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CmdrTaco's Week with Tivo
The TiVo is supposed to be a Digital VCR. Instead of inserting tapes and programming your box to capture channel 11 from 9-10, you say program it to 'Record the X-Files'. And if you opt for a "Season Pass", the device will record The X-Files whenever its on: syndication on FX? The official sunday night show on Fox? It doesn't matter: the TiVo allows you to forget what channel you're watching and what time your show is on.
I'm a fairly busy person, and to me this sounded like a godsend: I could tape shows that aired while I was at work or away on business or asleep, and stockpile them... then I could watch them (fast forwarding through commercials and deleting the rerunrs) when it fit my schedule. No more channel surfing. No more reruns. Less wasted time. I must say its pretty amazing to turn on your TV and see "Whats On" and see a half dozen shows I wanted to see from the last few days, but missed.
As you use the TiVo it gets smarter. It remembers what you've recorded (and with a simple 'Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down' option on the remote, you can tell it what you like and don't like) and attempts to guess what programming you might enjoy. I don't have any comments on how well this works, but since I had selected DragonBall Z and The Simpsons, it was essentially taping virtually any piece of animated crap being broadcasted on nickelodean (No offense to Rocko, Ren & Stimpy, and Angry Beavers, all of which are excellent) . Supposedly it'll get smarter with usage.
Its also pretty useful for watching TV in real time: the device is always recording whatever you are watching. You can pause/slo-mo/or rewind whatever you're watching. This allowed my girlfriend to catch a joke she missed during the Simpsons while running upstairs for a glass of water. And it allows me to slow-mo the gratuitous Sculley Cleavage from this weeks X-Files.
<RANTA>Anyone who bought a Dish knows that the consumer is being royally screwed by the FCC and the powerful television lobbyists who are fighting to keep broadcast TV off the dish. If I want local programming, I'll get it, but I don't, so why do I have to have to install cable just to watch the handful of network programs that don't suck? I don't want local news or weather, so why should I be forced to have 2 sets of wires. 2 Bills. 2 User Interfaces. 2 Boxes. It makes me want to go Goku on somebody. This is being resolved in larger markets, but it'll never get out to me in the middle of nowhere. </RANT> As a very nice side bonus, the TiVo tuner encapsulates both the Dish and the Cable's tuner functionality into a single interface: no need to change devices and interfaces simply to flash between FOX and Comedy Central.
Cost/Installation/PrivacyInstallation is easy, although somewhat time consuming. In my case I plugged it in, feeding an input from the DirecTV box (RCA jacks) and the cable (Coax) One output into my receiver and the other into the VCR (for "Archiving"). Also a cable connects to the DirecTV's serial port input which allows the TiVo to tune the dish. Power. Phone Jack. Done.
After that the box makes a few phone calls and indexes programming. This takes several hours. Plus, if you have a dish, it thinks you have every single channel! I had to go through 999 channels and turn off hundreds of pay-per-view channels (to say nothing of the sports channels and crap I'll never watch).
You purchase a box based on the amount of video you want to store. (15 or 30 hour version: I paid $699 for the 30) The hours is at the lowest compression. High quality gets me 9 hours out of the 30 hour box. Thats enough except when I leave town for a week. It is definitely pricey: A high end VCR would cost half this, but it seems pretty reasonable considering what it all does.
You also pay for a subscription so the unit can download TV listings. from each night. The fee ranges from like $10 a month to $200 for a "Lifetime Subscription". I'm kinda curious if I can use 1 subscription on 2 TiVo's if I chose to hook one up to a second TV.
The documentation and the tivo website both have extensive commentary on privacy. They basically say all the right things. I have no reason to believe that they're lying, but just the same, my tivo knows what I watch, when I watched it. The service subscription knows my units serial number and my name. Putting 2 and 2 together wouldn't be that difficult. They claim this will never be an issue.
I have no problem with them using information and making a truckload of money off it. A million TiVo's are gonna generate excellent, accurate ratings someday. And relationships between programs and viewing habits: "People who like The Simpsons don't like Veronica's Closet" type information. Hopefully someday this will mean that the TiVo will be capable of more accurately guessing programming choices tailored to me. The big scary question is will this be done anonymously. I don't want to start getting FOX spam because Philips sold my email address to FOX because I watch The Simpsons every sunday.
And now the problems... Technical StuffsFirst off, my unit was screwed. It crashes regularly. It goes anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, but it always freezes up: it made it for like 6 hours on saturday, but crashed twice during the X-Files on sunday. I called TiVo tech support and a very nice representative named Kendra was quite helpful (this was thursday). On friday I got another call to confirm some problems from another techie. I was told that I might get a third call from a top level specialist, or else a guy to coordinate the replacement of my defective unit.
It quite clearly was a bad harddrive. I assumed that after the second or third time it happened. It took a bit of time to get it replaced, but they did it. They shipped me a spare unit, and although it obviously forgot my preferences, I was back up and running.
Interface/Problems/SuggestionsAs a whole, it works great. It is very intuitive. I didn't need to look in the manual to get anything done, however it was very slow at times. I suspect that this might have had something to do with the hardware problems, but on several occasions, generating menus would take 5 minutes or more: particularly long ones like the 'Whats on Live TV' but occasionally in the menu where you search for programs to record. A status indicator would be nice any time its gonna take more than a few seconds to do something, however I figure this was pretty abnormal since most of the time these thigns all happened instantly.
The Powerpuff Girls Problem Powerpuff girls have an eratic schedule. Because of this, it overlaps frequently with other programs. The "Season Pass" feature refuses to ever allow 2 season passes to overlap... therefore, if any episode of The Powerpuff girls overlaps with anything else I want to record, I have to choose one or the other. The Simpsons Problem The Simpsons airs every day twice on fox in my area. It also airs a "New" episode sunday evenings. Selecting a "Season Pass" treats all 11 episodes identically. I select all 11 showings as a unit, even though they most definitely aren't. I can tell it to record only The Simpsons on sunday, but it should be able to tell syndication from the prime-time showing. The South Park Problem South Park airs several times a week: during a week, the episode is the same. By selecting a Season Pass, it records each and every showing: so I get 4 copies of the same episode. A simple scan of the plot summaries would be helpful. Dragonball Z suffers from the same problem: 5:30 and 12:30 are both the same episode. I get both. The TiVo should save plot summaries (when available. Its gonna be tougher when no summary is available. It seems like at least an episode number should be possible tho) of shows it records, and have a user definable time frame during which 'reruns' should not be taped. That way I could say "Don't tape the same episode of south park for 30 days" and be much happier. Precedence Basically there needs to be a set of rules that allows me to select a precedence for overlapping programs. Rules like "I've seen this episode in the last 30 days" or "This is prime time" or "This is syndication" need to be defined in order to help clarify what should and shouldn't be recorded. Then again, when these things can hold 200 hours of footage, it won't be as big of a deal.The future will be interesting: it would be cool if I could email shows to a friend. Obviously today bandwidth is to restricted, but if this thing was hooked up to say a cable modem instead of a phone line, it would be reasonably feasible. Its pretty obvious that in the future programming will be stored on mammoth servers and streamed to viewers rather then mass broadcasted and then stored locally. Then we could effectively pass the equivalent of URLs about instead of the actual streams, although in the future, a gig or so for a television program won't be the end of the world. Just don't expect that one tomorrow.
SummaryI got a bum unit, but despite that and a few significant problems, its clear that this thing is gonna change the way people watch TV. This version still has shortcomings, in hardware, service, and software. And there is definitely a looming possibility of some sort of security problem. But with all that aside, until the internet has the bandwidth to allow us to watch programming on demand, this is best thing out there. If you're tight on time, it will make television more enjoyable and more efficient.
The strangest part is the realization that you're not watching TV: you can pause whenever you want. You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off. But I still found myself thinking "I need a commercial so I can go to the bathroom". Some things never change.
fuckin richie rich, how does it feel to sell everyone out for a few million
VCR+ is a proprietary encoding of (day of week, start time, length), with no broadcast info at all. It just eases data entry.
Has anyone dared to take apart their Tivo or ReplayTV? I was wondering about the possibilities of a do-it-yourself hard disk upgrade.
Here's an interesting thought: Take out the hard disk, make an image of it on your pc, buy a bigger disk, write the old image onto the new disk, and put the new disk into the PVR.
This way, you'll save any OS/user preference info, right?
And since Tivo runs Linux, has anyone seen any source code? Is there a distribution available for download? (And I know it probably wouldn't be much help without the hardware encoder, but it would still be pretty interesting.)
-excuse my rambling
Yeah! Down with Zico! /. won't be perfect until all the posts are from mindless sheep like you and me! You told =him= real good.
I've had my viewing habits tracked for years now.
And my purchasing habits too.
Interesting system from Information Resources called Shoppers Hotline. They provide a cable box that connects to a phone line. Each night about 2am the computer calls the box and downloads my viewing records for that day.
Each time I go to the grocery store my purchases are keyed to my shoppers hotline number.
They are able to direct different commercials to subscribers. I know this is true because I know which two channels are being used. A tv connected to the "fixed" box does show different commercials than an unfixed box.
Cool stuff!
The hard drives are standard Quantum hard drives, but encoded and serialized. Currently, the TIVO software doesn't read the serial number in the Microcode on the drives, and there are those who have found ways to add hard drives to the system with success, but if TIVO decides to turn on the serialized code in the future, these units could be disabled. From what I have heard, the drives TIVO uses can't be bought anywhere else.
TiVo can still record on a manual schedule and pause live TV! The service just saves you the trouble of keeping the schedule up to date.
I've already added some nice speakers onto my computer and replaced my stereo... It's just a matter of time before my TV and video go the same way... a remote would be handy though...
As a stand alone unit though this is great, but I don't think I'll get one...
PS. what is happening with .mp4, any good URLs on its progress...
How long does it take to program the clock on THIS thing? :)
Buy a VCR, you're better off.
it runs linux on powerpc, which is very unstable and its slow too.
Shannon probably does not read slashdot
but, just in case
I described a system like this to you back in
1980. We were in a pizza place in Lubbock Texas.
sorry mods, I had to try
this is a true story!
Agreed! But there is a middle ground: Plan every hour of TV watching, and ensure it meets your personal "worthy use of my time" criteria.
/. logins. I wanna cookie!)
Presently, I go to TvGrid.com and check what's on, along with the plot summaries and the "RR" ReRun icon. If any new favorites are on, I'll print the schedule and highlight the program(s) I want to watch. Then, with the discipline of an Iron Thumb, I turn off the TV whenever there is no highlighted program to watch.
That's live TV, and if I'm disappointed in the program, I'll turn it off and wait for the next highlighted program. The Iron Thumb rules the remote.
I don't use my VCR much merely because of the logistics of getting my viewing preferences set (it is in a different room from the PC, and I haven't implemented enough Home Automation yet to set up the house-wide IR distribution system).
A TiVO or ReplayTV unit should give me the best of all these worlds: Easier selection, Easier programming, More flexible viewing.
Sure, I can record all I want. But I still won't "have" to watch it!
Geez, I used to sit through an hour of junk rather than turn off the TV between two favorite programs. It took me quite a while to get the Iron Thumb properly trained for use during Live TV.
No TiVO or ReplayTV unit will give you that discipline, but it may help if you have the desire. And it will certainly decouple you from the tyranny of Live TV and/or cryptic VCRs.
-BobC
(They guy who never remembers ANY of his several
There are some multi-remotes out there that are 'trainable', i.e., if you have a remote that it doesn't know the codes for, you can train it by placing the 'unknown' remote against an IR receiver on the multi-remote and then pressing corresponding buttons on both machines.
GET A LIFE YOU FREAKIN DORK. GO OUTSIDE OR PLAY WITH GIRLS OR SOMETHING.
One way to screen out commercials is to monitor the closed captioning signal. If you follow the Linux TV news at all, you will find some neat utilities that will dump the captioning signal as text. In my experience, the big advertisers (nationwide) almost always caption their ads. For local advetisers it's a crap shoot. Some do, some don't. You could create a database that recognizes a commercial by the text it generates. For example, the TiVo could do stirng matching, and soon as it detects a "hit", it automatically knows which commerical it is, how long it lasts, and when it began. For example, the caption stream comes in, and the text, "PANTY SHIELDS MAKE ME FEEL SO FRESH!" triggers a "hit list", the TvIo looks this up in a database, and finds out that when it saw this line of text, the commercial began seven seconds ago, and will continue for an additional 12 seconds, and blanks out or removes this section of video from what its recording. Only problem is that 1) A database of commercials and their parameters would have to be created and maintained, and 2) new commercials come all the time and there is a lot of overhead in keeping it up to date, and 3) The sheer volume of commercials would be overwhelming, and the probabilty of 'false hits' rises ("Mmm! Panty shields!"), and 4) Not all commercials are captioned, especially the annoying car dealership ones. It's a lot of work for one person to do this, but I forsee all the TiVo's networked together in a beowolf-like cluster. People are watching TV, they see an advertisement. They press a button when it starts, and again when it ends. This marks a commercial, and the captioning information and other parameters is sent to the central commercial database, which forwards it to all the other TvIo's. If the unit sells as many as 50,000 units, even if only a few hundred bother to participate in the commercial removal database, a lot of commercials would still get removed, leaving only the car dealership ones for you to enjoy. This is my plan to make life better for all humanity. -Derrick
Grab yourself a nice refreshing Coke, this might take awhile. WTF is the problem with product placement. If you want the show to be more like real life then guess what, Coke (or Pepsi, DrPepper, your choice) is the drink. What is so wrong with having the charactors drink real drinks. Now some of the blatant stuff (heh, Waynes World, but that was funny so it doesn't count) is kinda annoying, but just having a real soda instead of "Brand X Generic Cola" Why not? I would much perfer to have (Insert fav charactor here) drinking a Coke and eating Lays, then having to watch some BS commericial. That interupts the flow of the show. Trust me, just like everything else, ya get used to it and as near as I can tell it's an acceptable evil. For now money still rules the world, no matter how much open source progresses. -Hawkeye684 "He who laughs last, thinks slowest." (at school, pass at home. and i never remember it :)
I'm also a happy TiVo owner. I've had my unit about six months and have had only one lock-up which required a reboot.
TiVo was at CES and was showing off a development version of their v2.0 software. One of the new features was an ability to add priorities to season passes. There's a ton of other features (keyword and actor search, ability to set up watch lists to look for new shows that match your likings, plus a buttload of other stuff that I can't remember). It'll be a while before it's out - I'm eagerly awaiting it.
How about firing up a internet connection to download the program schedule instead of a direct connection? this way intl' users like me would receive the directv program listing without intl' phone charges!!
/. They allways seems promising, but without the internet steroids, they're no more than digital VCRs.
I'm aware of TiVo and ReplayTV since their announcement here in
Read, dammit! Tivo will still be a programmable VCR that can also pause live TV. All the service does is save you the trouble of keeping a schedule up to date.
Insightful? Give me a fscking break. I don't give a sh*t if it runs Linux or not. Replay is ultimately cheaper (and from what I hear, better). Linux be damned.
http://www.dishnetwork.com/hardware/third_level_co ntent/dishplayer/index.asp
also, are you being server and my favorite - keeping up appearences!!!
Why are they tying this to the phone line? Think AT&T will come out with a version that works the downloads of services through cable? Six months ago I bought a cell phone with a 1000 minutes a month and hooked up my cable modem. A month after that I cancelled my local phone service (I HATE USWEST). It's just not necessary. So no way am I going to go back to using a land-line just for a cool new toy. Somebody wake me when there's a better solution.
There is a great article describing exactly how to upgrade your unit at the AVS forum today. There are some requriements that are hard to meet, but it can be done. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/001724.htm l
IMHO anything they broadcast in the first place should be freely redistributable; the only reason network affiliates worry about it is that they depend on a complete absence of competition, and that ought to be corrected. Avoiding advertising is a far more serious issue, as that completely undermines the business model of broadcast television.
It's already running Linux, so it's probably possible to install a dialup server (getty?) on there. Of course, it would also be cool if I could plug this into my ethernet (cable modem) connection and access it through SSH.
That's weird. I have digital cable up here in canada (with 150 channels, 15 ppv, and 30 digital music), and the picture is much better than regular analog cable. With parity/checksums and error correction (bytes are out of order instead of sequential and the receiver puts them in order to separate possible errors happening all at once), you shouldn't be having too many problems. Usually with digital cable, it looks very good until you hit a certain falling point (usually around 23db) and then the entire signal basically goes (unlike analog which can have artifacts and crappy picture gradually down to its failing point).
I don't know the setup of TW cable systems down there though, so.
I don't know if Tivo has a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port for sure, but I do know that the ReplayTV _does_ have this, so I'm bettin you heard about the Replay unit, rather than Tivo.
My Father picked up a Tivo over Christmas and I spent 5 days arguing with him and getting the thing working correctly. I really enjoyed the ability to easily program the taping of any show, but the interface left something to be desired. The DSS has a much superior interface that moves at least twice as fast as the Tivo. Especially when you are just trying to scan channels or see what movies are playing. By far my favorite feature was the ability to pause a program you are already watching. My least favorite aspect was the fact that if you watched the DSS without using the TIVO you tended to screw up the TIVO so it wouldn't know what channel it was on, and it couldn't record (though it would still think it had). Whenever I turned the TV off, I had to remember to switch back to TIVO and change chnnels around until it figured out that it wasn't getting a signal, and got one again.
Isn't most of its functionality is that it is a digital VCR, and as a digital VCR you can do the pause, rewind etc. The additional functionality is guessing what shows to record for you, but that isn't quite perfect and, at least to me is just gravy, the meat and potatoes is the digital VCR. I am in Canada (Toronto) as well and could you not partially get around the problem by telling the machine that you live in Buffalo, and at least have it work on the American networks, and American cable channels?
Isn't that just changes to the filesystem code to do synchronous writes? They probably only had to change the kernel.
The only way someone could crack your Tivo is to be on the other end of that toll-free phone call and authenticate well enough to send a software update. Smurf attacks would involve running PPP over the connection, and I don't see why they'd bother.
This is the obvoius solution to the DVD being just a player. I would bet that Sony and the likes are working this thing over right now. In the future it will be "from Sony PS2/DVD/Tivo"
The best method I've seen yet is syncing on the network logo (like "FOX" in the corner) and automatically stop recording when it's absent. Considering that a lot of networks advertise themselves this way, it would work pretty good most of the time..
It may be possible to record two streams at once on the chip. Computer CPUs can only do one thing at once, but we have multitasking operating systems. You'd probably have to record each at half quality, but if you switch between the streams (maybe once per second) and use some buffering I think it could be done. The bigger problem is that there is only one TV tuner. You could split the cable and have it go to a second TV tuner card, but that would be a pretty major hack (You'd still need to encode these simultaneously). If anyone managed to do it, they'd probably be hired by Tivo.
Eh, professional sports is for the lame Joe Six-Pack with no creativity in his life.
