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SNIP:Microsoft is gearing up to compete directly with the TIVO DVR market with a product

Surely you haven't forgot the defunct UltimateTV PVR from Microsoft? MS tried entering that market and either due to market condition or patent issues decided to leave that arena. Now it looks like the PVR replacement is MS's eyes will be an Xbox media center. I imagine someday there will be a hardware upgrade to record some sort of TV broadcast or internet transmissions of TV.

I think it could have been an innovative console, but microsoft fumbled. To be fair they did an excellent job creating Live (although it's a bit expensive for a casual gamer). I was expecting a lot more when the Xbox was released.

The only real technical advatage it has over the PS2 is that it has more memory (64MB instead of 40MB), however the motherboards are setup for 128MB. If they had released their console with the full 128, we would have seen impresive games! When they killed off UltimateTV I figured they would release the same functionality in the Xbox. That would have been innovative. The HD is kindof neato, but wasn't ever utilized for much, they never released a browser, or any general purpose apps to make the Xbox WebTVish.

Not a likely target.

As seen on Where to Buy on the above mentioned site.

"UltimateTV receivers are no longer available for sale at retail locations. Microsoft will continue to provide support for current and future UltimateTV service subscribers."

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when they win this one who might they sue next? hmmm... Probably a good plan on their part to start with the 'little' guys first. ;)

On the other hand, Hauppauge has WinTV-PVR and a google showed several articles refering to those devices as PVRs. So the "jury is still out", but "I see the tide turning", [[insert more sayings here]]

Also, you are sorta right about not knowing that is available with DVRs, I have seen them used and played with a couple (including my father's house), but I do not yet own one. I will (most likely) purchase one over the next year. I am a little confused over your comment that "they sell themselves to a giant Asian firm" and that being better than the hated Hollywood, but the price factor of ReplayTV might push me to that system.

As far as Digital cable sucking, well you must not have any experience with the best feature, on-demand, because the channel quide will start (predictably) at "1" (which is On-Demand). However, I don't use the channel quide in "full format", somtimes I use it to see which "reqular" movies are starting or to check my "favorites", otherwise it's a bit of a pain flipping through over a hundred channels on screen of (maybe) 10 titles at a time. However, mostly I like the show title which shows up even when it's on commercial (a must have for channel surfing). From that I can check that channel's shows for the rest of the night (and find out the "info").

Yes. And a good name, like Ultimate TV; and they'll be unbeatable. Except they already tried and failed. They had two advantages over Tivo, they beat Tivo with dual tuner DirecTV and they built PinP into the box, but they still failed. (I recall it cost about $100 more)

Sony is the only one with the resources, name, and establishment to beat MS to the punch, too bad for TiVo, Sony likes to keep things in house and won't be knocking on there door to buy them out.

Given the choice between UltimateTV and DirecTivo, I went with the SONY licensed DirecTivo. Works great, esp. with the 120GB drive upgraded to. (The biggest part of why I went with Tivo, a vibrant hacker community and Tivo's acceptance of them as a positive thing)

Sorry, I know better than to answer trolls like this.

I have a ReplayTV. It's the PVR for folks who like more features, but less stability . :)

So it's the Microsoft Windows version of a pvr? Oh, crap, there's already one of those? :)

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

Where have you been? Microsoft shipped and killed UltimateTV awhile ago, which is where the PVR tech for Freon is coming from. Patents aren't even an issue here.

It's called Ultimate TV, and it's only offered for one of the direct-broadcast satellite services. They haven't tried to market it more broadly. Unclear why.

Um... Why are you being such a troll

Microsoft has already have a TiVo like system, it's called the Ultimate TV.

So until next time, please don't start the trolling and stupid MS bashing until you get all the facts straight

I think if TiVo got rid of the subscription model and went to a model fueled by hardware sales they'd have the best shot of becoming the ubiquitous device of this decade -- but with MS gunning at them and their continuing missteps, it's hard to see them becoming a widespread success. I'm still waiting to see what becomes of the vaporous but potential TiVo-killer Nokia Media Terminal. By the time these devices reach third generation, they'll be great--but I hate having to wait it out in the meantime!!

