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I wonder if this has anything to do with him not particularly liking ogg?

His name is Wenger, and you're probably right. If I had this guy's level of experience in digital multimedia and was as actively involved as he is in implementing such widely-used, RAND-licensed formats as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 etc. (which is what UB Video provided, before it was bought by Scientific Atlanta, itself now a subsidiary of Cisco), then I might have reason to not particularly like OGG, Vorbis, Theora, etc., either. Or, for you tin-foil hatters, just because it's a conspiracy doesn't mean the conspiracy doesn't know what it's talking about.

Don't forget that Scientific Atlanta is now owned by Cisco, too. They make the infrastructure systems for cable companies. I think the Sci Atl home page tells you all you need to know about this study.

It says:
The Bandwidth Crunch
Squeeze More Performance
from Your Network or
Join the Move to 1 GHz

It's marketing for a Cisco business.

Building upon its award-winning Explorer® 8300(TM) digital video recorder (DVR) platform, Scientific-Atlanta today announced its new MCP-100(TM) Media Center DVR with a built-in DVD burner. This market-leading product will combine all of the great features of the current Explorer 8300 platform, including multi-tuner DVR, optional high definition DVR, DOCSIS (DSG) and Multi-Room(TM) DVR capability, with a new built-in DVD player and burner.

The new MCP-100 Media Center will add DVD burning functionality for standard and high definition content that will give consumers the ability to simply and securely record their favorite shows and movies onto writeable DVDs. The MCP-100 Media Center will support the majority of writeable DVD formats and will also play off-the-shelf DVDs and CDs. In addition, the product is being designed to respect key content protection flags including 'copy freely', 'copy once', and 'copy never' tags.

Read and learn boys and girls. Scientific Atlanta has this product which should be available to Cable Customers early next year. I saw a demo of it at a Cable Show here in KC about 2 months ago...

I can say that the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD has an external SATA port for supposedly expanding the storage capacity of it's DVR. I haven't tried it yet to see if it actually works though.

I've had one of the TW boxes since the beginning of this year (Southern Maine is one of TW's favorite test markets), and you can do a standard "record channel x on schedule y" (where "y" is a particular date, every <particular day of week>, every weekday, etc.), independent of the program guide Check the manual for the "Scheduled Recording" option; it's in some unexpected place on-screen. I'm not sure if the odd placement is the fault of TW or Scientific Atlanta, but my hunch is the manufacturer.

Oh, BTW, according to SciAtl at the DVP product page, the HDTV-capable DVR cable box will be available to cable operators in October-November. Can they get any more tech in one box?

Hey, you left out the best part -

Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.

It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...

Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.

If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.

Hey, you left out the best part -

Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.

It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...

Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.

If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.

Hey, you left out the best part -

Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.

It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...

Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.

If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.

Hey, you left out the best part -

Any time that TW pushes an "upgrade", you lose all of your recordings, and all of your schedules.

It wouldn't be that bad, except that these "brainwipes" seem to happen quite often... enough to wonder if these units aren't based on an MS product...

Oh, and there's an extra funny caveat. You get no instructions with the unit, just a card with an annotated screenshot of the remote.

If you want instructions, you can go to the SciAtl website. After you read their privacy policy which says all personal information is optional, you can sign up and give them your name, address, number of TVs, number of computers... then you can give them the serial number off of the DVR (which is strictly optional, they promise)... then you'll have access to a user's guide once they email you your account info. It's gotten better, though. I recall when I got my DVR a year ago, they also wanted my spouse, age, gender, race, income, number of kids, kid's names, and the barcode number off the unit as well... but it was strictly optional, so it's okay. Funny thing is, the none of their scripts will allow you to register unless you complete all of the required fields, lol.

It'll be interesting to see if all the I/O features are left enabled.

but you're wrong...

Explorer® 8000 home entertainment

have a nice day.