Have u thought out the fact that in order to automatically filter out ads the network would have to insert a special signal at the start and end of the ad and advertisers would not allow them to do that Also wonder when TIVO will be available in India
Actually, there is a way to get the thing to detect commercials, and the great part about it is that it's something the *advertisers* offer.
Commercials are sent with a higher audio level than normal programming, which was addressed with certain televisions that were able to detect this and keep the audio at more or less the same level, so that you didn't have to keep upping and downing the volume. I believe that commercial skipping VCR's work on the same premise, or they detect pauses of a certain length or some such.
What would be interesting is this: Would advertisers get peeved that we're not seeing their commercials and thus quit blasting the audio so the ads can sneak through? Or, even neater, would there be some kind of regulation (in this case I'd have to be in favor of it) that *required* advertisers to put a stop and start signal at the beginning/end of their ads, so those consumers who wanted to opt out could? Kind of like being removed from spam lists. (*sigh*) Not bloody likely.
I know either TiVo or Replay uses a custom-made hard drive with two sets of heads (so it can play while recording with no contention). You'd think anyone worth representing them at Comdex would know how their product works, jeez.
Compare Canada and the US. They are far more alike than any Western European nation and the US are. There is far less violence, gun related violence, and "other" crime (per capita) in the US than in Canada.
Signs up for remedial posting course
... a Beowulf cluster of these?
Even those of us without fulltime connections to The Net could benefit from this. I don't want some other appliance to pick up the phone line while my modem is dialed in. Make it use ethernet and go through the gateway machine like everyone else.
How can I join the Democrats?
Assuming you're using a source with a/v jacks for your game, just switch the audio so that it comes from your radio rather than the satellite or cable box. Then you get it all in sync (well, as close as possible) and you can fast forward/rewind/pause without messing things up more.
So, when does something like this come out for the radio so that I never miss my fav talk shows?
Yes, buy a VCR. Really, the TiVO's functionality wouldn't matter much to you then-- you'd be wasting lots of $$. The TiVO is for people who don't want to remember when shows are on or notice when they move.
Whenever I hear comments like this I always chuckle.
Several years ago, I had (in fact, still have in my bedroom) an OLD 19" Sony Trinitron and no cable. This was a conscious choice, by the way, for two reasons: 1: "I'm not so lazy that I can't get up off my fat ass and change the channel" and 2: "I live in major market areas where I can get all the channels clearly--why should I pay for TV?"
The company I worked for moved to a different state and, since I went with them, they put me up in a Residence Inn for 90 days until I found a place of my own. In this Residence Inn, I had a TV with a remote control and cable. After 90 days, I was hooked.
If I hadn't actually been exposed to it, I would still be watching 6 networks and turning the channel by hand. And thinking myself a better man for it.
---
Personally, I was thinking about getting one when I first heard about it. It seemed like The Right Thing (ie, a TV that catered to me instead of vice versa). After reading some of these enthusiastic reviews, I may bip out this weekend...
What about when the big three (four) networks put their best shows in the same time slots? such as Thursday primetime. can TiVO record two shows at the same time?
i live like many in the far reaches of the sprawling metropolis...so do you? Take a walk close to the crepescule of prime-time and youèl notice the eerie blue green glow from most every home. It's haunting. Or if you remain indoors turn the lights off and watch the shadows your CRT makes on the walls. Youèl notice the comercials by the epileptic flashing which is a very dramatic change from most programs. What also disturbs me and my cockatiel is the the high pitch buzz witch permeates the room and most have learned to block out. Itès almost beautifull in an ugly way
i wonder if it possible to hack tivo. then you can program what people watch... oh, that would be fun...
TiVo is not owned by Phillips and Phillips did not design the hardware. In a couple of months sony will have their 30 hour unit out for either $399 or $499, I can't remember what they announced at CES. You also might find it interesting that alot of engineers that SGI bled away went to TiVo
Actually, in some ways Canada and the USA are more unalike than a lot of countries I could think of.
Canada is a lot more like Europe than the USA in its willingness to accept large, centralized welfare statism, cradle-to-grave nanny statism.
Canadians are a lot more genteel, polite, and reserved than Americans, more accepting of government authority as being by definition legitimate and reasonable and something to be trusted.
There is nothing like the American distrust of centralized authority and willingness to at least tacitly support resistance to what is seen as overreaching or illegitimate authority.
These comparisions are always bogus anyway since they are very selective of what countries are being compared; compared to most South American countries, or to South Africa or the former USSR, the USA has a fairly low crime rate.
Also note that a focus on guns is misleading. The UK now leads the USA per capita in certain non-homicidal crimes like burglery, robbery, etc. Yes, fewer people are being shot, but the crime rate is not going down, quite the reverse.
Anyway, if you want to be really politically incorrect, when you break the crime rate down by race (keeping in mind the Feds count hispanics as "whites" when counting crime rates), you find that white (non hispanic) crime rates in the USA are virtually identical to Canada or Western Europe.
No wonder the statist left and its media put the blame on the guns rather than the criminals using the guns. It diverts the attention from more obvious questions.
You have a knack for missing the point, and putting words in people's mouths. Might I suggest you seek a career in politics?
Check out Broadcast2000 at http://heroine.linuxbox.com/ It lets you record and playback etc. - Couple this up with an RF transmitter from your PC to the other TV's in the house. - Setup a wireless mic system and voice command to control your PC. - Get the PC to acknowledge commands via TV screen or voice response. - Use a cron jobs to setup recordings - Grab the latest TV guides programatically from the web. You could setup a voice command to show whats on at the current time or another command to say tape X-files. And that's just for starters... Check out http://misterhouse.net/
Fat and lazy? I thought they already were.
How can I join the Democrats?
simple, give up on logical thought, and the rest follows naturally.
Simpsons, PowerPuff Girls, Xfiles, no sports? What a dork
It's almost like saying that if you're bike can get you into town, why would you ever need a car? Because it's *faster* and it's *easier*, and yup, it's a lot more damned fun.
You obviously don't live in San Francisco...
-- a car-hating biker
My roommate and I have had one for a few months. We have DirecTV and an antenna for local channels. The problem is, TiVos and antennas don't get along very well.
When the signal gets a little weak (even though the picture and sound is quite visible and tolerable) the TiVo thinks it has completely lost the signal and puts up the sad faced "I lost the signal" screen.
If the signal strength of my favorite show goes up and down a little every ten seconds, this gets really annoying and you have to bypass the TiVo which is a real pain!
There should be an option to modify the signal tolerance of the thing, or turn it off all together.
Most people here probably spend 20x the amount we spend watching tv on the net. I know I do. The only tv show I watch is dragonball z (dumbshit story, but really cool, IMO) and the random basketball game on saturday or sunday.
the difference is the automated 'intelligent' agents running to help you pick and record shows. Of course, it also runs on your regular tv, so..
I don't know if newer ati-tv's have automated recording though - but I would gues it doesn't.
There is this thing called pure diva, which basically does everything a tivo does on a computer - but I think its only available on OEM's and in countries like japan right now.. (www.purediva.com)
I've been defending TiVo on the newsgroups for a while now, and it is amazing how many people are quick to stand up for their VCR's, claiming people will never be interested in devices like this, that their VCR and TV Guide produce the same results. It's almost like saying that if you're bike can get you into town, why would you ever need a car? Because it's *faster* and it's *easier*, and yup, it's a lot more damned fun.
TiVo has become a regular member of the family at our house. We play with him all the time, thank him when he picks out a good show, and say "TiVoooo" condescendingly when he records a stupid show.
And in one more piece of TiVo defense, I have never seen any of the problems that cmdrtaco unfortunately experienced, my 14 hour TiVo has been going strong (knock on wood) for about 5 months now.
Three cheers for TiVo!!!!
Oh NO!!!
not more product placement. I absolutely hate that crap. Especially when I already paid $7-8 dollars to see a movie. I don't want to see that crap on TV as well....
It's not lawyers that are the problem...it's advertisers
This TiVo thing is laughable - a chance to rot your brain and turn into an underdeveloped, overweight couch potato.
R.
Geez, what a rube.
I like the idea of boxes like this/digital TV Stations etc being able to track my viewing habits so that I actually get shown ads that I'm vaguely interested in.
If advertisers know who will see their ads, they are willing to pay more, TV stations can charge premiums for their ad time, a wider variety of advertisers find TV open to them and we get shown ads that are at least vaguely interesting, rather than endless make up and cheap carptet ware house ads.
If I owned DoubleClick, I'd be looking into this - in fact, they probably are already.
If you're worried about your privacy, why not check out the source code of the modded Linux OS they're using:
:)
http://www.tivo.com/linux/
Most DSS receivers have a little transparent infared LED you can tape over your VCR's remote control window so it can send "record" and "stop" commands. "Stop" works with mine but "record" doesn't, probably because I have one of those damn idiot-proof VCRs that requires holding down the "record" button for two seconds. sigh
hauppage and a few others do, I think. The software probably wouldn't be so hard to write - though, watching real time then pausing and coming back and then fast-forwarding through commercials to catch up with the live broadcast might be a little tricky.
Er, that was supposed to be a reply to another post about Tivo circumventing commercials. Mod me redundant, already.
Rob, please tell me you know how to program a traditional VCR...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I must be out of the loop. When did guns start providing defense shields to deflect incoming bullets? Man, I have to change my thinking on guns. (This was sarcasm, by the way.) So, if I run out and get a gun, my chances of being shot will go down as opposed to not having one? You, sir, on a complete idiot.
Most fatal US gun incidents occur at home with peoples own guns. Statistics show that gun profilaration correlates with people getting shot. Extreme example: compare western Europe and USA.
Sorry, wrong subject.
-- Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people
I did some research on both Replay and Tivo, and went with Replay. I tried out the Tivo at a local Best Buy to get the sense of what it could do, and was impressed. Then I started looking around for reviews of both systems, and it seemed like Replay was the best bet. The cost has dropped considerably in the last couple of weeks-- it's now $499 at 800.com, and you get a lifetime subscription to the service. Also, the hard drive holds 20 hours of programming at lowest quality. This makes it all around less expensive than Tivo, unless Tivo's price has dropped recently as well. I regularly record at medium quality (about 10 hours worth) and the picture's great. I was disappointed the first week I had the Replay. I had it set up to record Buffy and Angel, and it missed both of them. But the next week, the version 2 of the software was downloaded to the machine, and now it works like a charm. I love the fact that I can rapidly search through the upcoming week's listings for shows I like. I love the fact that I can set up a Jim Jarmusch replay channel. I love the commercial skip button. It also allows the user to choose to record every episode of a show, and it's supposed to skip the reruns. In practice, I find that it's not consistent about this, and I do get old episodes of shows. The Replay is supposedly upgradeable (i.e. you'll be able to add more hard drives in the future), and initial setup takes about 25 minutes, not the hours required by Tivo. I strongly recommend it, and you can always return it with the 30-day guarantee, no problem. But it really is a life-changing device.
Not so true. There are two primary means that this will be avoided.
l .inserts/index.html
1) Integrating ads right into the programming, either through blue screen insert spots (e.g. the label on a soda/beer can) which can be changed for individual markets (Did Ross call Ed's Towing in Dubacha, Kansas or Johnny's QuickGo in NYC?). We've already seen this happen with Dan Rather at Time's Square or in sports games.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/25/digita
2) Commercials with irratic/irregular timing. Right now there is a pretty clear distinction, some seconds of black.. but how about if this space had noise inserted into the it to prevent it from being easily detected? Or if the space was eliminated all together.. doh.
People who own guns who are killed at home are a) suicides, b) victims of domestic violence, or c) criminals engaged in criminal activity. Gun control would not effect any of these deaths. The fact that these crimes occur at home is meaningless - a lot of gunshot victims happen to live in crack houses, flop houses, drug dens, etc. Drug dealers, pimps, gangsters, etc. all live in houses - thence, whenever they get offed, this gets labeled as a gun crime in someone's "home" and as more "proof" that keeping guns in one's home is "dangerous"!
Statistics show that gun profilaration correlates with people getting shot.
Figures lie, and liars figure.
Shall we apply a little logic? The fact that those areas in the USA with the most violence also have the most gun control laws? That areas which allow concealed carry for ordinary citizens showed a drop in crime? The fact that these "statistics" completely ignore the cases where the ownership of a firearm prevented a crime? Or recent studies showing the ownership of firearms prevented far more deaths than were attributed to firearms in the same areas?
Extreme example: compare western Europe and USA.
That's what makes you hoplophobes so charming: your complete ignorance of the facts and determination not to be swayed by them. Why don't you compare Switzerland to the rest of Europe? Switzerland has a higher per capita gun ownership level than the USA. Why not compare current USA crime rate to crime rate of 50 or 100 years ago? Guns are actually less prevelent now in American culture than they used to be, yet the crime rate is several orders of magnitude greater.
But then, you would have to use the critical thinking skills that God gave you, rather than emotional flim flam.
When did criminals stop running from anyone who demonstrates an ability to defend themselves? Guns deter far more crimes (usually with no shots fired) than they aid. Most criminals carry knives anyway; use doesn't draw attention, forensic identification is more difficult, and the punishment is less severe.
If I use a "chip" to test PPV on my box, can I still do this with Tivo?
Consider this:
TiVo does all of that and a bunch of other neat tricks. And if you really want a particular program archived, there is a dump to VCR option. How much do you archive? I probably kept 1 show out of every 10 I record using a VCR, and I always had to remember to use a different tape for shows I wanted to save. No longer a problem.
TiVo changes how you watch TV because you don't have to watch it when things are on -- but unlike a VCR, TiVo doesn't run out of tape. When you're out of HD space, it tries to make space (delete automatic suggestions by TiVo first, then oldest next, etc.)
It's not perfect, but for first generation technology, it is very impressive. Try one out for 30 days and return it if you don't like it. I was a little skeptical at first, but it seems to do everything it promises. There are still some problems, but according to TiVo support, v1.3 of the software should be released to all TiVos sometime in the next month.
Really. Really-really-really. I swear.
Try it some time. Try to manage a week without turning the bloody box on. It can make a world of difference.
I apologize for ACing, but my karma is exactly 42 right now, and I want to keep it at this value for some time.
I recently got the ActiveHome kit from X10. That includes this 8 device learning remote. I have another OneForAll learning remote that only lets you learn these four buttons across the top for each device. This X10 one lets you program just about any button on the thing with functions of other remotes. I was able to put in all the necessary functions from my Tivo remote into it. I do miss the nice contour of the Tivo remote, so maybe buying another one would be worth it.
X10's remote and video sending kits are wonderful for this apartment life. Stupid place only has one cable connection, and so I had to run an approximately 50 foot coax all the way to the bedroom.
Sure, if you consider the live tv features worth the money, go for it. Tivo lets you use the server for a couple weeks free, use it, love it. :) $10 isn't too much, same price as those big multiplayer games, and I have yet to get junk mail to my "special" address I gave them.
Yes, selecting programs depends greatly on the accuracy of those program listings. I believe they get their listings from this national service. I know my cable company does, and the descriptions on both the cable box and Tivo often are word-for-word exact. I just forget the name of that service company.
There was to be some sort of offset that could be put in around version 2.0 of the software, so that when broadcasts are put off after a long sporting event, you could say "start recording this show 35 minutes later than it's listed." But for now, you're just stuck to watching live in those situations. For my cable here, it's 99% accurate. I can only recall a handful of times (certainly less than 5) that I selected something to be recorded and it wasn't that program at all.
can record a show when you see a preview
I'm curious, how does that work? Do you mean to say that when an advertisement for a show comes on the network, you can click a button and Tivo knows which show to tape based on the ad? That's pretty damn cool. No, Replay can't do that.
That's the idea. I know some channels can broadcast other information outside the audio/video signal, PBS sends the current date/time which some VCRs can use to set their clock. This press release says they partnered with NBC, Showtime and Encore (to start) to implement this. I don't have Showtime/Encore, but I haven't seen it happen on my NBC channel yet.
Well, invent a device that does what Tivo does with ethernet and all the other geek features. Then build a business around it. Then be swamped with billions of clueless users who you now have to tell what a network is, how to set up a network, IP addresses, subnetting, etc. Tivo's business is making a simple that's sort of the next generation VCR. That's it. If you want a different device, then well, invent it or pay someone to invent it. :) I'm sure there's all sorts of big corps that would jump at the chance that a user could access the filesystem on a device like this and copying movies all over the place. As we see with that Apex 600A deal, even if the access is hidden, they'll still sue your ass off.
All these "I won't buy it until it does X, Y, Z" is pointless. It is a product right now. If it fits your budget/needs, go for it. Otherwise, go away. That said, I refuse to buy Snickers until they add peanut butter. I like peanut butter, and by golly, they had better address the peanut butter enthusiast crowd. Reece's Peanutbutter Cups do, dammit. I want snickers to as well!!
Enjoy it while it lasts, and when it does, kindly ask them to GPL all the software. Then we can just right programs to pull the info from web pages and what-not. Or, God forbid, someone comes up with the bright idea of starting a business to further feed Tivo users with listings...
What if the world ends tomorrow, am I out the $499 I paid for my Tivo? That just can't be right. Time for a nasty email to Tivo to see what their post-apocolyptic business plan is. Not just that, but this TV I have is rather new, I don't want to be out that money. Damn you Sony! Why didn't you sell me a television that was impervious to the aliens that blew up Earth?! Is that too much to ask, I mean, really? And I want a full refund for my rent that isn't used. Those commie bastards don't need to keep my rent when there's 8 days left in March.
The Tivo forum on www.avsforum.com had a posting yesterday or so by a guy that put in a general IBM 17GB drive in as the second drive. Of course, just doing a drive copy from another 30hr unit makes the filesystem only 13GB. Maybe someone, sometime, will give Mandrake's little partition expanding thing a whirl, and try expanding it to the full size of the hard drive.
The software and serial number seem to be only on the first drive, so that would be harder to upgrade. And, well, you have to get someone to buy a 30hr unit so you can copy from it. The guy that did this said several drive copying programs didn't work, but told the one that finally did. I'll watch the forum for a while, see if his thing blows up or anything too bad before trying it myself. I certainly worry about how it would handle software updates (like to 1.3) with a hacked system like this.
For what it's worth, their web site has their privacy policy which says your viewing habits, likes/dislikes, etc are never transmitted over the phone, only kept on your hard drive. Of course, that probably won't stop some people's paranoia. You can leave the phone unplugged, and just use it like a really expensive VCR. It just misses the whole point of the device.
Then you'll have to take out the various patented technologies. Everything related to MPEG is patented any more, so that has to go, yay for AVI. Isn't that very original idea of having menus and tv listings patented too? Someone has got to have a pantent on adding a series of +1 and -1 to do all that suggestions stuff. Plus who knows how much more behind-the-scenes stuff. Let's face it, not everything will be open sourced. This is a nice little device, just go with it.
Does the Replay save what you watched forever (or other long time), so it never records something twice? Tivo's problem is it doesn't, and so it can only check the list of recordings that are on the drive. When you delete the episode, it's gone and as such, liable to be recorded again.