TiVo is a software company, more precisely a Linux software company. They don't make any hardware, just the software. Now what on earth would TiVo have to do with UTV, which runs WinCE?

Not to mention (from UTV's web site): "UltimateTV® SERVICE IS DEVELOPED BY WebTV Networks, INC., A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF Microsoft."

Ummm, wrong? Shrug, they can "talk" about putting something like this together all they want, but the WebTVs I've seen for sale are just for web surfing.

OK, then you're wrong too. Look here for info on a device that receives DirectTV signals, records video, cruises the web, and displays interactive TV content. Maybe it's not everything that was in the article, but it certainly isn't just for surfing. Especially the interactive TV part. Have you ever seen enhanced TV programming? I don't think you have. I did the NBA on NBC last year, and it rocked, if I do say so myself. Live stats during the game, player profiles, in-game chat with other users watching the same TV program. Go back to the NBC ETV link to see about a dozen shows that made the "light of day". Once you get a WebTV+ box, you can also watch E! 24 hours enhanced, datelineNBC enhanced, Comedy Central enhanced, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, 24 hour Game Show network, etc, etc. Is that enough "light of day" for you?

Ummm, so what? It still can't do anything mentioned in CmdrTaco's fantasy.

"So what"? The most successful convergence platform ever gets a "so what"? I already proved that the WebTV platform can do some of the stuff in the article by itself, and act as a GUI/controller for the rest, and that it's already in a million homes and costs way less than it could, and your reply is "so what?"? If that was flame bait, then let me just take the bait real quick:

One of less than 100 industry insiders in producing enhanced television content posts insider information on a possible solution to the problem posed, and you reply that you don't get his point. You should be ashamed of yourself, seriously. Stop getting your opinions on consumer television products from consumer television product sales brochures before you post a reply to an expert, dude. Next time, follow the links past the homepage, and don't waste my time creating anchors. If you don't see my point, just assume it's because you don't get it, which is probably the case more often than you know.

I'm not proud of buying a Micro$oft product, but in the PVR market, I was led to believe they had the best product/service combination.

Ultimate TV is a service offering from Microsoft, that like the X-box, has little to do with PC software. Well, I found out today that they fscked that up too.

Whaddyagonnado?

This question has been asked no fewer than two times before, and one time, I even answered in +3 detail on exactly what would be needed to make a PC-based TiVo.

But that's okay, let's rehash.

Since we're going entirely software-based, e.g. you're sitting a normal, icky PC in your stereo rack, or you're just using your PC as normal, you probably don't have a hardware MPEG encoder. The best you've probably got is a Matrox card with onboard MJPEG compression, and I don't think the Linux drivers support that.

Now, assuming you already know how capture a video stream and pipe it to an MPEG encoder (and trust that your system is fast enough to not drop too many frames; think P3/500 or better), the only thing you really need to do is add in TV listings, and integrate them into channel changing and record functionality.

Copy and pasted from my previous post, channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online.

As for integration, a lot of this work has already been done, at least for satellite TV streams. Klaus Schmidinger produced his Video Disk Recorder which performs channel guides and VCR functionality on his Linux PC, for his satellite TV using a PCI card. All GPL'd, so feel free to port it over to plain old TV cards, too.

--Vito

I've been doing research on this for the last month or three, and the news isn't entirely good. First, you need to figure out exactly what you want your TiVo-esque set-top box to do. "Personal TV" features like live pause and live rewind? Digital, full-frame recording? MPEG1, MJPEG or MPEG2 compression? Channel guides and automatic VCR programming? CD playing? DVD playing? Lastly, what will you put it all in?

Let's start with personal TV features. You can currently record live, full-resolution video and audio onto your HD without dropping frames -- assuming you've got at least a 500mHz processor and a fast HD. That's just a live dump to a raw AVI, and you'll fill up your HD pretty fast that way, at roughly 1-2 meg a second. But if you can blow 4gb for an hour of programming to be able to do a live pause/rewind for a while, then that's not too big a deal. But what if you want to include digital VCR features, not just live pause/rewind?