That's a different service. TW uses boxes which they get from Scientific Atlanta, then they add some magic codes to it and rent it to customers. As you can see from the link above, TW is just rebranding the same box that SA makes - it looks like they just copy-and-pasted the image from SA's web site! The demo is even identical, except of course TW's logo swapped out with the SA logo.

In addition, I don't think they are testing the service at this point, I think it's just released - Scientific Atlanta would be the ones testing the box anyway. The box AOL-TW is going to be producing is probably going to be developed internally.

Moxi looks awesome. One of Digeo's partners is Scientific Atlanta. TimeWarner's digital cable boxes (most of them) are built by this company. In fact, the new "DVR" that TimeWarner is releasing soon is Scientific Atlanta's Explorer 8000. And from what I've read, it sucks (right now).

Which leads me to ask, why doesn't TimeWarner wait for ScientificAtlanta's Moxi-based device? I mean, TW is pushing HD in several markets, and yet the Explorer 8000 doesn't even support HD (even though the literature says it does... check the wiring diagrams, no HD).

Hopefully they will offer Moxi soon. I love my TiVo, but a sweet device like Moxi, integrated with my digital cable service, combined with HD support equals TV HEAVEN.

The standalone PVR could soon be a thing of the past.

TiVo and Replay are both trying with mixed results to enter the cable set top box market. The cable companies don't want to give another company revenue if they can keep it for themselves.

" Scientific Atlanta which makes the digital set top boxes for Time Warner cable and others has recently started shipping the Explorer 8000 which has PVR capabilities.

Among other things, it allows you to record two programs while watching a third from the hard disk.

The cable companies will much rather keep the $10-15 per month extra that they could charge for this box, rather than share it with Replay or TiVo. And the customer will not have to shell out $400-$500 upfront to get it. Look for the SciAtl box to gain significant marketshare as PVRs gain more household penetration.

The standalone PVR could soon be a thing of the past.

TiVo and Replay are both trying with mixed results to enter the cable set top box market. The cable companies don't want to give another company revenue if they can keep it for themselves.

" Scientific Atlanta which makes the digital set top boxes for Time Warner cable and others has recently started shipping the Explorer 8000 which has PVR capabilities.

Among other things, it allows you to record two programs while watching a third from the hard disk.

The cable companies will much rather keep the $10-15 per month extra that they could charge for this box, rather than share it with Replay or TiVo. And the customer will not have to shell out $400-$500 upfront to get it. Look for the SciAtl box to gain significant marketshare as PVRs gain more household penetration.

Sorry, no proprietary details, but the box specs are publicly available from Scientific-Atlanta

The link you gave requires a login. Try this instead:

http://www.scientificatlanta.com/customers/prod_su b_PVR.htm

Pause, rewind, fast forward, record, and re-play live analog and digital TV programs - without an additional box in your entertainment center. Scientific-Atlanta has introduced our most powerful member of the Explorer® set-top family, the Explorer 8000 model, which will deliver a wide range of multiple interactive TV applications through a single set-top. Using a built-in 40 gigabyte hard drive, this innovative set-top will also enable the simultaneous viewing and recording of two channels of programming and as well as support HDTV.

Scientific Atlanta will be providing the DVR box. It will be able to record both analog and digital channels. It will not use Tivo software. It has dual tuners so you can record one show while watching another. For more info, see this press release.

I don't have the motorola cable box so I can't be much help there. But In Columbus, Ohio, Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000 cable boxes that seem very similar in functionality. It also has some nifty hardware, USB, some type of card slot (PCMCIA?), another port marked as 'serial', it supposedly supports ethernet, also. I know they have some type of developer page on their site, but it looks like you need a membership?

I do know how to get into the diag mode though: hold down the diamond button for 5 seconds then hit select (or maybe both at the same time). You can see DETAILED information about the box, tune channels, etc... quite interesting!!

If anyone else is interested in this box, post or mail me, because I have been wondering what I could do to this box for over a year, I just never got around to messing around with it.