And just what "more direct control" does their software give you with recording? I mean, with Tivo, you go up/down (or page up/down) through the channels and listings, hit Select, and voila you can record it. Other than a speech/mind recognition bit, I just don't see what could be more direct. I'm sure the user interface is different, but is that what makes it more direct?
And with this new thing in v1.3.0 where you can record a show when you see a preview of it, that's just even easier for us lazy folk.
Don't worry, some people will complain about anything. :)
Since I got my Tivo in early December (just a few days before they started that $100 rebate, but I'm not bitter), I haven't watched many commercials. Well, other than the two or three flashes during Tivo's fast forward. And I must say, life is grand. I watch shows in 20 minutes per half hour, never missing a beat.
As for advertisers, well, commercials have always been the time when people go to the bathroom, make a sandwich, etc. When they crack down on toilets and mayonnaise, we can bitch some more.
Some people have tried, and there was one guy in the alt.*.tivo newsgroup that says his box was upgraded by an independant guy (not sanctioned by Phillips). I think most people just don't want to accidently blow their $400 investment. I've had the thing almost four months, and with just the 14hr unit, I don't run out of disk space much. I just watch regularly, and delete things when I'm done. If I don't watch live TV, I'd say about 4-6 hours is programmed via Tivo Suggestions and season passes. So, if I leave home or don't watch for a few days things will fill up.
As for sticking any old hard drive in, I'm not so sure you can. It uses Quantum QuikView drives, which are IDE, but somehow tweaked for multimedia stuff. As the hard drive is constantly going, you'll need a good quality drive like this so it doesn't blow up. Besides, next month Sony's unit will be out which is supposed to be a 30hr unit, at Phillip's 14hr price.
Every couple weeks? What does Tivo do that you reboot it? I've had my unit four months and only needed to reboot once. The video started freezing, major artifacts, etc. I reboot the thing and all was back to normal. Other than that, this thing has more uptime than my main Linux box, but that's mostly because I keep buying new hardware for it. :)
You come back from vacation, and find that you're now recording nothing but COPS.
----------------------------
It'll happen.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You can't...I talked to the Tivo people, and the viewers guide service is not available here in Canada...you can use it as a digital VCR...but you loose most of it's functionality. Hopefully they will support Canada soon, I mean, population wise, we are just another large city to the US. :-)
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Recording MPG streams is the hard part of the whole thing, and I presume they use a dedicated encoder. Unfortunately that's not the kind of thing that scales well.
From what I've read, ReplayTV units make long distance phone calls to connect back to their service and the total charges come pretty close to being the same as TiVo's subscription fee. TiVo uses either a 1-800 number or a local number so it doesn't run up your phone bill at all.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Actually, ReplayTV units make long distance phone calls (from what I've read), and the fees that it generates in phone calls are very close to what you would pay for a TiVo subscription fee. TiVo units use either a 1-800 number or a local number so it doesn't run up your phone bill.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
It's very unintrusive with its phone calls. It usually makes them late at night when your sleeping. It will also monitor the voltage on your line to see if the phone is in use. So, if you're using the phone when it wants to make a call it will wait til later. Also, if it's in the middle of a phone call and you pick the phone it will hang up so you can use the phone. The only thing you'll really miss would be incoming phone calls during the 15 minute interval that it dials in while you are asleep. Even that shouldn't be an issue since you have a cell phone.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
OK, don't take my word for it then... read some comments from actual ReplayTV users. One poster said it costs him $40-50 per month. It may not cost you anything if you're near one of their local numbers, but it apparantly does elsewhere.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
If you don't have a phone line, you can't dial-up and get the program info, so the usefullness of a Tivo is really limited.
Damn, I hate the number of things that require a phone line today. DSS, pay-per-view boxes, Tivo, hell, even some appliances can be set to dial-up for service if they are about to break down.
The real kicker was about a month ago when my bank suspended my on-line account. They ran a 'security check' and found that my home phone number and my home address didn't 'match' (I use a cell phone.) I had one hell of a time convincing them to let me get my money out! Apparently, if you don't have a land-line phone, you're not allowed to do business with this bank. Nice.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
From Amazon.com:
ReplayTV: 20 hours, $499.99, $0 subscription fee
Tivo: 30 Hours, $699.99 plus $199 subscription fee
14 hours, $399.99 plus $199 subscription fee
How is ReplayTV $200 more than Tivo?
I wonder if either of them supports adding external storage? I think ReplayTV has a firewire port, but I am not 100% sure on that.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Nope, and it costs $899. Tivo costs $699 and you can get a lifetime subscription for $200.
You figure it out.
People won't go back to books. Not going to happen as a whole, maybe a nice fraction.
I'd rather pay to watch what I want. I rent, trade & buy movies & TV shows on DVD and tape. The producers get their money from sales & the local video stores get rental money. Since the media giants own most venues, they still get money from what I watch, only the way they get it changes. Also, I get better audio. Until I get an HDTV display & reciever, I can't get AC-3 reception at all.
You seem to be in a minority for being a huge fan of PBS. I guess I would actually watch if I had decent reception.
Yes, TiVo can do this. The added features of TiVo allow you to record things that aren't on right now. The reason to pay a subscription is to be given the programming details (when they're on, what channel, etc), and ReplayTV can't do this, AFAIK.
While some people would object to their viewing habits being tracked and used for directed advertising, I'm not so sure it's the inherent evil that a lot of people make it out to be.
Getting arbitrary FOX spam because you watch the Simpsons is bad, but it would be far less objectionable if it was something you actually *wanted*. While it may sound offensive when you look at it from the point of view that people will be trying to market products to you based upon information they have on your viewing habits, it's worth noting that the more they know about you, the less likely you are to get random advertisements for products you'd never think about buying.
Doing market research purely on TV viewing habits is of limited use, because the only thing you're demonstrating a willingness to pay for in this instance is the TV setup and the programming, assuming it's not broadcast. However, if this information could be correlated with actual buying data, they could actually direct useful marketing at you.
I can certainly understand not wanting strangers to have this kind of info about you, but it's worthwhile to consider the possible benefits of better marketing profiles. I'd like to see something more like Amazon's recommendation engine (which works very well once you've bought a lot of books from them) but perhaps generalized a bit more.
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
The only problem is that you can't simply replace the Tivo drive with a regular hard drive. The Tivo uses a special Quantum drive which has two sets of heads, allowing for reading from and writing to the drive at the same time.
As I understand it, this is one of the reasons why the Tivo is so expensive.
Here's a company with everything in place for the perfect open source commercial product, even running on top of Linux, and they're not. The TiVo box would still sell, since it's nicely configured to run the TiVo software. The subscription to programming data would still sell. They may be afraid of a competitor stealing the software if it were open source, but apart from the illegality of doing so, the competitor would have trouble making money trying to offer something TiVo couldn't.
What actually concerns me most about these guys at the moment is that their web site is running IIS.
TiVo crashes sometimes?
(I'll let you put that one together for a moment)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
That supposes that the device is getting accurate program time information, so that you don't stop recording thirty minutes before the actual end of the whodunnit. Is it usual in the US?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I e-mailed TiVo about this a couple of months ago. I politely mentioned that I wouldn't consider a device that required a telephone line, but that ethernet would probably make this an impulse buy. They responded that they are considering adding ethernet in the future, and that feedback was appreciated. But they had no specific information as to when this might occur. I hope they get enough requests so that they add an ethernet interface.
"The Others" on NBC Saturday, most of the stuff on Fox Sunday, Drew Carey. HBO (pay TV, big budget) has the Sopranos and other excellent programs.
Jesus, Moses. South Park isn't exactly the pinnacle of entertainment. Furthermore, some of the funniest Comedy Central stuff is recycled from big-budget producers.
Sure, there is a lot of big-budget crap (like most X-Files episodes?), but let's not fall into the trap of thinking everyone done on a shoestring is worthy of adoration. (eg. Bleah Witch.)
--
#19845
These devices are a paradigm shift in the way you watch television, and as a result many folks have a hard time seeing how they fit in. But that's natural, since they are hardly a year old.
You say 'paradigm shift', I say 'design limitation'..
Really, though, I see your point, that these devices are essentially 'time shifters'. Still, I care mostly for their random-access capability and digital features (pausing live stuff, ease of deletion and selection). I'd be thrilled if I could also archive them in the digital format so I could for example tape a season of the Sopranos on 1-2 DVD-RAMs in HQ, then stick 'em on a shelf for later.. How do you loan copies of your TiVo recordings to friends? How do you make copies of htem in case your TiVo breaks or in case you delete them accidentally?
Nope, I see what you mean but it still remains that I won't be terribly interested in a TiVo-style device until it has removable media and commercial-skip. Now integrating TiVo into a set-top DTV box OTOH.. (YEs, I know about the Dish STB but I won't be wiring 5 TVs to a DBS ssytem anytime soon)
Your Working Boy,
\begin{quote}
At home I used to have a very intelligent VCR with near-perfect voice recognition and
knowledge of me. I could ask it to record programs by name and, in some cases, even
assume it would do so automatically, without my asking. Then, all of a sudden, my
son went to college. \cite{Negroponte:95}
\end{quote}
@Book{Negroponte:95,
author = "N. Negroponte",
title = "Being Digital",
publisher = "Hodder \& Stoughton",
year = "1995",
}
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
You say that TV will die. I say that BAD TV will die. I'd be much happier to pay a few bucks for quality programming than to have a kilochannel of mindless garbage. Witness NPR, to which I am happy to pay $100/year for the pleasure of quality, commercial-free programming.
-jwb
I got my Tivo for Christmas, so I've had three months now for it to get to know me well (and vice-versa I suppose). Here are some comments across the board about what Rob had to say.
Well, there's my 2-bits. Guess I should get some real work done now.
-"Zow"
A while ago I was at Philips labs where they demo'ed a similar device. One of the things that struck me as most useful (and cool) is that you can start watching the beginning of a show while the end of the same show is still being taped. Then if you skip commercials, you can actually "catch up" and watch the end of the show in real time.
--
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
EOM
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It appears that the main reason the TiVo has a telephone connection is to get television scheduling information. In the UK (and I think most of the rest of Europe) you can get such information (and a lot more) through teletext, a gloriously old-fashioned system transmitted in the space above the television picture. A TiVo-like device could either use the standard listings, or the manufacturers could 'buy' space on one channel for specially formatted listings. No phone line required...
The UK probably the world leader in digital television, BTW - there's two main providers, OnDigital, which is received through a standard aerial, and Sky Digital, which needs a new satellite dish. There's also digital cable television, and internet access through television sets is rapidly becoming a reality.
One disturbing feature about the Sky Digital system is that you must connect it to your phone line for a minimum of one year, so it can report back information like viewing habits and pay-per-view channels. If you don't, they'll cancel your contract. Big Rupert Murdoch is watching you...
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The unit does look pretty sweet thou. GPL and linux drivers..
-IronWolve-
Costco has stereo/4head for 79 bux.. But it doesnt play my DVDs. ;)
Humm, Tivo does, now If I can just move the files to my personal linux box.
Burn a CD with Simpsons on it. (:
-IronWolve-
* Linux its not just for PCs anymore.
One this that worries me about TiVo is its reliance on dialing in to find out TV schedules. What if, in the fickle consumer eletronics market, the TiVo tanks and shuts down its lines? Do these essentially become $700 doorstops?
True, I guess that the TiVo is open source, so people could hack it somehow to use another way to access the program information. But I wouldn't bet of the feasability of this.
Come to think of it, has anyone looked into doing this even if TiVo doesn't tank?
TiVo and Replay units are ok, but still offer little above a VCR that I would sink that much money into one. DishNetworks on the otherhand has some nice things in the pipeline. Right now, they have a DishPlayer unit that offers TiVo functions with somewhat better programming for recording multiple shows. I record a few programs that are on multiple times a day or week, and most of the time my unit says "Every Time 8:00 - 8:30" or something similar.
But the main advantage of an integrated unit is no Digital -> Analog -> Digital -> Analog conversions. The DishPlayer records the MPEG2 stream off the dish, so the unit puts out the same quality as live TV. It also offers a cheaper box, since no MPEG2 encoder is needed. The disadvantage is no local stations can be recorded through it, but thats a minor problem to me for now.
Also, the DishPlayers standard UltraATA33 hard drive can be replaced with ease. So adding additional hard drive space is easier then the TiVo or Replay units.
DishNetworks has partnered with Replay, and hints have been dropped in various DishNetwork chats that an HDTV Replay box is on it's way that also offers a tuner for recieving and recording local stations. This is definitly on my list of things to buy when it comes out.
Since this thing is running linux, and probably has some form of reconizable equipment like an EIDE hard disc, shouldn't it be possible to crack it open and slap in say a 75gig drive? I bet that would up the video time nicely. Better yet if it is scsi, run a ribbon cable out the back to a big raid box. Now that's what I call viewing pleasure.
More to the point, anyone crack these things open and see what video system it has, I'd love to tinker together something simmilar in a mini-tower box and stick it in my A/V rack ( have a 7' x 19" equipment rack with all my componets ). You can get those IR remote mice / keypad boxes that talk to standard IR ports. All in all a much beefier system I would think. It could also be cracking blocks for Distributed.net and signal proccessing for Seti@home in it's spare time.
Then again I could wire it into the house lan and out on the T1 from work, and have it doing simmilar content filtering on say MP3's off Napster sites.
(Wonders off muttering techno-babble with a glint in his eye..........)
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
Well, since a Tivo could reasonably be expected to be in your home, then it could have the same system as my answering machine - dial in, tap out a four-digit code to access it, and if you forget the code, just reset it when you get back home. Since physical access is restricted (mostly), there's no need to worry about securing a local method of access - only the remote method.
Quick note on this. You'll only be able to fast forward/rewind what has already been broadcast. If you're watching show that hasn't been broadcast before, and you want to skip the commercial, you won't be able to. Why?
Because you (and the TiVo more importantly) won't have seen the commercial (or placed it into memory).
Well, it should just be downloading data, not code. As long as you keep Microsoft and their beloved "active content" from getting involved with the project, I don't see how this could happen.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's not a lot different than tape
Really? So if you're watching TV you can hit the "pause" button to go to the bathroom and your VCR will automatically and instantly pause what you're watching, even though you never told it to start recording?
And if you hit the "Pause" button on your VCR, you get digital frame advance capabilities, without the shakiness that comes from tape?
And your VCR+ allows it to record the right show even if they change the time the show is broadcast?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I have a Season Pass (automatic recording of every episode) to the syndicated broadcasts of Law & Order on A&E... they show two episodes per day, one at 1pm and 7pm, and another at 11pm and 3am. It records the 1pm and the 11pm, never the 7pm or 3am (i.e., I get one and only one copy of each episode). TiVo support told me that it does scan program descriptions for duplicates. I wonder why CmdrTaco's getting them?
For example, a home-built digital TV recorder gives you MPEG files which you could easily save out to DVD-RAM, something the Tivo won't let you do. Or, you can email the files to your friends (gotta love those cable modems!) Or, as someone else suggested, you can telnet in from somewhere else and set it to record a show you just heard about. The list goes on...
The point is that gaining greater control over digital devices has enormous potential for integration and synergy, which doesn't apply to dishwashers (dishwashers that don't have CPUs, that is...)
So your economic comparison, in this case, is ignoring (placing no value on) a major benefit of the alternative. A system with features like I've just described probably can't be had for even $10,000 off the shelf right now, so it comes down to what it's worth to you.
Heck, I've just convinced myself to buy a Hauppage card!
well, when traditional commercials are unfeasible, or just unprofitable, then the advertisers will resort to things like product placement. see the recent review of 'mission to mars' for very telling examples.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Those are some good looking features... Makes it tempting to at least look into this.
A few more questions, though:
1) Can TiVo record more than one program at the same time on different channels? If not, can you watch one program and record another at the same time? Since it supposedly records whatever show you watch as you watch it, does that prevent you from recording something else? (I frequently use my VCR to tape a second show when I have a conflict between two programs I want to watch...)
2) Can you remove/update the hard drive? If I record a bunch of shows/movies that I want to keep forever, is there a way to keep those on disk and not limit the remaining space for the device? It'd be nice to be able to simply buy another hard drive and swap it in any time I wanted... And even to take my hard drive out, drive over to my friend's house, and stick it in his TiVo to watch... Or at least to copy episodes/movies off the drive and onto a removable medium, like DVDs or what not...
3) Are there security hazards with a TiVo? After all, it seems like it does connect to some external server, so the connection might go the other way too... Can someone crack my TiVo, screw up my settings, delete my programs, run smurf attacks through it, or any other such nonsense?
-Joe
'One very strange thing the TiVO does is delay all "live TV" about 4 seconds.'
This is an interesting limitation. Almost everything I watch is sports programming, but for local sports--specifically UNC Tar Heels football and basketball--I often turn down the sound and listen to the radio announcers. (I often do this when "Dick" Vitale is doing a game.) Clearly, this would be difficult with the TiVo delay.
(The CBS transmission mechanism for the NCAA tournament actually introduces a half-second delay relative to the radio--sometimes the radio announcers can call shots in or out before it's clear on TV--but it's not enough to make it hard to watch).
What would be really cool as an enhancement would be the ability to take video from a TV channel and audio from a radio station, then feed them both into the same feed so that they come out at the same time. Though if you live in an apartment complex as crowded as mine, you may still hear the cheers or curses of neighbors before you see what happened.
(A side note on the commercial-skipping discussions: live sports are still a case in which there would be room for commercials. Unless you want to get lots of replays and know that the game has progressed without you seeing it, you're going to hit a point where the game itself pauses for a commercial and you have to either (a) back up and look for interesting replays, (b) go to the bathroom, or (c) wait out the commercials.)
He was an accident waiting to happen. Most accidents happen at home. Maybe he should have gone out more often.
Not to respond to a troll, but to respond to this troll: Linux is probably not crashing. The user-level "TiVo" application may be crashing. Since I'm gessing you can't telnet into your TiVo, you can't kill the job and re-start it. You're left with a reboot.
Noww if TiVo were open source....
Local programming has been out for no more than 4 or 5 months and not in every market.
And where I am at, Mediaone's signal is the worst of any cable company I have ever seen. I also live where there are 6 or 8 local channels, but they don't pump much into the air for signal since there are so many "wonderful" cable companies helping. The reception is horrid.
Ultimately, the complaint against airing local stations was never truly justified any more than shutting down that Canadian web site (ICrave?). The ads were still there, but no one likes to share. Why we don't complain about the new technology that removes spaces from recorded and live signals to gain more air time is beyond me.
Myxx
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Twisted Little Gnome - The Podcasting Network http://www.twistedlittlegnome.com
This is because the thing does this:
1. take TV signal, encode into MPEG
2. stuff encoded signal onto disk
3. read from disk (or, perhaps the last couple secs are in buffer RAM)
4. decode and display
The trick is that all this takes time to do, since the MPEG encoder needs a buffer of sufficient size (= # of frames = time) to achieve good a good compression/quality compromise. That's where the most of those four secs come in.
BTW, when you see the four steps above, it becomes obvious how the time shifting is done, since (1,2) and (3,4) are run in parallel (in principle, two threads).
