up (although that is mostly to do with the Football League, ITV digital, Enron and Worldcom).

...or so I read somewhere, they'd better hurry up if they want to get it into Santa's sleigh...

So all you ex UK OnDigital subscribers who are going to be forced to return or pay for your set top box, there is hope of a getter gizmo.

This is a new suscription free PVR for the UK market that receives all the free to air DTTV channels.

Not much in the way of details or prices yet...

The Electron was basically a lost cost version of the Beeb, another part of the product line - it wasn't a rival.

This machines architecture can also be trace into the Acorn Archimedes, which included a functional BBC B emulator in RISC-OS. Acorn later split into ARM and Element-14, ARM is still going strong as the CPU manufacturer and Element-14 is now a division of PACE, developing
IP enabled Set-Top-Boxes. And this DSL4000 STB still includes a functional BBC B emulator.

Well, Acorn made the Archimedes (which, despite Apple's claims, was the first home computer to use a RISC processor) and then the RISC PC (a old 202Mhz model is sitting next to me at the moment) - just as they were about to launch the RISC PC II (aka Phoebe), Morgan-Stanley Dean Whitter decided that Acorn's shares in ARM Plc (the designers of a whole range of RISC processors - originally the company was called Acorn Risc Machines, then Advanced Risc Machines) were worth more than the company itself and the split the company up.

Most IP rights and staff went to Element 14, but the rights to the RISC OS operating system were sold to Pace who have sub-licenced the rights to RISC OS Ltd. The "Acorn" name and logo itself were sold off to Acorn's largest distributor Castle Technology.

More information is available.

Wi-Lan isn't Wi-Fi (802.11b)- wi-lan is W-OFDM, wireless t1/e1- and they have a great technology for the reception of HDTV so that you don't get the silly black blocks that disrupt signal,-- but instead, the FCC chose to back 8-VSB, an inferior technology.

The greater question is, why is the FCC deciding this? They didn't decide which cell phone technology was going to reign, only which frequencies we'd use.

Sources? http://www.wi-lan.com

commentary: If we were to follow the 'lead' from the ATSC then this is what the future would look like. The Americans are still in denial about the Brazilian (and other) DTT test results (denying the basic facts that a single carrier system can never work for wireless DTT) and have carried out their own tests arriving at their own conclusions using incorrectly configured DVB-T equipment. The sooner the US drops its single carrier 8-VSB based standard in favour of an OFDM solution the better for all concerned. A report summarising why DTV is not happening in the US (example of flawed thinking: DTV does not necessarily mean HDTV). Unfortunately, DVB and ISDB have (so far) been unable to agree on a common OFDM way forward even though both standards are nearly exactly the same (ISDB improved the DVB-T standard with the addition of extra time interleaving, band segmentation and the option for 4k carriers). However, due to the wide acceptance of DVB-T and its myriad other supporting standards it is unlikely that ISDB compliant equipment will ever be deployed outside of Japan.

Take-up of Digital TV in the UK has been the most successful in the world in percentage terms (the US is not far behind); but can it continue to grow at the same pace? ITVdigital, the DTT service provider in the UK, launched with an early (2k carrier) release of DVB-T and had been reasonably successful (although I am sure some would disagree?) with over 1.2 million subscribers up to the end of 2001. Unfortunately, due to a combination of factors ITVdigital are in danger of closing down and are currently in administration. The BBC in their annual R&D review for 2000-2001 (Digital Television Distribution section) list some of the issues associated with DTT in the UK and give an interesting insight into how improvements can be achieved. Thanks to the wealth of experience gained in the UK other European DTT service providers will be able to provide a more advanced and improved service to their customers. Get the insider views on the UK DTT experience from the following newsgroup: uk.tech.digital-tv;

The $200 extra per TV seems a bit steep.

Here in the UK you can get a set-top terrestrial digital receiver for £99 with no subscription charges. That gives us a rough idea of production costs, but compare similarly-featured analogue TVs to digital TVs and there's a couple of hundred quid difference.

It seems that the cost of "going digital" is being kept artificially high by TV manufacturers.

On a similar subject, the UK government wants to switch off analogue broadcasts by 2010. Many people think this is unrealistic because digital take-up has been slow and TV manufacturers aren't doing anything to help, especially with regard to low-income homes. You can get a decent-sized analogue TV for less than £200 but you're looking at almost three times as much to get a basic digital set.

Not too long ago sky came out with a new PVR system called Sky+ which they are now starting to hype (though this questions if it is released). What's interesting is that sky have left Tivo to persue this option from Pace. One of the touted advantages was that the Sky+ will record the actual broadcast stream direct to disk, but I can't help but think the real reason for the change in tack from sky is that they wish to have more control over the capabilities of their customers (i.e. no Network card streaming hacks please).

Not too long ago sky came out with a new PVR system called Sky+ which they are now starting to hype (though this questions if it is released). What's interesting is that sky have left Tivo to persue this option from Pace. One of the touted advantages was that the Sky+ will record the actual broadcast stream direct to disk, but I can't help but think the real reason for the change in tack from sky is that they wish to have more control over the capabilities of their customers (i.e. no Network card streaming hacks please).

That's been ripped straight from the back of a Pace Micro set-top-box. They've put no effort into this blatant forgery, you usually find some creativity at least, but that box is just a complete take of their nearest rival

Thinking about it... when it comes to MS, that could actually be a legit picture.

Yeah... I have a DOCSIS modem from Motorola, they didn't start installing cable modems en masse in the UK until a standard was decided upon. They ran trials using ATM based modems around 1996 though.

My digital set-top-box has a DOCSIS modem in it too, which is used for the interactive stuff, there's a RJ45 on the back but it's redundant at the moment. I hear Pace are starting to make boxes with 802.11b built in, the idea is they will fit (or you buy) a wireless board for your PC and you're straight on the net. The cable company wouldn't have to bother wiring in a seperate cable modem and ethernet.

Think about it, you will have digital TV and an online games system that plays Dreamcast games in one box.

According to this story at The Register Sega and Pace have announced that Pace will license Dreamcast technology for their next generation set-top boxes. Pace are Europe's largest digital TV set-top box manufacturer and has made set-tops for all the major UK digital networks (BSkyB, OnDigital, NTL and Telewest) and for US cable networks (Comcast and TimeWarner) as well as digital networks in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Looks like their tackling the home gateway challenge from the other side than Sony.

Yeah - I know Acorn Computer Group were looking into this - and did infact produce a 'cut-down preview' system which would have produced the feed into the hardware. Unfortently, this was before all the Network Computing business which took up their time and money and eventually caused the company to break up (I think Pace Micro now have the rights to any CAVE implementation by them - but I'm not sure... :( ).
RIchy C.
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