Now, things get a little more expensive. The crux of the problem is to do live, full-frame MPEG2 video and audio encoding in software, you need at least ANOTHER 500mhz of horsepower, and a single 1gHz processor won't cut it. MPEG1 quality blows if you're recording off satellite or even decent cable TV (if you want the low-end, though, the Broadway MPEG1 encoder is cheap, around $800), leaving you with just MJPEG or MPEG2 video. MJPEG is much larger than MPEG2, because it doesn't have temporal compression, but you can get consumer-grade hardware MJPEG encoders on Matrox hardware, so for a build-your-own box, if you 2-3x your HD size, you should be okay. But to do it right, you want full-frame D1 MPEG2 encoding (half-D1 MPEG2 is MPEG1 resolution, but MPEG2 quality), like you have on DVDs. And to do that in hardware will cost you over a thousand dollars, and may not include an MPEG DEcoding solution!. Yuck. Darim's MPEGator2 can do full D1 encoding for (only) US$1800, VisionTech's MVcast is US$1995, DV Studio's Apollo Expert is US$1995 and includes both encoding and decoding, making it possibly the best buy. I have no idea if Linux drivers are available for any of them, but the price alone puts that sort of tech out of the realm of most people's hands.

With that sobering realization in mind, let's forge forward to channel guides and VCR programming. Channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online. And once you have this set up, it's not much farther to program an IR transmitter to sit in front of your VCR's IR port to have it automatically record shows for you.

CD playing in a set-top box is a nice feature. Pop the CD in, and have it hit CDDB for the disc info, and give track options. Shouldn't be too hard.

DVD playing in a homebuild Linux-based set-top box is nearly possible now, too. As of this weekend, I believe that you can now put a DVD in the drive, and play it, entirely software decoded, no ripping VOBs or copying to a HD, full-screen, full-frame, with real-time AC3/48kHz audio downsampling to 44kHz, and audio/video sync is probably only a few hours of coding away. Now all we need is hardware MPEG acceleration in the ATI Rage chipsets, and maybe that attractive Apollo encoder/decoder.

Lastly, what are you going to put this monstrosity of open-source software engineering in? What we've just explained above is that for around $3000, you can build a combination cable box (we'll ignore the open source software cable descramblers for the moment), real-time MPEG2 digital VCR, timeshifting personal TV player, channel guide, CD player and region-code-less, restriction-less DVD player, that utterly blows the quality of anything else on the market out of the water. This is what TiVo WANTS to be. But what are you going to do? Stick a fat, ugly, beige desktop case on top of your TV? Bah. T-A-C-K-Y. Even the recently rediscovered BookPC (aka NLX) cases still look like PCs. But most people can't afford to mint custom cases, yet you want something that doesn't look like a PC. How about a 1U or 2U black rackmount case, sans locking front panel and rails? 19" wide makes it a bit wide for small TVs, but that's okay. You've got a bay for a floppy drive or small LCD panel, a DVD drive, and enough room inside for at least one HD, and in some 1U cases, both the TV card and the MPEG card! Otherwise, just go 2U, which isn't TOO much larger. Whee.

I think that's it. I don't know what the state of TV input on Linux is, but I assume it's pretty good, or you wouldn't even be able to consider this project, so that's not a big deal. And even through you can record in real-time, without compression, straight to AVI (bleagh!), I left out the possibility to post-process the AVI to MPEG, because really, that's so tacky. That's like having to play DVDs by copying them to a HD first. Do it realtime, and Do It Right(tm). Lists of MPEG hardware encoders I got from a Canadian distributor called BernClare Multimedia, Inc. Seems like a nice place. Other URLs I used for reference (no, my personal project doesn't have a site; I just posted most of my knowledge here!) include the still-conceptual LinuxVCR project, the LinuxToday article on How to Build Your Own 1U Rackmount, the Calibri 300R 1U rackmount Linux-based router, and LCDproc for that LCD display you know you'll need on the front to perpetually blink 12:00.