I like the concept of this device -- the ability to digitally record shows, and to be able to "pause" regular TV.
What I don't like is the subscription model. I'd gladly pay the cash for one of these things, but I really hate the idea that it needs to download information from a service in order to work. Because when that service goes out of business, the TiVo is basically reduced to paperweight status. It happened to DiVX, after all.
The Tivo site has a very good faq that will answer a ton of the speculation that's going on in this discussion:
http://www.tivo.com/what/faq.html
this seems like a dubious statement at best. got any facts to support it with? here are a few to support my 'no worries, advertisers will find a way' theory:
i'm sure there are more examples of ways in which advertisers can advertise w/o commercials, so please feel free to add to the list.
my vision?
the future may not have commercials as we know it, but we'll probably move back more into a model as in the early days of television. your favorite host/guest/actor chooses to smoke/drink/eat/own/wear a particular thing, appropriately logoed. this happens all over tv today (seinfeld, the simpons (dialog), etc.) and i think this is the trend you will see in the future, but never, ever, ever, despite how good it might be, will you see advertisers stop advertising. at least until consumers stop consuming, and this, being the usa, seems unlikely.
My TV has this great feature called TV Guide Plus. It downloads the programming info for every station right over my broadband line. It does the same with an antenna as well. I'd rather not hook my TIVO up to a phone line, so I'll wait till they include that feature to buy one.
look here: http://www.cadsoftusa.com/people/kls/vdr/
For those interested, here's the quote:
Ottawa huh? I'm in Ottawa too and have been drooling over TiVO for a while. ReplayTV sounds good, just not quite as good. Unfortunately you can't get TiVO in Canada right now. Can you get ReplayTV in Canada? If so, where and for how much?
Yep, although I'm paraphrasing. I'm going by my very poor memory here, but it was the TiVo webmaster, Richard Bulwinkle(?) in a TiVo newsgroup. You should still be able to find my post and his in newsgroup archives. Look for ones with "Canada" in the title from about 3 weeks ago.
ReplayTV costs about $200 more than Tivo. A lifetime subscription to Tivo costs $200. See any difference?
I really wanted this capability this weekend. I was away visiting family, and I forgot to turn off some programs before I left (I have the low-end Tivo and I have it record a lot, just in case I want to watch it). However, the Tivo doesn't have a way to automatically prioritize the order in which shows are deleted except for the order in which they were recorded.
No matter what anyone tells you, if you really like TV, Tivo is the best $400/$700 you'll ever spend. Really. I've had mine 5 months and it so kicks ass, I can't tell you. A couple of minor annoyances, and sure $200 more for the subscription, but it is SOOOO cool, it's well worth it. A coworker of mine bought one, and raved about it, so I tried it and then got one. Now at least 7 people at work have them (I think my job is their biggest sponsor :-) and we all can't live without it. I've only heard bad things about replaytv (although they may have fixed a lot of the problems). My Tivo has crashed exactly once, and a quick reboot fixed it without losing my prefs. I do wish for a firewire port, or enet, but hey... next version :-)
I work at a startup and would always miss my favorite shows. Now the fox sunday night linuep, nypd blue, beat suite, etc., I can see 'em all. And while I have the 15 hour version, I almost always use the "least" quality or "next to least" quality setting, which is more than adequate for stuff you're not going to keep forever... and it ends up being plenty of capacity for me. At the highest quality setting, I've A/B'd it with Digital 8 from a HQ source and it's indistinguishable (at least on my video equipment, which is decent).
If you love TV, run out and buy a Tivo. You won't be disappointed!
1. Stereo works just fine on my Tivo. Closed captioning doesn't seem to get recorded, though. I personally don't care.
2. You can buy extra Tivo remotes from the company.
3. I had that same dialup problem until I switched to a different phone jack. Apparently the first one I was connecting to had ring and tip reversed, which doesn't seem to affect phones, but tivo was sensitive to it. Now it's happy. (I agree, that's kinda a bug...) The error I used to get was "no dialtone". Is that the same as what you were getting?
care to elaborate?
Just make sure the protocol (and perhaps source) is public, so anyone can audit what type of data is sent. Right now Aureate is having similar "privacy" problems because they're closed and not being trusted.
I disagree: the BBC does have adverts, quite a lot of them in fact. It's just that, well, they're all for the BBC...
... quite why they feel the need to advertise something we are already paying for, and (more to the point) can't refuse to pay for (if you want any TV at all, that is) is beyond me.
--
Was this just a cute way of saying the TiVo queries the coax input or does one have to hook the phone up into the box as well?
After the DIVX disaster, I'm rather leery about any device which wants to make my viewing habits known to anyone with deep enough pockets.
If a few interested people were to spend some hours on this, we could come up with a free version of the software. It might never get as polished as a commercial box like Tivo, but it would be hackable - if you want to add/change/remove a feature you could do it.
Control it with whatever input device you like - infrared remote, keyboard, mouse, telnet.
The software would have some hefty hardware requirements, but I would definitely rather pay similar money to buy hardware to upgrade my fast game playing machine (add a nice mpeg/tuner board with a remote and a fast/large hard drive with separate read/write heads). Then I could use my ethernet, program it to record remotely, etc.
The two problems I see for this project are:
1. Does the tuner/mpeg board exist as a product that is inexpensive enough? I haven't seen it, but if they are able to build it into these boxes at consumer prices there must be something out there.
2. Program guides for your location would have to be sucked in somehow - there may be a clever way to extract this from some web pages, but this is the sort of thing that may need both continuous attention and different solutions for different areas.
If anyone knows of a project that is working on this, by all means post about it and email me - I have been interested in this idea since I wrote a TV schedule viewer in a user interface class.
If you don't know of a project that is working on this but you are interested, email me anyway. If I find a project in progress, I will let you know about it, otherwise I will try starting one.
Mark.Gray@pobox.com
I've had my Replay box for four months. I find it somewhat easier to control (more predictable recording and storage-management behavior) than a friend's TiVo.
Initially I chose Replay because TiVo had plans to use advertising to subsidize schedule subscriptions, and Replay didn't. However, from what I can see, both companies are still fine-tuning their strategies.
I've had one problem, which turned out to be at Replay's end -- there was a period of a few days when my Replay couldn't make the phone connection to download the schedule information. During that time Replay's Customer Service was extremely helpful, even giving me the maintenance codes to look at diagnostic output from Linux.
WRT recording problems, the only glitch I'm dealing with at the moment is that Replay allows a little slop in program start/end times, so that it catches shows that slip due to scheduling problems (like sports events). However, this means that you can catch two episodes of a show if they run at back-to-back times -- for example, in my area, new episodes of Voyager run at 21:00, but my Replay box will also catch the rerun that starts at 22:00.
All in all, I'm happier with my Replay than my friend is with his TiVo.
Allen
Nah. The ideal situation would be an ethernet spigot and allow us to customize the setup of the box. Just stick 200gigs or so of disk on a server somewhere in the house and then these tivo boxes on each tv and let you build up archives and such. Store it remotely. Plan a end of season Arliss party or something like that.
1. Closed Captioning only works on the RCA outs of my TiVo, not on the RF output. This is definitely a bug.
2. Yeah, but they're expensive.... :(
3. I just checked it, you're right! They are flipped. Weird. I wasn't getting any errors, it just wasn't dialling automatically, only manually.
Thanks!
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I bought the 14hr TiVo when it first came out. I have to say that I absolutely love it. With cable now about $60/mo, TiVo lets me extract the most of it. It catches all the bizarro shows that I like late at night, and I can watch them in any order, unlike a VCR.
If I was rich, I would have gotten the 30hr TiVo. I have my 14hr set at medium quality, which only gets me 8hrs of video that's a little better than VHS. I use medium quality because the sports shows I watch end up in a flurry of MPEG mosaics at low quality.
TiVo currently has an upgrade program at: http://www.personaltv.philips. com/upgrade/process.html. $299 to upgrade from the 14hr to 30hr, basically the price differential.
My TiVo is a little buggy. It never dials up by itself, I have to always manually dial-up. I called TiVo tech support and while they were nice enough, they never resolved the issue. It's not too much of a pain so I never bothered to get it fixed. Maybe 1.3 will solve it.
One of the things I wish I had was another remote for TiVo. I use a 2.4ghz NTSC in-home broadcaster to beam my TiVo's living room signals to my bedroom. A pair of infrared signal senders sends the remote's commands back, but my bedroom TV is different from my living rooms. Yeah yeah, I should get a multi-remote, but none of them are preprogrammed for TiVo. So I end up carrying my TiVo remote to my bedroom when I want to watch at night.
I also noticed I'm not getting shows in stereo. Not sure if this is TiVo or my cable service, have to look into that. I just got a new home theater system, so it's annoying that everything is in mono.
Anyway, I hope someone figures out how to hack TiVo so that you can put in any large HD you want. CircuitCity has 30 gig hard drives + UltraDMA66 interface cards for $199 right now (w/ rebates). Tempting, tempting. My TiVo is almost out of warrantee anyway, so I'd love to rip its guts open to put in a larger drive.
From one geek gal to all you geek boys...
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On the AV forum it seems that many Replay owners are still paying $10-20/mo for toll calls because there is no toll-free local number for them.
Tivo's latest software release (1.3) supports local toll-free calls, but also allows the owner to choose the 800 number if there is none.
Replay's built in $200 lifetime subscription fee is bogus if you can still end up paying $10+/mo for phone calls. I'd rather get a $399 30hr Tivo (from Tweeter) and pay the $10/mo, than pay $499 for a 20hr Replay and STILL pay $10/mo.!!!
If you're not in a toll-free local call area, you're SOL.
Replay is $499 for 20hr.
Tivo is $399 for 30hr (Tweeter), with Sony about to announce - in april - 30hr unit for $399 MSRP (street $300-350 ?). Phillips price likely to drop further.
Tivo service costs $10/mo, via 1.800 number
Replay service is "free", but for many people costs $10-20/mo since there is no 1.800 number and not very wide coverage for toll-free local call numbers.
Sure prices on both are likely to drop, but right now Tivo is well ahead, and the Phillips/Sony and soon DirectTV competition will IMO keep Tivo more competetive. Replay, AFAIK will only be available from Panasonic (or Replay themselves).
At first the reasons TiVO gave why they weren't selling the units in Canada was the lack of available TV schedule information here and that some encryption built into the system made the things illegal to export. None of these reasons really seemed to hold up, so I recently asked again. Last I've heard they can't expand into new markets because they're having enough trouble keeping up with demand in current markets. Argh!
Someone at Tivo told you this (trouble keeping up with existing markets)? Was this via e-mail or phone? Do you remember who you talked to?
As a TIVO investor, this is very interesting!
While Tivo can replace much of what you use a VCR for (particularly "time shifting" your TV shows), you should think of it as a TV-enhancer rather than a VCR. Tivo market it as "personal television". A Tivo is an *addition* to your home theatre, not a replacement for your VCR.
If you want to archive stuff on Tivo to tape, then there is a "save to VCR" function that makes that easy to do.
Tivo uses MPEG-2 compression (same as satellite TV), so raw thruput is not very demanding. Tivo's lowest quality is 1GB/hr (30hr Tivo has 30G (2x15) HD), while highest quality is about 3 times that.
It uses Quantum fireball IDE drives with Quickview AV support.
You can archive to tape (play to video out), but there's no digital output yet. Sony may well add firewire to Tivo, since they've announced they want to integrate all their multimedia products, and PS-2 has firewire.
The AV forum (linked from www.tivo.com) has some posts pertianing to hacking Tivo.. it is possible to do a DIY disk upgrade if you know what you're doing, but it's not a Tivo supported feature yet.
I found it. Thanks very much! :-)
Tivo records in MPEG-2, at three different quality levels.
According to the Tivo AV forum many people even find the lowest quality (1GB/hr) quite acceptable.
There's a new DirectTV + Tivo box coming out soon that will record raw DirectTV (MPEG-2) downloads, and thus be indistinguisable from DirectTV.
Only Tivo's mods to the Linux kernel (e.g. some file system changes) are GPL'd.
The Tivo *application* itself is proprietary, as you might expect. Pretty damn impressive Linux app, though!
ReplayTV has 20hr storage and costs $499
Tivo has 30hr storage and costs $399 (from outpost.com/Tweeter), with Sony $399 MSRP unit coming out in April.
Tivo subscription costs $10/mo (or Lifetime subscription for $199), and uses an 800 number or local toll free call. Replay has no subscription fee, but costs about $10-20 a month in phone calls since they don't have an 800 number!
Potential privacy issues are the same with both. Tivo guarantees on their web site that they will not collect your viewing habits.
From following the Tivo AV forum, I don't think crashes are normal. With around 50,000 users so far (my guess - 25,000 last quarter), I think the forum would be swamed with complaints if it wasn't reliable. You should call Tivo or Phillips to get it replaced. There's a Tivo guy on the AV forum (link from www.tivo.com) who will help if you're having any problems.
I noticed overall the quality of reception through the TiVo was a little worse than the TV's internal tuner (it's an older Mitsubishi 601 35"). The loss in quality looks more like an artifact of having "yet another link in the system" rather than any MPEG artifacting. I'd do a more expensive A/B comparison, but I just can't bring myself to unplug the TiVo :)
I think this unit is a great step forward for mankind, *but*:
You said that you suspected a harddrive failure on a box running Linux, without tou having any possibilities to exchange the hard drive, right?
Wouldn't it have been much better if one could stick a 18GB 3.5" scsi drive into the back of the unit making it possible to store *alot* more data (movies, talk shows or what-so-ever)?
perhaps something for the next release of it...
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
CT mentioned how you can rewind live tv. That is because the Tivo is constantly recording into a half hour buffer. This is a great feature, but there is no way to save this buffer.
I wonder if there could be a way that you could program/write a program that saves this buffer - you know, an open source project/hack to save the day?
Which brings up another question - how to get the program to work with the software that TiVo runs on (which I don't know anything about... oops). I realize that my questions are a bit muttled; I'm not sure of all that I'm talking about. I'm just assuming that there's somebody who is/could work on writing a program that could somehow "sneak in" and write that buffer to disk - say, an external drive that you connect somehow to the TiVo (via the modem ? does it have a network card? hmmm..)
Just curious, you know.
Insert mind here.
When I bought mine in June, TiVo was cheaper, had more capacity, had better features, and better backers.
Today, the features and prices are converging, but TiVo still has the best array of alliances with media companies. This is why I think it will flourish. ReplayTV can hope to be bought by Microsoft, but I'd say its chances of flourishing on its own are small.
I don't know why you're seeing a 4 second delay, but I only see about 1/2 second. I've set up my cable feed and TiVo's output into PIP on my TV and can see only the 1/2 second delay between the two. Of course, if I pause the TiVo for a little bit I can get 4 seconds.
Many people would rather sit there and watch commercials than stare at a blank screen, anyway.
I personally enjoy watching my HTML load on a slow dialup connection.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ReplayTV has a 30 second fast forward button. Press it and you instantly move forward 30s.
I'm envisioning some fun with this one.
Buddy get's up to bathroom. FF to missed field goal, then back up a few minutes.
"Hey buddy, I bet you $5.00 he misses that field goal."
George
Hey, I though this was a site by people I could relate to. Now where do I go?
I dunno, what's your couch look like?
Did you see the newest WiReD? Malda is in it, lying on an ugly couch.
Come on, just because you're a geek millionaire doesn't mean you can't have a nice couch.
George
Price. TiVo simply offered more storage and features for less money. The choice in this department wasn't very hard.
Programming. The TiVo's program guide offers comprehensive data about programming, and extensive searchability/indexing, as well as season pass programming (which, granted, needs a bit of work). As far as I know, ReplayTV does none of this.
Also, an important thing to note, but which may not be a big deal to everyone, is this. TiVo has strong ties with DirecTV. I believe they're coming out with a new version of the TiVo which doubles as a DirecTV satellite receiver as well, but putting that aside for a moment, the current TiVo offer the ability to decode DirecTV Pay Per View movies. ReplayTV cannot do this. I tend to get 3 or 4 PPV movies a month, some of which I transfer to my SVHS VCR to watch again. If I had gone with ReplayTV, I couldn't have done this.
Tivo is almost entirely dependent on the dialup connection to a service provider that gives it program information, correct? If Tivo fails in the marketplace (a la DIVX), doesn't this mean that all Tivo boxes become almost useless?
Is there any contingency planning in place for this possibility?
This creates all the problems about who answers the phone. The best solution would be to just wire it up to the home network. Hell, TiVo is basically a Linux box. Replace the application with a GPLed application and you can have all the features you want (like commercial skiping).
Actually, they should sell a TiVo (minus CPU and HD) PCI card and provide stripped down TiVo software as open source. They could featutre mine the open source version of the interface for the main stream TiVo and users would still need to pay for the subscription based features.. and all the geeks would be happy since they could have any feature they want (commercial skipping, smarter recording), as much drive space as they want, etc. I suppose they could use hardware patents to prevent people from seling a compeating set-top box.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Yes, and you can also build a low-end pentium to put in your trunk, write some software, build a wiring harness to re-wire your dash, filter and regulate a power supply, and wait for seconds-to-minutes for this device to boot up to play MP3's in your car, OR you could go to the car hardware section of mp3.com to find a device that can do it for you.
My point is that the Tivo is a consumer device. They want people to be able to buy these things at Wal-Mart, not to have to build them themselves. Sure, if you want to spend your own time and energy building one, more power to you. That's what the hacker thing is all about, but if I needed such a device, I'd go out and buy one.
Thought they worked by detecting the longer empty black screen between commercial blocks and the shows. I've never looked into it, because I just don't trust broadcasters not to start sticking slightly longer pauses into the shows, thus screwing up my tapings.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Product placement isn't exactly new. Remember Wayne's World? (was it the first or second?) Now _that_ was product placement.
Intolerant people should be shot.
But that's perfectly ok, tho, i'n'it? Since the api to the secret stuff is fairly well defined, you just need to recreate it. By overspeccing the HD cache, you should be able to hide the fact that you don't have that good of a disk-placement alg.
Actually, now that I think about it, you should get fairly good performance from just setting your HD block size to something a bit larger -- say about a 1 MB. That's at least a good fraction of a minute, which should be enough to hide seek times.
johan
You jump without thinking, grasshopper.
Being unarmed is not simply being "without a gun". In some cases, it can mean not being aware that there are mean people who will hurt you for funsies. If you meet a fool with a gun, you need every skill, every sense, and sometines a good bit of luck to survive.
The original wit implied that gun owners hurt themselves. Much more likely that harm comes from the hand of another.
Most internet pornography is viewed in homes with computers. Statistics show that computer prolifaration correlates with children viewing pornography.
Actually, statistics can "prove" almost anything if you manipulate them correctly.
The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun -- Atticus Finch
The easiest way to get shot is to meet someone else with a gun when you are unarmed.
The one important thing to note is the hard disk in the TiVo -- It's a Quantum QuickView disk, which has TWO sets of heads - One for reading, one for writing, so it can watch one program while recording another.
With hard disks getting faster and faster, it might be possible to do this on a machine with a fast disk and a lot of RAM, but I don't think the tech. is there yet to guarantee that you won't be dropping frames.
Taco, you _DO_ know that your dish unit can control your VCR, AND can do the 'I want this show recorded bit' right?
Not as 'cool' as a TivO but probably just as effective, and certainly a heck of a lot cheaper.
Hey, I though this was a site by people I could relate to. Now where do I go?
Actually, there are episode descriptions for most programs. For instance, I can select a Simpsons episode in the program guide and read what the episode is about. I know everyone is afraid of the Divx thing, but Tivo has to connect SOMEWHERE to get program guide data so it knows the times to record your shows. Personally, I would like to see an ethernet jack as an optional accessory for all us geeks with LANs. That way the Tivo could update without having to be hooked up to a phone line. I have had a Tivo long enough so my viewing habits have changed. I am less stressed at work and am no longer late because I can watch my favorite shows whenever I feel like it. Hell, my Tivo recorded Trainspotting last night and I didn't even know it was on (But I love the movie). All you people fishing for stock tips, invest in Tivo, or their competitor ReplayTV (IPO Soon) because this is going to catch on and consumers will buy these FAST.
tasty and delicious
I'm a fairly busy person, and to me this sounded like a godsend: I could tape shows that aired while I was at work
or away on business or asleep, and stockpile them... then I could watch them (fast forwarding through commercials
and deleting the rerunrs) when it fit my schedule.
So this device allows someone to record shows while they are not present and then watch them at a later date? Wow! I'm surprised something like this hasn't been invented a long time ago. </sarcasm>
Seriously though...I don't see a huge demand for these things. It's not a lot different than tape and you can't keep the episodes around if you enjoyed them, it's time to over write them with new. Sure it's easier than programming a VCR, but with VCR+ so popular, why subscribe to a service? I wonder how much TiVo paid for the plug...
Yeah, but I'm sure there's an API buried in the code :) You could write your own GUI... Make up some cool lookin' skins for it too..
--- sig moved for great justice.
One of my friend as a VCR that can mark those commercial.
When it finish recording somthing, it rewind, the play back (faster that normal playing speed) and when it detect a commercial it marks it. When you play back the recorded program, then it automatically fast forward the commercial. Pretty neet!
I don't know how it detects commercial but it seems to rok really well.
One way I can thin of detecting commercials to to listen to the audio track. Commercial have the sound highly compressed (in audio terminology) and play a lot louder than movies or other programs.
FWIW, people over at dbsdish.com (myself included) have been hacking the dishplayer and installing larger drives than the original 8GB units. Reports of up to 40GB installed. I upgraded to a 27GB and can get 12-15 hours recorded at a time.
Yikes! I knew folks with guns were dangerous but really, if I meet someone who is armed I'm gonna get shot? Everytime!?
As far as the TiVo and commercials - the scariest solution will be when they start putting banner ads on TV to get around the TiVo type machines...
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
Mine just arrived last night and I had it up and running in just under two hours. I agree that the setup was easy if not a little long. I also like the fact that the provided all the cables I would need to hook up my equipment.
Can any one tell me what in the real world terms is the difference of the recording quality?
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
You can only fast forward through commercials after the show has been taped, and in this case it's just like if you were to tape a show on a VCR (like many people do, mind you) and fast forward through the commercials (like many people also do, mind you). Thus while this does, I suppose, increase the amount of people who will be taping things as supposed to watching them live and therefore being able to FF through commercials, TiVo still doesn't get to take the blame for the first piece of technology to let people speed through commercials - the VCR does.
... plugin to automatically filter commercials out ...
:-))
This already exists -- and it's patented as I recall. Several VCRs on the market have "commercial advance" logic in there. It will mark the beginning and end of commercials after a TV show is recorded.
I have an RCA VCR that does this. Over the past three years, it's only been wrong a half dozen times -- and it's recording fuzzy crap out of the atmosphere -- and NO, it is not looking for VBI control signals (even if they were there it wouldn't be able to see them clearly in all the fuzz -- the CC information is garbled already.) It will automotically skip the commercials on playback (even "blue screen" them if you want so you don't even see them in fast forward!) and I've not heard of anyone suing RCA over this.
Personally, I leave both options off... sometimes I want to see the commercials. I'm sure no one ever thought I'd want to use commercial advance in the inverse -- all I wanted to see was the commercials duing the superbowl (it's nice to see they managed to play some football in between all the commercials
You can do this already. Think about it for a few minutes and it should come to you... The TiVo has RCA video and audio inputs. Most radio receivers have RCA in/out and a "monitor" feature for you to pass the audio through an equalizer...
If you cannot figure it out, I'll have to draw you a picture.
Price. TiVo simply offered more storage and features for less money.
You need to check the current pricing. Replay has dropped their price twice in the last six months, so they are very competitive now.
Last year Replay announced an alliance with Panasonic, there are supposed to be Panasonic-branded Replay units coming out some time this year. Presumably that will start to level the retail situation.
They do have some media alliances too, for instance NBC and Cartoon Network are already sponsoring "replay zones".
Generally though, you're right, Tivo has the lead in market penetration. However I think there is definitely room for more than one vendor in this space. Look at how many brands of VCR's there are.
FWIW, ReplayTV has this same characteristic. I've never tried to measure it, but its about 1/2 to 1 second or so, as reported elsewhere in this thread. Also the reasoning elsewhere in this thread as to why this occurs is dead on.
Did you really find it necessary to post this same comment twice in two different sub-threads?
It's still not true. ReplayTV has a whole directory of local dialups it can use, when you configure it you tell it what area code you are in and it suggests the nearest number.
Yes, there are a few things that overlap with VCR's, for instance:
Here are some of the many things Replay and Tivo can do that no tape-based VCR can do:
I'm a Replay owner, so I'm partial to it of course. I like being able to punch in keywords and have it search for related programs. I have a channel set up that shows me whenever George Carlin is on, another that tapes ever time Penn & Teller are on TV. In my VCR days it was very tedious to pore over TV listings to find this stuff. Now its a snap.
Neither Tivo nor ReplayTV are designed to replace your VCR. Both vendors make that clear in their marketing materials. Though these devices do overlap in capability with VCR's, their main strength is in the things they can do which VCR's cannot.
Acceptance will come. Some parallels might help you realize this. DVD's do not replace your VCR, yet they are widely accepted. CD's did not replace recordable media like cassette tape and mini-disk, yet they are widely accepted.
Why? Because both DVD's and CD's provide capabilities that go far beyond the previous media which they ostensibly 'replaced'. In their case it was better picture/audio quality, higher media reliability, random access, and so on.
Likewise personal television devices like Replay and Tivo will be widely accepted, but will not completely replace VHS VCR's. I personally have both a ReplayTV and a VHS deck, and I plan to continue this way for some time. In fact I'm planning to buy a new VHS deck because my current one is getting a bit long in the tooth.
These devices are a paradigm shift in the way you watch television, and as a result many folks have a hard time seeing how they fit in. But that's natural, since they are hardly a year old.
Compare the current discussion with the skepticism that greeted DVD's in some quarters when they were first released 2 or 3 years ago. Three years from now, devices like replay and Tivo will be as common as DVD players, perhaps more so.
The other features mentioned in that press release, like 'Wish List' and 'Teach Tivo' sound like Tivo will have something equivalent to Replay's keyword searching (or 'themes') soon.
The 'Tivomatic Recording' feature, which is what we were discussing, is definitely not yet supported in Replay. I imagine they will move to offer something like it. I can't imagine the broadcast networks doing something like that but offering it exclusively to one vendor. At the very least, unless Tivo patented it, Replay could make their device compatible with it.
The 'Overtime Scheduler' feature is also something that Replay needs badly. It's my number one request currently. Not just for sports events, but for some channels (like Fox) that are constantly starting programs 30 seconds before the hour. Used to be you could literally set a clock by when a TV program started, currently some networks are up to 2 minutes off when they start programs. This is somewhat easy to compensate for in a VCR (I always started taping the Simpsons 2 minutes early and left 5 extra minutes on the end) but with Tivo/Replay they deliberately don't give you control of the start end times---to make it EASIER.
One thing I'm getting out of this is: isn't competition great? Its obvious to me that the existence of two products in this category is driving these constant improvements to both services.
No, that can still be an issue with Replay. It only checks for dupes on shows you have kept.
And just what "more direct control" does their software give you with recording?
In Replay, you can prioritize the recordings by choosing "guaranteed" or "not guaranteed". When you choose guaranteed, it will pre-reserve disk space for that program, and recording that program will be the priority if there are conflicting non-guaranteed programs. It also warns you if you attempt to set up two guaranteed records that conflict.
Non-guaranteed lets the Replay manage the disk space itself, more like Tivo does. So it might choose to delete a non-guaranteed program to make room for another one. However it will never delete a guaranteed program without you telling it. In the new software, you can mark a program to keep it, basically changing it from non-guaranteed to guaranteed.
It takes some getting used to, but basically what you want to do is set up most everything as non-guaranteed, and reserve guaranteed for those once-only can't-miss programs. For instance my Star Trek channel is non-guaranteed, but I set it to tape the Oscars on Sunday (since I'll be somewhere else then) and I made that guaranteed.
Replay also lets you choose shows to record in a variety of ways. The two main ones which existed in the first version of the software were "show based" and "theme based" channels. Show based channels work like Tivo, you pick a show and tell it whether you want to record all of them, or just one episode. However unlike Tivo it does try to tie it to channel and time so you don't get syndicated repeats. I.e. if you say tape Star Trek at 9pm on UPN on Wednesday, you only get the Voyager episodes, not all the old reruns on SciFi and elsewhere.
Theme based channels are like keyword searches. Basically anything thats listed as text in a listing can be the target, people, titles, descriptions. If you want every talk show that George Carlin appears on, that's trivial to set up in Replay. If you really do want all the Star Trek's, no matter what channel they are on, you do that with a theme channel.
The new software lets you do some new things with theme channels. You can restrict the searches to actors, directors, titles or show descriptions. Thats handy when searching on a keyword that might have multiple meanings. For instance, you may want movies directed by Paul Mazursky, but not stuff he appeared in as an actor. You can also have it show you a list of matching shows, which is a good way to check your query to see that it is working the way you expected.
Because you control the way theme channels are set up, that thing mentioned in the review where recording DragonBall and Simpsons resulted in tons of other animated programs getting recorded could never happen in Replay. That's good in that you're more in control, on the other hand it does reduce the "serendipity effect" where Tivo might record a program that you would really like, but never knew about. However, you can get some serendipity like effects from the new Replay Zones feature, described below.
The new software also adds a thing called "Replay Zones" which are basically predefined queries into the program listings. So for instance if you want to look up all the R-rated movies that are on this week, you can do that with a couple of clicks in Replay. One that I really like is you can look up all the movies that are being broadcast in letterbox format.
Replay zones are also where the advertiser-supported stuff resides in Replay. There are zones for Cartoon Network and NBC Comedies, that are obviously paid for by Time Warner and GE respectively. But they are not intrusive, and I don't mind there being some ads in there if it keeps my subscription cost at zero.
can record a show when you see a preview
I'm curious, how does that work? Do you mean to say that when an advertisement for a show comes on the network, you can click a button and Tivo knows which show to tape based on the ad? That's pretty damn cool. No, Replay can't do that.
If I want to keep something in my Replay, I dub it off to my VHS VCR. The new software has a feature that steps you through the process. I usually cut the commercials out in the process (see next paragraph). I understand that Tivo provides some convenience features to do the same thing.
Replay does have commercial skip, though it is not automatic. There's a button that skips forward exactly 30 seconds. With some practice you can bop through commercial breaks with a few button presses.
I seriously doubt you are going to see these vendors add features that let you copy off programs in digital format. The same IP nazi's that are leading the DMCA and RIAA stuff that is going on now will never let this happen. But I have a couple of data points that point toward this.
First of all, remember that both Replay and Tivo are making deals with program producers to guarantee themselves alternate revenue streams. These program producers are not going to want to encourage a vendor producing a product that will allow easy digital copying of their precious programs. The broadcast networks are already paranoid about devices like this allowing users to more easily skip commercials, so the hardware vendors have to get in bed with the networks to make sure everyone stays cooperative.
Second of all, I can point to a press release at the Macrovision web site that says that both Replay and Tivo have licensed technology from that company to support their copy-protection scheme in future versions of their hardware. Basically, you will still be allowed to time-shift Macrovision encoded programs using the units, but if you try to dub them off to another device, they will be re-encoded with Macrovision to prevent that. Judging from the timing of the press release (last April) I don't think the original units made by either manufacturer had this capability.
In fact, I discovered that my ReplayTV 2004 unit, which I bought in October, does NOT have this capability in it. I can record Macrovision encoded stuff into my Replay, and then dub it off onto VHS tape just fine. That recently came in handy. (No, I was not pirating something, it was completely a fair use situation).
Apologies for the strange formatting of that previous message. I *did* preview it, and it looked fine, but when I posted it that happened. Gremlins, I guess.
To be fair, DirecTV also has their own DirecTiVo coming out this summer, and from what I've read you'll be able to choose between using the DirecTV guide or the TiVo guide for recordings. Remember, both DTV and Dish sell their systems as a loss-leader. So they're both able to sell an integrated TiVo/receiver unit for just about the same price as a standalone TiVo without much loss, and it's just another way to tie you to their service. And in case you didn't know, DirecTV bought USSB last year, all DirecTV programming now comes from one source.
Technically the FCC still *is* screwing us with their local programming laws. Despite some improvements in the last year, the law is still leaving millions of DBS viewers without local programming over their dish. It isn't feasible for the DBS carriers to offer local programming to smaller cities. People that live in these cities aren't legally able to receive out-of-market programming from DirecTV or Dish unless they get permission from their local broadcasters. So in order to receive the networks over your dish, you either have to live in one of the top 20-30 TV markets, or live so far out in the sticks that you can't get any reception via antennae.
This stuff sounds pretty cool, I certainly agree that that it needs to recognize re-runs or identical programming and only tape them if I told it too... (i.e. do you want reruns taped [y/n]) Personally I don't care about the privacy side of it, even if they do spam me I'll just add it to the pile of spam that I throw out every day from icq and email :)
:)
If they get the smart feature working better it would rock too, I don't always have time to look for things to watch that I would be interested in, in this case it might be able to find them for me.
The idea of being able to watch TV when I want rather then when the networks wants kicks ass. It means at 5:00pm or 6:00pm there will be something more interesting then Martha Stewart for my wife to watch... man Martha pisses me of, and that is not a good thing
I don't much care for the subscription idea, I would much rather pay the 200 lifetime up front then pay on a monthly basis though it isn't too bad cause most people already pay for the cable or satellite on a monthly basis.
On the whole it sounds like a big step in the right direction!
Andrew
I feel compelled to comment on how my feelings towards TIVO have changed after 5 months of use.
In the first couple of weeks, there was a HUGE excitement. Coming home from work, waking up, my thoughts would be "I wonder what TIVO recorded for me?" Everyday was like Christmas.
Shows I long loved and forgot about are still on, only at 4:30AM. It was great. The you told TIVO you liked the show, and you got Overdosed on episodes.
Two issues came up later. I became in the habit of not worrying about whether something like X-Files would be recorded. Unfortunately, one day the show was delayed and TIVO didn't know it. I'm not sure it could have, but it would have really been nice if it had.
Also, it now seems to delete shows too quickly. Since the X-Files incident, I sometimes check to make sure "it's there", TIVO thinks I watched the entire episode, so it deletes it. I now have to override this by using "save until I delete" Even if I don't preview a show, it deletes too quickly.
The other issue is now everyone wants me to output things to VCR tape. It's a pain. There's a ton of requests from friends like "Can you have TIVO record..." I think I'm gonna tell them TIVO is broken.
So, After 5 months I'd still give TIVO at least 3 thumbs up.
I've always wanted one of these, but I'm a full time student working a part time job, and i just can't afford it :P
-motardo
This would also make downloading the programming information much faster also, BUT imagine if there was a way for someone to plant a virus onto the Hard Disk, or something. Another neat thing if this thing had an ethernet plug is that you could possibly pull the programming from the TiVo onto your PC so you could archive it. Just my thoughts -motardo
You've got to expect some delay given the amount of time it takes to record the broadcast, and then 'rebroadcast' it to your TV.
It's always recording and you're always watching the recorded feed.
TIVO has changed the way we watch TV...in a good way. There's no more rushing to get all the drinks and snacks ready before the show...just get your stuff together whenever, plonk down infront of the TV...if the show has already started, just start watching from the beginning...while it continues to record the show for you. That's the best feature, you can watch a recorded show while it's recording something (the same show or a different one on a different channel).
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
http://www.tivo.com/linux/
Its just a normal harddrive is my understanding. I dont see any reason why you couldn't replace it yourself.
Sigs are awesome huh?
And that's why I pay an additional $10/month to get Showtime, so that I can watch first-run, unedited episodes of Stargate and Outer Limits.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I recently am moving in with a roommate, who decided that I needed to get cable. Now I dont watch TV much, but since she was demanding the Sci Fi, channel (I figure we can put it in the back ground for our Linux network) However, the big question was whether or not to get satellite, digital, or tivo (or rather dishnetwork's dishplayer for satellite**) or tivo with digital cable.
(**note dishplayer runs WinCE which is NOT a plus)
Now both us are Linux gurls by default so the tivo held an awe to it. However, I wasn't sure if it was even slightly comparable to satellite, or would it be better to (as Taco did) get it in addition to satellite. Also satellite worries me because you cant get any of the basic channels (and I want my Buffy dammit). However, with satellite, I know you can get blank cards (not saying we would get one but I know they exist) and then we could get free porn which is always a good thing (hey gurls like porn too ya know). Anyway we have been shooting this around for a week or two, and it is time to make a decision. Help!
prices, and opinions are welcome, and desired as we have to make a decision.
'an angel
She became a geek by absorption, one day she woke up with a bad taste in her mouth.. and knew how Linux worked
I don't really watch much TV, but when I do, I don't like to sit around and wait for the show to come on. TiVo has been the solution to this problem. I don't have any major complaints, except for the fact that it freezes every once and a while. It feels like I'm using my mac again. You can't restart it also... you have to unplug it. Oh well, maybe it'll be fixed in those o-so-useful automatic software updates.
Sorry for the WOB, but I was reminded of the above After Y2K comic when I read this:
Take care,
Steve
Those "certain televisions" just have a run-of-the-mill audio compressor circuit in them. They aren't 'detecting' anything more than the incoming audio level itself.
No relation to advertisement detection at all.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
"Many people" find living in a trailer park with a half-dozen rug rats quite acceptable, also.
Depends on your standards threshold, I suppose.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Are there any Linux-compatible TV tuner cards with MPEG encoding?
:-)
TV listings (broadcast, cable, and satellite) are available on the 'net. Perhaps one might could write a Linux app to extract the relevant listings from a site like ClickTV, and record their favorite shows. Slo-mo and freeze-frame are optional.
I'd do it, but I can't remember the last time I watched TV.
// TODO: fix sig
Sounds like this unit is a godsend to anyone who watches Fox on Sunday night. I mean, they have some pretty good shows, but after hearing "My butt is sweating. It just needs to air out...The TRAILER!" durrning ever commercial break, Malcom In The Middle was loosing it's appeal. They did the same with the Simpsons and the X-Files. They're hyping their shows so much I want to turn off the TV instead of keep watching...and the "Fox has the big shows" was ok when it started, but not durring every damn commerical break!!!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off.
/Duncan
And just how happy do you think advertisers will be about this idea? True, you can turn off your normal TV during commercials, or tape it and fastforward through it -- but this box makes it so much easier!
Don't worry about this the cable companies return salvo to satellite is coming and it is the similiar to the Tivo stuff.
Your cable company will supply you with a digital set top box. You will be able to use this to order Video On Demand (and pay) directly from their servers. While it is playing you will be able to ff, rewind, all the various trick play.
In the near future you will be able to do this for your regular channels as well if you have the digital service.BUT, trick play will be disabled during commercials. Also depending upon the cable companies architecture you not have a normal coax cable connection. It might be Ethernet or some other option. In Toyko it might be ATM (OC-3c) to the home.
This will start to put a squeeze on TIVO and Satellite as cable customers won't have to buy a $699/$999 box for features. Sure TIVO is better but people will still have Video on Demand and trick play. All for a normal subscription rate.
So don't count out the advertisers. But TIVO is very cool and I will most likely get one myself. Full digital cable is years away though cable companies are implementing the infrastructure today and installing testbeds as we speak. I am doing an install in Montreal next week.
Duncan Watson -Rock climbing, Encryption, privacy
PGP Fingerprint -PGP Key on www.keyserver.net
Duncan Watson
How useful would TiVo or ReplayTV be outside the States? I'm in Costa Rica, but we receive network programming out of Denver. (And I'm not going to let the thing call the States to find out what's on).
Taking it apart one night, the main board down towards the front stage right corner looks like a pci card... |||||||||||||||| |||||| like a pci card should look like, and more interesting, the little part is towards the corner, and the big part is near the inside of the board... meaning that you could plug the monster into a pci motherboard and the board would hang outside the box.. as in it is made to fit... wonder what it is for? Single board computer? put it on a passive backplane and add ethernet and scsi?
(And don't forget about the DirecTV rebate!)
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Since this is a Linux box, providing this functionality should not be a problem. Right ?
I also want to be able to log in and email somebody a program I recorded (preferrably in an mpeg format). I have a T-1 (DSL) connection at home and that should be enough bandwidth to email videos to family who have similar types of Internet bandwidth. Is Tivo planning on doing this?
Also another capability would be add some kind of a wireless keyboard interface. So that I can browse the web right from my comfy couch instead of having to get up and go to my computer.
I want all these features and I dont think I am asking too much!
Dish Network's new dish and receiver combo have a "digital VCR" built right in for $399. www.dishnetwork.com It has more features than Tivo. It also has internet access built into the box. That fact that it is Web TV access sucks, but hey considering it costs less than the other systems consider it a free extra. Also Because the satalite dish already has the built schedule features they have evolved to extend ease of use. Dish Network is the first Cable/Satalite company I have ever been with where I do not feel like I am getting fucked with constantly. They have excellent customer support and Tech suport and there prices are very reasonable.
AFIAK most hig-end 'Made in Germany' VCRS, have the possibility to pause the recording when a commercial starts and restart at the end of commercial.
These model have also a teletext decoder that permit the programming of recordings using some special teletext pages, and if the selected program is delayed or prolonged (say a tennis match) they will record all the program delayng the start or the end of recording.
Is clear that for this system to work reliaby the broadcasters have to encode some data on the transmission in the teletext stream to inform the VCR what is happening.
In Italy broadcasters don't trasmit these signals, and for that matter sometimes they publish teletext pages with wrong programs, and of course these are not compatible with the german style.
Would it be worth my time to buy one of these things if I can't use the phone line? I don't have a phone line at my house. I have a cable modem and a cell phone. That's all I've needed so far, really.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
Theres one problem with this, security. As soon as you start letting "anyone" dial-in to the TiVo then you have the age old problem of authentication. User names and Passwords work, so long as they are set properly, and the system has a "lock-out" mechanism. But then you would have the problem of people calling up who "are away for a week and forgot there password, could you unlock my system". Sure the company would say "no" but its the fact that the feature would generate tons of extra traffic on there phone system with people trying to figure out how to login to their systems, configure the settings, complaining that they cant download the entire programming schuedual in 2 second when it takes the tivo a few minutes a night phone call.
Now console/terminal style output to a computer would be very cool, i could sit in the other room on the computer computer and program the tivo (we dont own one, yet) to record some wierd special someone on IRC is talking abou
oh wow, didnt see that...i guess our school filtering software crops the POST at X bytes...there was another paragraph on that...woops...
Thankgod for the BBC, lots of top programs with no adverts.
Excuse me ?!? When was the last time you watched the beeb ? Honestly, besides Top of the Pops and Never mind the buzzcocks there's very little else on the BBC that could be considered even remotely decent, let alone "top". There are so many cooking and game shows on (not to mention a mixture of the two) that I sometimes feel beating my head with a large blunt object would be more fun.
We got one last week. After two days, we decided we can't live without it.... --mark
Actually, what you are going to see happen is a melding of the commercials and the shows. Commercial endorsements will be the norm, and "stuff" (advertising) will be added and filtered from our programming in REAL TIME. The tech is already there....
Obviously, to put larger hard drive into the tivo should be easy enough, it's the softwar and access to the system we have to get around. But why do that?
I think that tivo should make 'consumables' for the tivo. First, they should add a small hard drive or flash memory to store preferences (which was lost when the hd crashed, right?) and firmware. Use the HD for data only, and make it removable. Then tivo can sell 'cartridges' for additional storage. They could learn this lesson from HP and all the printer manufacturers who practically give away some printers and charge through the nose for ink/toner cartridges.
Since these things are reusable, it wouldn't be all that bad. It'd be great for people who'd like to have some short-term archival abilities. In the long run, it'd be too expensive. Of course, it'd be even better if we could then just transfer all of that onto CD-Rs or whatever larger, inexpensive, random-access archival medium comes next.
sounds really interesting, and alot more convienient that using a vcr to tape all of my favorite shows... is the system in 'beta' or something now? when do they plan to offer this to everyone?
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
No, commercial TV once was like that.
In my homecountry, TV went from 2 public channels in the eighties to a lot more, including commercial ones.
Starting with commercials only around the newsblock at 8, then in between shows, and now in breaks during the shows.
It'll only get worse...
On the other hand, in the Netherlands we still watch Friends in 23 minutes, because we have only 1 commercialblock in the middle of Friends. And NO irritating commercials between the intro and the first scene, or between the last scene and the trailer.
I still don't get how you can run 3 minutes of commercials, 30 seconds of credits/titles and then 3 minutes of commercials again...
<grub> Reading
Well, hopefully, the advertisers will be able to use the data gathered to "tune" the commercials.
... perhaps commercial TV will go that route.
I love watching some commercials. They are hilarious or thought-provoking. I know they are trying to sell something, but the better a commercial is, the more I'm willing to put up with it during a TV show.
Also, PBS is starting to have commercials, only they're between shows instead of breaking the show up
I'd rather *not* pay for TV and put up with commercials, especially if they were tuned to my preferences.
It ruins the effect quite a lot when you can see the walls wobbling
Yes, but Dr. Who and Blake's 7 still entertain more than some of the blander sci-fi offerings (with larger budgets).
Besides, BBC still manages to create some amazing effects-based stuff like the recent programme on Dinosaurs and Gormangast(ly) - the latter being IMO boring but impressive visually.
(Sorry, don't take me too seriously with that rant.)
ditto
I know I will catch some flak for this but there is an alternative, that does have some advantages. Dish Network is selling a sattelite reciever that has the hard drive built into it. This gives it several advantages - no second unit, it records the program uncompresssed as it comes in from the sattelite that's right baby DIGITAL not analog, which means a better picture, and also if the program originally was brodcast with Dolby Digital you will have that. The listings for the service are downloaded from the satteltie each eveing and are for seven days, the TiVo get these over the phone line which is slow and may have to be interupted. It still gives you the ability to pause live TV, record a program once or for the season(which only record the episodes that are on that channel at that time) It also cost less - you get the Dish 500 sattelite dish(dish network has a large number of local networks available), receiver with hard drive, internet with WebTV(BOO!) all for $399. Now for the *GROANS* It does record for only about 12 hours(but remember it's digital), and it has WebTV built in but you do not have to sign-up for the service. I've had mine for about 3 months now and couldn't be happier.
I'd also note is that TiVo has the best user interface I've yet seen on a piece of consumer video gear. And finally, the instruction manual is well-written and lavishly illustrated. My conclusion? TiVo Gets It.
-Phil
You can now get a 30 hr Phillips unit for $399. Stores owned by Tweeter Electronics (Hi-Fi Buys,Bryn Mawr Stereo,..) and the web site http://www.outpost.com have them for this price. CmdrTaco: take yours back for a full refund and get one of these...but it looks like there are no stores owned by Tweeter Electronics in MI :( You can read more on the AVS Forum at: http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgi/forumdisplay.cgi?ac tion=topics&forum=TiVo+Personal+Televisi on&number=6&DaysPrune=5&LastLogin= BTW: There is also a discusion at the above link on how to upgrade a TIVO with a larger HD. ;) Frank (in NW Ohio) Crazy about my 15 hour TIVO.
If you look in the System Information section on your tivo's on screen menus, there is a "Dial-in Configuration code: 000" key. I think the Dial in stuff is there just not turned on. To bad it's not open source.
You would need two seperate tuners to accomplish this, so yes, it is a hardware limitation. Seeing that PIP TV with dual tuners used to be like $100 more last time I was TV shopping, I can deal with Tivo not being able to multitask...
Chains owned by Tweeters (Tweeters, HiFi Buys, Bryn Mahr, etc.) have already dropped the price of a 30 hr model to $399. Use the store locator at www.hifibuys.com . Outpost.com's Tweeters link may have this price too.
? action=topics&forum=TiVo+Personal+Televisi on&number=6&DaysPrune=5&LastLogin=
Sony has announced a 30 hr model for $399 in April. Phillips prices are expected to drop to this level at that time. Tweeters chains just started early.
DirectTv subscribers can get a $100 rebate. Later this year (?) there will be a DirectTiVo box that records the MPEG stream directly instead of decoding & encoding it before it goes on disk.
A good web forum for TiVo info is at
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgi/forumdisplay.cgi
I got mine from a Bryn Mahr two nights ago.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
So what'll we watch onconmmercial-free TV today? Ann of Green Gables? Sesame Street? No...BARNEY! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
~svoboda
~svoboda
Practice kind randomness and beautiful acts of nonsense.
Ok, all you nerds with more time than I, someone needs to figure out how to open this box! Bigger Hard Drives (75 Gigs!) More Memory! Make it run a web browser, play MP3's, play MAME games.
I am kind of disapointed that this has not been done.
Is there something about this hardware that makes this difficult? I would expect them to use as many simple, off-the-shelf components as possible.
I know some TIVO hardware people are reading this. Spill!
Donut
I'm a DirecTV subscriber and have never turned the video quality to anything higher than the second lowest setting. The video quality is as fine as I need it to be. With analog cable, I'd turn it up to a higher quality, but for the satellite crowds, something lesser is still very good. Also, my unit has been on for 4 months and is so far ROCK SOLID. VERY positive for a 1st generation product (actually, it's OS is what got me interested), and it should only get better.
yeah, my rca can mark the commercials. it still tapes them, but after the show it marks all the commercials and automatically fast forwards through them. it's very nice
the mind is a terrible thing to taste --ministry
And when they first came out with DishPlayer, it was only $99 for the Dish and DishPlayer receiver!!! It was my understanding that the DishPlayer has all the features of the Tivo, except for the smaller record time, but I seem to remember hearing that they were coming out with an updated version with more storage among other things; maybe they'll announce it at next Tuesday's Tech Briefing on Channel 100. IMHO, Dish has always been a better value and better service than DirectTV. Not a lot better, but just enough to earn me as a customer. And I do get some comfort from knowing you only deal with one company for all the programming and service support. The 'Charlie Chats' do get corny, but how many other companies put their CEO on live TV once a month to take customer questions/complaints/suggestions?? And how many other companies schedule regular live broadcasts explaining all kinds of techie info, and giving peeks at what kind of new products and services they are working on, like the upcoming Tech Briefing?
As you can tell, I'm a BIG DishNetwork fan. I know some people will use other services for their own reasons, but I encourage anyone thinking about DBS services to give them a look, and talk to existing users of any service they are considering. The Tivo-DishPlayer comparison is a perfect example of the better 'value' I think you can get with DishNetwork. No, I don't work for DishNetwork.
Then, I'm guessing it won't be another 2 years before someone comes along with a plugin to automatically filter commercials out.
#snip#
Not that I blame TiVo for this phenomenon -- it's most likely coming no matter what, but it's a concern nevertheless.
What this means is just that the networks are going to have to change their business model. On-demand delivery of content is an entire paradigm shift, and if they don't change the way the look at the marketplace, third party companies are going to come in and steal the revenue stream.
I've thought long and hard about the possibility of 'death of commercials', etc., and each time I come to this conclusion: eventually you will be able to 'buy out' your own commercial time. Its almost the same thing with cable right now. You pay for a 'premium' service that represents the revenue stream to the content provider. They don't care if they have ads, or if its a subscription-based deal. Basically, I see it all shifting to subscription-based content--which is the only obvious solution when you can pick and choose programming as networks and other content providers directly support on-demand content. There will probably be a fee for these services, ie. the new Simpsons will cost you $1.00 to watch. BUT a company that wants you to see its advertisements will be able to bid for your time, essentially saying "hey, we'll pay for your subscription cost for this program if you view our add twice during the show".
The nice thing for geeks is that we tend to value content(time) over price(typically 'cause we're well paid). I would gladly pay a $1.00 every half-hour to view a TV show minus the ads. But if its not worth a $1.00 to you to watch commercials, you would still have the option of viewing the content. Everyone wins.
-k
I just hooked up a ReplayTV, the competitor to TiVO, Sunday and had to rewind the shot of Scully a few times... Replay was $500 for 20 hours of storage, and no monthly fees. I don't have cable, so I haven't had opportunity for most of the issues CmdrTaco ran into. I love it because I no longer have to bitch about the lousy shows on late night broadcast TV. I'm keeping the last couple of episodes of a lot of shows I like but haven't watched in months cause I'm never home at broadcast time.
Compare the commercial revenues of Fox, NBC, CBC et al with Comedy Central.
But a budget doesn't always hurt. (There are exceptions. I think South Park would have suffered if it had a big budget when it started) Compare any US science fiction with just about any Science fiction based series made by the BBC. It ruins the effect quite a lot when you can see the walls wobbling.
Thankgod for the BBC, lots of top programs with no adverts.
Top programs!? What like the National Lottery live, and Crime Traveller!? (Sorry, don't take me too seriously with that rant.)
Sounds like most of your menu problems were caused by the hard drive. I don't know why there are so many bad units but rest assured you were not alone. We were very lucky in that our unit worked flawlessly right out of the box. The only problem we had was that the batteries in the remote unit had exploded during shipping. Tivo was more than happy to FedEx us a new remote, free of charge.
Cost
You paid $699? Shame on you! We paid $515 + S/H for ours before the $100 rebate from DirecTV. We got ours through Pro Active Electronics which we found via Nextag. (Current price direct from ProActive is $575. If you go through Nextag you can certainly get a better deal.)
South Park
The quick and dirty fix to your South Park issue is to not delete the episode from your hard drive until the others have passed. I admit that it is a kludge but it works. Well, it works most of the time. If the episode numbers are wrong in the program info (the stuff you download every night and that Tivo buys from a third party, Tribune) are wrong then all bets are off.
The ultimate solution to this problem would be for TiVo to keep better track of what you've already watched. There's no reason for it to not keep a database of which shows you've watched recently. It should probably track TV shows for about a month and movies for 6 months or so.
A more common problem for us is that future episodes that should get recorded don't because Tribune reuses episode numbers when they should not. The support people at Tivo know all about this and have yelled at Tribune on my behalf on several occasions.
Power Puff Girls
This is definitely a problem. Version 2 will have a systematic way of prioritizing season passes. There's currently a workaround for this as well.
The Simpsons
I don't have a workaround for this. This, too, is supposed to be fixed in Version 2.0.
What you left out
One of the features that sold me on the whole thing was the automatic software updates. As part of your nightly phone call you receive patches to the Tivo software. Version 1.3 is currently being rolled out and should be coming to a Tivo near you in the next several weeks. (They don't give it to everybody at once in order to do load balancing.) Version 2.0 (big rewrite, lots o' fun stuff) is due out Q3.
Bottom Line
If you're serious about TiVo you need to read the TiVo forum at AVS Forum. There is a major TiVo community there; loads of user-to-user goodnes. Also, TiVo has a full-time rep who hangs out there and other places.
--john
--john
--john
just to let you know, there's also traditional VCR's that are able to stop taping once a commercial comes on, and pick up once the programming starts again.
...yeah but that feature is reliant on the broadcaster/program maker actually providing it. The way that it works is by detecting a 'signal' in the same manner that teletext works (ie transmitting the information to stop/start recording in the vertical blanking interval of the signal) - if you are a broadcaster reliant on advertising income, are you going to go out of your way to transmit this signal? Hum, thought not.
'The best thing about deadlines is the wonderful WHOOSHing sound they make as they go by.' - Douglas Adams
Who's to say that advertising has to continue as a source of revenue? We've already got pay-per-view and subscription services like HBO that don't rely on advertising. Pay-per-view isn't exactly a bastion of quality programming, but HBO puts out some good stuff.
With something like TiVo all of TV could potentially become pay-per-view. They've got the data on what you're watching (or at least recording...I assume tracking both wouldn't be difficult). It would be a short step from there to charge you specifically for the shows you watch.
-- "" - Harpo Marx
Not true -- ReplayTV dials in nightly (local number if available) to grab programming info. You get channel listings for previous 24 hrs through next week, including program details.
What's great about ReplayTV (and probably Tivo too) is the ability to receive upgrades to the software automatically. I've had my ReplayTV unit since August, and they recently did a major upgrade that installed one night. They added a lot of additional features, including slo-mo, and better recording options. One really cool thing about ReplayTV is the quick skip button, which pops you forward 30-seconds instantly, right through commercials.
As an owner of one of each unit, I should point out that BOTH Replay and Tivo have extensive programming guides, contrary to what some people are saying here.
The big difference is that Replay includes a $200 price bump over Tivo to pay up front for the service. I should also point out that Replay has no manual, VCR-type setting, like Tivo or a traditional VCR does. So, if the guide is inaccurate or you just want to set an event manually, you're screwed. OTOH, Replay lets you pause a live event for hours and hours, whereas Tivo has a 30 minute limit under the most recent software version.
It may not be a mac partition at all. If you use a use a thrid party boot manager it sees it as a mac partition. They must be similar though. Remember not that long ago when boot managers saw NTFS as HPFS. NTFS is based on HPFS, but before NT got the market share it has now no one wrote a utils to proberly identify it. I keep hoping better hacks are going to come out. The prices on the 14 hour units are falling and I'd like to just be able to add any size HD i want as my second drive.
Not to mention a firwire port in the back. I'd consider getting one if all you had to do was plug in a huge FireWire HD and away you go...
Since it uses a standard HD, I'm assuming that all I would need to do was find out how it is formatted and any necessary drivers and then I could drop in one of those new IBM 75 Gigers.
Is the OS on the drive or is it embedded? If it is on the drive, could I get away with imaging the included drive onto the new one?
I would aslo like to be able to connect it to my computer so I could capture the video. I've heard a rumor that there is an included, but not active FireWire (IEEE 1394) port.
Does anybody know any answers to these questions?
_________________________________________
You're looking at this wrong... advertising as we know it will change, but new improved methods will be added. With the power of this box the possibilities are endless. Say you are watching Friends and you just love the shirt Jennifer Aniston is wearing - you could pause the tivo, drop down a menu, find out who made it and possibly buy it.
They are also doing tests where you are seeing a commercial for something and their is an info icon there - you can click that and it will show you more detailed information on the product or show that is being advertised.
Another cool thing I really dig is the deal they signed with Blockbuster - if I want to watch a movie, it can record it overnight and have it ready for me to watch the next day or the next weekend. Tres cool! That will be neat when that is setup and running...
One word of advice - the Sony box is coming, it is a 30 hour box and MUCH cheaper (strange as Sony is usually pricier). That is the one I am waiting for!
On another note, is there not already a less sophisticated system for analog VCRs, where numbers printed in the listings are entered and the machine will then track down 'x' episodes... My recollection is that its pretty useless, as you have to register each new No., which takes time, but the principle's there. It's called VCR plus, or something of that nature...
________________________
He who fights and runs away,
If anyone has this can you tell me how it compares to ReplayTV. From what I can tell Tivo is more popular but I don't think ReplayTV needs a subscription, I could be wrong. If you have any information for me you can e-mail me here.
Thanks,
Andrew
ReplayTV has 20 hours of recording time, has low power mode, updates the software automatically, costs $499, and looks better to me.
2 words - Banner Ads.
Have u thought out the fact that in order to automatically filter out ads the network would have to insert a special signal at the start and end of the ad and advertisers would not allow them to do that Also wonder when TIVO will be available in India
**Life is too short to be serious**
In case you are like me, and want to invent your own TiVo thing using linux. I found a med-high end video capture card that has GPL drivers.
60fps @ 720x480 NTSC
http://linuxmedialabs.com
It is pretty pricy though >$400.
Do you think that the future is with these devices that record a signal using tv listings info or maybe with TV on demand where say the Simpsons are available for download starting 8pm on sunday and the main storage is at the company site.
I can see the latter way reducing the cost to consumers as the unit would be less complicated. An advantage of the former is that it works with exising cable network.
So this thing runs linux? Is there anywhere i could get some more info on that?
...I switched to ReplayTV after learning more about the ethics of the people that make up the company.
--- Speaking only for myself,
Man, I wish I worked at TiVo. It would have been nice to ship it with an rc5 cracker. It obviously has some kind of processing power, and it runs on Linux. During it's nightly updates it could upload blocks. Wooo.
Home shopping would drop dead? What, do you think home shopping networks are there because some executive somewhere thinks they are excellent programming that everyone wants to watch?
Home shopping channels are there because someone, somewhere buys enough stuff to keep them afloat. A change in how people can watch TV won't have any effect on home shopping whatsoever. In fact, I expect your options as far as home shopping goes to continue to expand, regardless of what else happens.
The only thing that will kill home shopping networks is interactive home shopping, where you can look for the specific items you want. IE web pages.
Has anyone heard of plans to replace the HD with a CD-R or CD-RW or other removable device for extending the space ( ie, if I want to save mucho things)?
I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned wanting these consumer devices (TiVos, DSS, etc) to support Ethernet. I realize the majority of consumers don't *yet* have full time connections up, but with xDSL, cable modems, etc, that's changing. I'd like to plug my widgies into the ethernet, and keep them off the ol' analog phone line.
Those of you doubting this product or technology, you should really give it a try. It has changed the way I watch television forever. I could not imagine going back to the way it was before.
To Address some points and concerns of posters
1) Feature Problems - The author rightly notes that TiVo doesn't currently deal very well with the issue of repeats and syndicated programming being duplicated on multiple channels. You just need to have patience on this one. Tivo is currently on release 1.3, and more features will be added over time. The box is run on Linux and the company wants the OS to be stable first and foremost, so features are being added gradually.
2) Price - Already the 30 hour units are dropping to $399. You can expect this trend to continue for the near future. Remember we are in the pioneer/early adopter phases of this technology. This is when the prices are at their highest. For those saying $10 a month is too much, I don't know your finances, but I can tell you that this will change the way you watch tv. Is that worth $10/month? that is up to you.
3) Phone Line access - No way around this. TiVo has to use your phone every night to dial in for the Channel Guide.
4) Hard Drive Size - Yes the initial versions have smallish hard drives in them. Obviously larger ones are in the future.
5) Picture Quality - Picture Quality on the best setting is incredible. Even on a big screen TV it looks very nice.
Finally I just want to make a few comments on the Future of TiVo. This company has agreements with DirecTV, Sony, Blockbuster, and AOL. Sometime this year you will be able to buy a TiVo that incorporates both TiVO and your DirecTV tuner. Thus the bitstream will be recorded to disk directly from the satellite and the image will be replayed in the same quality as if viewed live. Sony will be releasing a 30hr TiVo in April. Blockbuster has signed a deal with TiVo to offer real Video on demand services via TiVo (most likely requireing some type of broadband service). And lastly, we may not like AOL, but interactive TV and convergence is the way of the future.
Yes, commericials are now an endangered species, but TiVO offers so much more than that. As a final example of something you can do with TiVo, listen to this:
It is 8pm and you ready to watch some tv, ER is coming on, but you have TiVO set to 'TiVo' that, while you watch another show (star trek) you recorded earlier in the week. At 8:45 you finish watching star trek and flip over to ER and start watching it from the beginning (while it is still being broadcast live). At 9:30 you finish watching ER.
The pause and rewind functionality are also very easy to underestimate, but I will leave it at that.
You can hook it up to your VCR for archiving. in fact, you can archive a VHS to TiVo and never again have to play the tape. no wear and tear on your kids tape even after 100 viewings of Winnie the Pooh. I would imagine within 18 months we will see a DVD TiVO combo box. I don't need anything more than that.
Umm the service provider is AOL's phone network. make you own call on whether or not that network is going down anytime soon. But if you decide it is going down, maybe someone should tell their 20 billion customers.
Should be cool
Don't confuse PTV with DVR functionality. I have a dishplayer (with 40GB drive in it)and it works great for recording stuff, but it is not personal television. I cannot customize it and it does not learn my preferences. Also, I really cannot conceive of anyway of filling up my 40GBs without archiving shows to it. DirecTV will be offering a true TiVo box later this year with the best of both worlds. As for your recording concerns, that seems to be just a matter of programming. I am sure their coders will figure it out.
Don't forget the Dish-Player from Dish Networks. It's got the Tivo/ReplayTV functionality built into the Satelite receiver, and the MPEG2 stream from the satelite is written directly to the HD, avoiding video compression artifacts that the Tivo and ReplayTV have at lowere resolutions. I played with one of these at the local tech store, and was immediately sold on it. $399 ($200 if you are currently a cable customer) gets you a ~10hour box. This is 10 *real* hours, at full MPEG2 quality - which would be better than the highest video qualities on the others. AND it supports (and records) Dolby Digital for the programming that includes it (mostly only pay-per-view at this point, though anything with a "DD" in the TV listing is). The programming and software updates happen via the satelite connection. The manual says the phone connection is necessary, but I honestly can't figure out why besides PPV ordering. The service the the Tive-like functionality is $9.95 a month, with no lifetime options like Tivo. I've heard that the HDs inside are fairly standard EIDE drives, and that several people have upgraded from 18GB to 36GB and gotten almost 24 hours of storage out of it.
The "Simpsons" problem (where you really want the most recent episode but get stuck with conflicts in season passes or having to record ALL of the old syndicated shows) referenced by CmdrTaco actually has a solution. You can record manually just like a VCR. I like watching the most recent "JAG" and don't mind if it happens to store extra JAG's from syndications, but not at the expence of NEW showings of other things that I want to watch. You can go to "Pick Programs to Record" then "Manually Record Time/Channel" and set it to manually record the recurring new episode. As for the thumbs up, I have learned to use that sparingly, in fact I use it to attempt to compensate for one of the other situations mentioned -- it doesn't quite solve the precedence/preference value, but you can choose the one you REALLY want to watch with the MANUAL or SEASON PASS methods, and then put 3 thumbs up on your next choise, 2 on any others... Since I use the thumbs up sparingly this works for me, along with manually recording the current NEW episodes of shows, and then thumbs upping those so that the syndicated versions will give you more stuff when all else fails to be something you want to watch.
On a side note... Some other fun stuff....
Hit the "TiVo" button and then the digit "0"... it'll give you an animated TiVo cartoon... I other digits (like TiVo+2) get you shortcuts to things, 2 gets you directly to the 2-do 2-be-recorded screen.
I really enjoy my TiVo... Yes, it can be a bit sluggish, especially when you're recording live TV, watching something else which you had had previously recorded, and it happens to decide it's time to dial out for your daily schedule... I've also had a problem whenever my TiVo and/or DirecTV box looses power (which I fix by unplugging just the power to the DSS box), and the TiVo box has locked up maybe twice -- but I'm really happy with it.
As a techie I think it would be nice if it had an ethernet capability for retrieving programming, and possibly a firewire or other connector so I would know it could be expandable with more disk capacity.
The BBC has no advertisements because there is an annual tax to own a television.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Do these things work with cable boxes? I can't get DSS in my apartment, and I'm stuck with the box for HBO.
One of my exact concerns.. And it's not like there's a 'slide out' cartrige for them.. You have to quite literally get into the guts..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
They aren't exactly 'stock' drives. It's not like I can pull it out and replace it with any old drives. They would have to be of the exact sector, etc, count, to work right. It's not like a RAID array where the drives can be mounted on nice pull out cartridges and simply replaced..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Err, nope, sorry, wrong answer.. The kernel modifications are simply to be able to provide priority direct access to the raw device. Pretty much it..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Unfortionatly, that's the OS, but *NOT* the applications that provide the interface, etc.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I've been really debating getting one of these beasts, and the *only* thing that concerns me, and has really put me of is their method of storage..
A Hard drive..
Hard drives are reliable in the long term. They wear out. Plain and simple. What happens when a head crashes, or some other nasty thing with these beasts? Perhaps 3 years down the road, when my model wouldn't be produced anymore?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The advantage is time. I don't want to spend that much time to get this functionality.
An example. When a meal is over, I like to just rinse the dishes off and put them in a dishwasher. It cleans, disinfects and dries the dishes pretty well. In short, some pretty useful functionality. I, of course, could have gone to the hardware store and bought the high pressure pumps, heating coils, enclosure and spent the next 5 Saturdays building my dishwasher, or I could go to an appliance store and buy a dishwasher for a few hundred bucks and have it delivered and installed.
This parallel seems not to sink in with a great many geeks when the functionality is being done by a computer. In most other areas of life, we've decided that the trade off of money for a functioning device rather than having to put in the time to build it ourselves is worth it. Sure, you can buy car kits and build your own car, you can build your own house, you can get a kiln and bake your own dishes. OR . . . you can go to a dealer and buy a car, hire a carpenter, and buy your dishes, all decisions most of us have made. However, to the greasemonkey, the hammer and nails guy, and the potter, doing all of those things yourself is a great reward.
Let those who want to trade off the labor related to computers by buying consumer products or packaged solutions do so.
Yes, the hardware to get this to work may be close in cost, but for the sake of arguement let's assume you make $20/hour(Totally random number to make the math easy). You work 40 or so hours per week at that rate. If your situation is good, you get 1 1/2 times that if you are required to work in your "off" hours. Setting up the arrangement you describe, which includes writing the software, would take most people several evenings/weekend days. Figure 6 hours of hardcore work in an evening 6-12pm and 8 hours on a weekend. Work 3 weeknights and Saturday in a week (we'll assume you coded, debugged and it works in that time), and you've got 36 hours in on this project. Grand total if you had to do this at work on the clock? $1080.
For a geek who loves to configure hardware, write software, etc. a donation of labor like that is no big deal. However, for most people, they'd rather donate that time to something else, whether a project or just relaxing.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
They've got a bit further to go IMHO.. IIRC ReplayTV has commercial skip, and these systems should have removable media (DVD-RAM? Caddied HDDs?) for archival storage..
I'm happy to wait: I don't watch too much TV anyways..
Your Working Boy,
Is the source code they provide really enough to build a device? Or do they have additional non-gpl'ed software that is required to do the work?
I would love to build a small device that just does the pause/rewind/slo-mo part of tivo. If TIVO were to sell a device that did just that for maybe 100 bucks, it would be great... then you wouldnt have to pay a crappy fee every month, you wouldnt have to deal with incompatibilty with several cable/satelite inputs... A simple box that worked well and was cheap would be great!
Boy, would Nielsen kill for that!!!
--
Remember, in Sagan's* Cosmos (the novel - ain't seen the flick), a guy invents a pattern-detecting chip that can detect commercials and thus, he ruins the TV "industry" as we know it. He then goes on to invent a chip that detect political speech, but this time, his invention gets seized in the name of national security...
* Yes, the BHA...
--
Yes, but... Think of the FUN you'd have designing and building you own dishwasher!!!
--
We're seeing the death of broadcast TV. Pay channels, only available through paid services like cable or satellite, are the future.
The cost of these channels is in the subscription. HBO does not run commercials. MTV does, because they're jerking off the RIAA to begin with, and would sell children for more money. Pay-to-view and Pay-per-view are where we're headed, and commercials are exactly what Rob said - bathroom breaks.
Personally I prefer pay-per-view, but it needs to come down to earth. I have a satellite dish, which costs too much. I don't watch it while at work, or while asleep, yet I pay for 24x7 availability. I'd prefer to pay for the fraction of time I actually have available for watching TV.
After some thought, I think that the elimination of commercials, the added flexibility of replay and slo-mo and stuff like that, is worth the price of disclosing my viewing habits to the service provider. Maybe then science, sci-fi, nature documentaries and shows I consider interesting would get more funding, JMS would get millions to bring Babylon 5 back, and ESPN and home shopping would drop dead.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
So what's the HD in the thing? How big? How fast? IDE or SCSI?
Can I replace it with, oh, a massive RAID setup of 15krpm monsters in my basement to store a month of uncompressed video?
Can I access the HD as an HD? Say, with the intention of burning a DVD of that special event? Or archiving to DAT?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Sony and TiVo have announced that they're working together in a similar relationship as Phillips. The rumor mill says in April Sony will be releasing a '30+' hour TiVo at Phillips' 15 hour price point: $399.
Also, regarding subscriptions, here's the screw: The lifetime subscription of $199 is for the lifetime of a single unit. If you upgrade to a new unit, you need a new subscription, though you can sell your old unit with its lifetime sub. It's totally transferable from person to person, but not unit to unit, and you can't share one sub with multiple TiVos.
Finally, for you college kids out there, TiVo and Phillips are having a special, knocking off $50 from the 15 hour version. They're running full page ads at UC Berkeley. I've never felt like such a squarely pegged demographic group in my life: "You can miss a class. You can miss a midterm. But you never, ever have to miss Buffy."
I can't find the URL for the deal right now. does anyone else have it handy?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I think someone had a unit that worked by checking to see if the audio was stereo or mono, and since most commercials are in mono, it detected them, but only when the broadcast was stereo. Don't remember much more though.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well, if you have a linux box and recompile your kernel with MacOS partition support (you probably do not need that, since ghost seems to manage to read the partition map) and hfs support you should be able to read it. As for manipulating the partition table, there is a utility called pdisk which is basicly fdisk for MacOS style partition maps. I do find it kind of surprisingc that they use an hfs partition. The reason that seems feasible is that they bought third party boot firmware that support booting from an hfs partition, but not ext2. Lots of people seem to buy their firwmare from firmworks in the PPC world, so it would not be the strangest thing.
blaster
So even if you rewind to the start of a show and press record, it really starts recording only the live feed and seems to jump ahead when you press record?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First they insult us Canucks by including the offensive "Blame Canada" in the oscars, then they refuse to sell TiVo here, what next, steal our top comedians and pass them off as Americans??
Ok, so I'm just jealous. I've looked at both ReplayTV and TiVo and want TiVo. It seems to have a slightly better feature set, and it runs Linux. Now I'm not saying that's a reason because I'm a rabid Linux fan, but that makes it much more likely that eventually:
But I can't get TiVO here!!. At first the reasons TiVO gave why they weren't selling the units in Canada was the lack of available TV schedule information here and that some encryption built into the system made the things illegal to export. None of these reasons really seemed to hold up, so I recently asked again. Last I've heard they can't expand into new markets because they're having enough trouble keeping up with demand in current markets. Argh!
The good news is that Sony is apparently coming out with their own TiVO unit soon (April was the last date I've heard), which is supposed to be far cheaper than the current Philips TiVO units. This price competition should make it easier to get any of these units (ReplayTV or TiVO) and should drop the prices for all PTV products.
Anyhow, a good website for information on ReplayTV and TiVo is AV Science Forum (and yeah the flash intro sucks).
Anyhow, any other Canadians out there, eh? Do you want your TiVo, eh? Any ideas how we can get it, eh? Any rumours on when it'll arrive, eh?
about the satellite rebroadcasting.
What you want is happening in the form of the 1999 Satellite Home Viewers Act. Here's the homepage
Thanks for the briefing, this looks like a transitional device, maybe the 2.4 version will have what you really wanted.;)
--
+&x
The 30hr Phillips Tivo that CmdrTaco reviewed has an MSRP of $699 (you can buy it for close to $500 if you shop around), but Sony is about to announce (in April) a 30hr unit with an MSRP of $399, that presumably will sell for closer to $300.
Tivo is basically an IBM PowerPC with hardware MPEG-2 decode, custom TV overlay graphics, a 30G HD, and an excellent custom remote control. Not bad for $3-400!!!
Sure you can watch TV on your PC, but Tivo as well as being very cheap is meant as a home theatre component to be located in your living room. I'd sure prefer to watch TV on a 35" TV while lying on my couch than on a 19" monitor in my computer room.
Think TV banner ads. :-(
You think those network bugs in the lower-right corner of the screen are annoying? You ain't seen nuttin yet baby...
I don't see what the advantage is here.. $700 USD will buy a monster hard drive, and a ATI TV Tuner is cheap. We use the windows software and two 20GB hard drives to do most of this right now, and it wouldn't take much more to write a program to make it go to prevuechannelonline.com or something, and figure out when my favorite tv shows are on. It's just a matter of having enough space to buffer until the encoding is done, which does take a little while. On the other hand, I think you can get mpeg video encoders now that will approach realtime encoding.
Since when I get a nice place, the first thing I'm doing is installing a media server, perhaps most of this functionality can be the target of a new (or existing) open source project?
Maybe I'm missing something?
Kudos..
..don't panic
No, you need to read the post.
CmdrTaco says very plainly that the local broadcast issue has been taken care of for larger metroplexes, which is exactly what you're talking about here. Nothing has been done to handle people in the boonies; there's not enough bandwidth to get everyone's local programming on the satellite broadcasts.
What really needs to be done to allow everyone to see their network shows is to go back to allowing satellites to broadcast network programming without local programming, just like CmdrTaco says in the post.
Not that there aren't plenty of times that slashdot articles are unresearched and inaccurate, but let's keep our criticisms focused on the inaccurate articles, rather than making inaccurate criticisms against the good ones.
Lame? R U frickin' crazy!! This unit sounds wonderful and with a few fine tunings and give 'em a few more years, this TIVO thingy is gonna be all the rage. I wish I had a shit-load of money to invest in the company producing them or at least get in on some stocks that are going to soar through the roof in the next few years. Technology is wonderful! (I just hope it doesn't make Americans TOO fat and lazy)
Compare the commercial revenues of Fox, NBC, CBC et al with Comedy Central.
Now which is currently producing the best programs ? The call isn't down to price, great programs can be made on small budgets and awful ones on large budgets. Do you think South Park costs as much to make as some of the god awful stuff on US PrimeTime ?
Thankgod for the BBC, lots of top programs with no adverts.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
but one of the fun things about having a VCR is being able to borrow someone's tape. With Tivo or any other digital device, there is no physical device that you can readily share or borrow. Sure, you can probably crack the box and take the hard drive out, but who is really going to do that.
Another problem with tivo, you're limited to whatever programming your cable or satellite provider beams into your home. What happens if your daughter wants to watch Bambi? Tivo isn't going to help you there. A VCR owner can just go out and buy it, or better yet, borrow it from the next door neighbor. Granted, this isn't really a knock against Tivo but it does demostrate that while Tivo sounds great, it is not a replacement for the VCR just yet.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I currently use a Hauppage tuner card to capture selected programs for me (Knight Rider, South Park and Red Dwarf) from a cron job, and then when disk space runs low and the cluster is unoccupied it tries to farm them out for MPEG-2 compression. Most of the stuff I record gets seen soon enough it never actually gets farmed out for compression. Granted, I always have 30G of video lying around, but that's acceptable for me..
The biggest bit of the puzzle I see such a project needing is a 'user-freindly' scheduler. Like you said, pull the listing from TV Guide or Preview. As of right now, I need to know when everything I want to tape is on.
Media server? Video, audio, etc? Elaborate, if you will..
.sig: Now legally binding!
just to let you know, there's also traditional VCR's that are able to stop taping once a commercial comes on, and pick up once the programming starts again.
-motardo
Neither do I. The artifacts are apparent all the time. Not just when signal quality has degraded. It's very much like a fairly low quality jpeg image.
Time Warner's digital cable suffers from this as well. Neither my wife nor my son notice, but I can see the artifacts of lossy compression.
I have a DSS and back in December DirectTV had a channel set asside to run a 24/7 infomercial on these things. It looked really neat and I ended up doing quite a bit more research online and soliciting Usenet opinions. Here are a few points I would like to add.
p tv.htm
As many people have mentioned already is that there is another unit on the market known as the 'Replay'. This unit doesn't cost you a monthly fee to subscribe to the programming, but it costs $700 compared to $500 for the Tivo. Now the Tivo has an option to purchase a lifetime subscription for an additional $200. So as you can see there is no difference. $700 for a Tivo with lifetime subscription and $700 for Replay with lifetime subscription. With the Tivo however, you have the choice of not pre-paying the subscription fee. Useful if you can't come up with $700 or if you think perhaps the service wont be up long enough to recoup the $200 loss. There are allot of other issues to consider when deciding between the two units. Many people have made comparisons so you might want to dig around online.
In any case here is a link to one such comparison:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elund/
I personally decided the Tivo was the superior product based on what I have read.
It also looks like the big investors think so too. Vulcan Ventures, DirectTV, and Sony all have invested into Tivo.
Another thing is that Tivo and DirectTV have struck some kind of deal. Not only has DirectTV droped a huge investment into the company there are rumors of a set top box that combines the functionality of the Tivo and a DSS into one unit. This is exactly what I would like to see, it could reduce the cost of the programming subscription for one thing as it could then be beamed down on the satellite data link. Of coarse nobody knows what they really have in store for us, at this point it is all just speculation.
If nothing else Television is changing, I like the way things are looking though.
Sigs are awesome huh?
One very strange thing the TiVO does is delay all "live TV" about 4 seconds. This is when you are in "watch live TV mode," without pausing or rewinding or anything. If you put to TVs side by side, one going through a TiVO and one not, the TiVo TV has a 4-second delay. It's really odd. You'd never know it unless you had two TVs in a room.
Otherwise, the TiVO is damn impressive. It really does revolutionize how television is watched, if you care about that sort of stuff. The interface is pretty, lots of audio and visual feedback for UI selections... the collab filtering part is a little gimmicky but fun. The Season Pass feature needs a bit more intelligence about how syndication works. An ethernet jack would make those midnight phone calls shorter and less intrusive.
Why pay TiVo every month when you can get the same service from ReplayTV for free? (clarification: I don't own either TiVo or ReplayTV yet, so I don't have first hand experience with either.)
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
Tivo is awesome and I wouldn't know what to do without out. Every single friend who plays with it, wants one.
FYI - my unit has never crashed, even when running beta software.
While it is true that the bandwidth is limited, it is still ILLEGAL to receive network feeds from cities that are further that 100 miles away. I want Boston stations, but I can't legally get them here in Arizona.
Basically, it all boils down to the fact that if I want FOX, I have to buy cable, and If I want Boston's feed of FOX I have to hack my system and risk prosecution.
The FCC is way too powerful for our own good. It seems obvious that they are catering to the cable companies by limiting the programming I can get from DirecTV.
The video quality on my tivo is great. it's all mpeg streams so it has the same down fall. ie when the wind is blowing through a group of trees, everything gets all blocky and jerky. But for 90% of the scenes, you have to pay attention to see the difference. I'm not an video/audiophile, so you may be more critical of the quality than I am, but if you don't like the lowest quality, It has 3 higher settings.
This will just motivate advertisers to find different ways of advertising.
More effective and perhaps insidious advertising is that which is a part of content; either you want to watch the ad because it is entertaining or the brand is promoted as a part of the show you are watching. In both cases you have absorbed the content and was unable to avoid the commercial promotion. This is the future of advertising.
I have owned a ReplayTV for the past 8 months (1 year?) or so, and it really HAS changed the way I watch television. When my husband was clamoring to get one before, I was very resistant. I couldn't imagine why anyone would pay that much money for a glorified VCR (we can both program ours just fine)? But after months of nagging, I finally gave in. Now I can't imagine our living room withou one.
;-))
Benefits of the "digital personal recorder" (both TiVO and ReplayTV):
1) Pausing live television: If the phone rings in the middle of watching a live program, I can hit the Pause button, go answer the phone, come back to the TV, press Play, and pickup exactly where I left off.
2) Instant replay for live television: If you missed a line of dialogue or just want to see that cool slam dunk again, you can. ReplayTV has an Instant Replay button that auto-rewinds the last 5 seconds or so (you can keep pressing the button to rewind more than that or just do normal rewind as well). I don't know if TiVO offers this feature.
3) Ability to watch a taped show while another is being taped: I can be watching a taped episode of Ally McBeal while the Replay is also recording South Park. I CANNOT watch a different live show while another is being recorded because there is only one tuner.
4) Ability to watch a show from the beginning WHILE it is currently being taped: Let's say you record the X-Files because you thought you'd be out on Sunday night. You come home at 9:30. With a traditional VCR, you have to wait for the recording to finish. With the Replay, you can start watching right then and there from the beginning of the episode. If you catch up to the live broadcast, then it will just be like watching normal live TV through the Replay. (By the way, I thought the Scully Cleavage shot was pretty killer, and I'm a married heterosexual woman.
5) Theme-based channels: I like Jacque Pepin's cooking shows and equestrian programs, so I have the Replay set up to tape these programs whenever they come on, any time, any channel.
6) Easy to maintain library of recorded shows: We used to have to search through multiple tapes to find the show we want to watch because we were taping so many. Then if you watch one show on a 6-hour tape but doesn't get to the rest of the tape, that tape cannot be reused unless you want to risk accidentally taping over something else. With Replay, each show can be deleted or archived to VCR individually (archiving is a new feature with the January upgrade of the Replay software).
Things I like about ReplayTV that I DON'T like about TiVO:
1) I don't want to pay for my programming guide, not monthly subscription or one-time payment.
2) The TiVO UI is not as intuitive to use or pleasing to look at as the Replay (I saw a TiVO demo at the neighborhood Fry's).
3) TiVO has said that they might start carrying commercials built into their channel guide (like banner ads on web pages). I have not heard any plans to proactively carry advertising from Replay.
4) I REALLY hate TiVO's "smart record" feature where it will tape shows you MIGHT like based on your viewing pattern. Just because I like equestrian programming, doesn't mean I want to tape the entire lineup of Animal Planet! With Replay, I can create theme-based channels that are as broad or narrow as I want. I can just tape Jacque Pepin: Encore with Claudine episodes or any cooking show. This gives me plenty of flexibility but still full control of what gets recorded. This is especially important when disk space is a premium.
5) ReplayTV has a 30 second skip button that effectively fast forward through commercials one at a time. Usually at the start of a commercial segment, I press the button 4 times, and the show is back on. Replay has gotten into trouble with advertisers with this feature, but since I'm a consumer, I love this feature and would not want to see it go away. For what it's worth, I often rewind and consciously watch a commercial ON PURPOSE if it looked interesting.
Wow, for a first post from a new user, this message was hella long. Obviously the personal digital recorder is not for everyone. But for us, the device has really made a difference. And I'd definitely recommmend ReplayTV over TiVO.
--madoka
Not dumbshit, but dumbed-down. Try watching some of the original Japanese episodes, completely untainted by FUNimation's edits and idiotic dialogue. There's a wealth of them on the net, one source is Da Black Goku. *bows* You're welcome.
There is a similar device on the market which doesn't require you to give up your private info, and doesn't require a monthly subscription: ReplayTV.
I'm not sure if Tivo has this feature, but ReplayTV also allows you to pause/rewind 'live' TV broadcasts... it records whatever you are currently watching to allow you to do this. Pretty slick.
I'd buy one, but I'm using an 'odd' TV provider, LOOK TV, here in Ottawa, and Replay TV doesn't support the listings for that yet.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
You can't compare TiVO to Beta and Laserdiscs, as in this case negative feedback does'nt apply: i.e., whether TiVO sells 50k units or 10 millions, it won't make a difference in terms of the service it provides to those who have bought it. Whereas if you have Beta VCR, or a Laserdisc, you'll be in deep trouble if you want to use it for watching rented movies.
I've had a TiVo for almost a year now (since last May, I think). I love it.
:-)
To respond to and add to some of Rob's points:
Recommendations. When I first got TiVo, I wasn't so impressed with this idea. As with Rob, it recorded a lot of crap early on. Nowadays though, I often don't bother getting season passes for things unless I critically feel I can't miss them. I just give them a thumbs up or two or three, and TiVo gets them for me.
Crashes. In the entire time I've had mine, I've seen maybe 3 crashes.
Subscriptions. You can't use one subscription on two TiVos.
Season Pass Overlaps. I've had occasional problems with this as well. Version 2.0 (due out "sometime this year") contains a "season pass prioritizer" that should substantially alleviate this problem.
Reruns. The South Park problem shouldn't happen. My TiVo never records the same program twice, unless I've already deleted one copy of it. That is, you'll never have two copies of a program on the drive at the same time. If you watch your shows very promptly, you may get duplicates after you delete them. The basic problem with this is that Tribune (their data source) is not consistent about things like providing episode numbers or rerun flags.
Overall, I can genuinely say TiVo has changed the way I watch TV. I watch a lot more PBS now because it doesn't matter that Nova is on at 5am, I can watch it at 8pm that day. Instant replay is great when you miss something, which means you can watch TV without dedicating 100% of your attention to it. If you miss something, replay. Being able to watch a program as its being recorded is really amazing too. Start watching a program 15 minutes in, and you can finish it when it finishes, after fastforwarding through commercials. Also very cool is the fact that you can watch a program at 3x with closed captioning turned on. Very useful when you're watching a movie and decide a scene is dragging
Another thing Rob didn't mention is the remote. This is one of the nicest remotes I've ever seen. Ergonomic, powerful, easy to use, and complete.
A lot of people question the video quality: I'm not a videophile at all (I've lived most of my life with just good antenna reception), but I find the lowest quality fine for all the TV I watch.
Overall, TiVo is an incredible device, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
You say that TV will die. I say that BAD TV will die. I'd be much happier to pay a few bucks for quality programming than to have a kilochannel of mindless garbage. Witness NPR, to which I am happy to pay $100/year for the pleasure of quality, commercial-free programming.
-jwb
Wait, let me get this straight: You're complaining because commericial TV as we know it might kick the bucket? Why would this be a BAD thing? The day that happens I'm renting Bourbon Street for me and a million of my closest friends. The best programs that get broadcast come from member supported stations anyway. (PBS if I have to spell it out.) So "Friends" might go away! Hurrah! "Popular" would become not so popular? Yippie! "7th Heaven" sent to hell? THERE IS A GOD!
Hey, maybe, JUST MAYBE people will start reading BOOKS again. Wow. Y'know. Immersing yourself in something that betters yourself as a human being, that is intellectually stimulating. But I'm just a dreamer.
Sorry. I really, really hate TV. I hate TV like Hitler hated the Jews. Except for "Frontline." And "South Park." Ok, and "Buffy" every once in a while. BUT THAT'S IT. And "The Simpsons."
Ah, ferget it.
- Rev.Something to think about...
TiVo currently chargest for service...
TiVo is connected to the net for this service.
What will happen:
I see a not-too-distant future model (competitor?) of TiVo where the service is free in exchange for banner advertising in the TiVo menus.
And a slightly more distant future where commercial-free programming is offered in exchange for banner advertising in the TiVo menus. These banner ads are stored on the local HD and served up according to the "projected" interests of the TiVo's user.
Why every advertising exec wants it to happen:
-"Banner" commercial content is cheaper to produce and deliver (a banner ad takes up a LOT less space and production resources than 30 seconds of FMV).
-Targeted banner ads based on watching habits of each and every individual viewer are a lot more effective than targeting a single ad for the entire viewership of a program.
-Given the choice, more people would rather watch commercials (even if it's just a banner ad) for things they're interested in rather than not interested in.
-People are a lot happier with the idea that it's the box on your thier very own shelf that watches what they watch, and not some huge invisible server somewhere in the Evil Empire's headquarters.
-You can FF or channel flip past a commercial, but you cant use a TiVo without a menu (your ad WILL get eyeballs).
I'm somewhat suprised the same hasn't been done by IE or Netscape. All of the components are there, it's just a matter of implementation.
I read your review, which is quite nice, but one of the things about this unit that I would really like to know is, what is the video quality? What resolution does it capture at? Does it capture the audio in stereo, and at CD quality? Perhaps someone knows of a "secrets of the Tivo" web site, and could post a URL or two?
Thanks,
- Mike
It appears that the kernel source is available for TiVo - you can get it here . Kickass. Now you can have your own TiVo too - of course you'd have to let loose of your PC... Or hell, multiboot! Leave home for the weekend, and put your oh-so-expensive PC into TiVo mode... Now lessee if I can compile it on Amiga Linux *g*
--- sig moved for great justice.
One thing you forgot to point out is the possibility of futute upgrades. It is possible to add a second hard drive to a 14 hour unit and thus getting the 30 hour unit which you paid over twice as much for. I'd like to be able to add that new 75 GB drive from IBM to get a massive upgrade but this isn't possible (AFAIK) right now for several reasons. Tivo appear to use some sort of Mac partion for data as well as an ext2 and swap partition. Ghost understands the ext2 and swap partitions and can adjust the image size acordingly. It doesn't, however, understand the funky mac style partition. It will copy it sector for sector but you can't resize it on a bigger drive and thus no added storage for recording. The easiest way to get un upgrade is either buy it (and pay out the ass) or borrow Tacos HDs and clone them to yours sector for sector. Instant upgrade but you just voided both of your warranties. I am thinking that there is a freeware util out there that will allow be to resize that macish partition. If there isn't how about someone showing off their mad programing skills and writing one.
I recall from a previous /. discussion on this matter that although the TiVo guys GPLd the bits they had to (changes to the kernel), they worked around having to GPL the difficult bit:
They wanted a filesystem suitable for direct-to-disk video recording: after all you don't want garbage collection or on-the-fly defragging to kick in while you're recording the Simpsons. They used some proprietary technology to achieve this. Filesystems generally involve a kernel change.
Instead, they implemented an NFS-like filesystem, with the TCP/IP bit taken out: i.e. the kernel communicates with a userland process, which in turn does the HDD management.
Their userland process is *not* GPLd, and I understand it's protected by some patents.
--
Uh. The FCC is no longer screwing. As of sometime last year the proper laws were passed to allow for local TV on DBS systems. Problem is, DBS is too much of a narrowband communication to handle *everyones* local shows. Get a decent antenna or get cable again if your gonna beef about it. Mediaone out here is better than dish anyhow since the digital services are on.
So, the moral is, slashdot needs to research. IMAGINE THAT!
-- dieman - Scott Dier
A few more comments... I have had a Tivo for a few months now, and satellite / antenna integration is suprisingly one of the best features. However, you quickly get used to never watching crap on tv (that includes not watching commercials). I rarely even watch live tv anymore.
As far as crashing, I have never had my unit (the smaller of the two) crash on me. However, I have had a few problems where my satellite receiver stops responding to the serial input and I need to restart that.
A few things that are missing from the Tivo:
CT mentioned how you can rewind live tv. That is because the Tivo is constantly recording into a half hour buffer. This is a great feature, but there is no way to save this buffer. If I'm 10 minutes into a good show that I didn't tell the Tivo to tape, and I want to save it to show my fiancee, too bad. If I hit the record button, it starts the recording starting at the time I hit the button, not at the beginning of the show (which I could rewind and watch).
A couple of extra navigation buttons. ReplayTV has a 30 second fast forward button. Press it and you instantly move forward 30s. Since most commercials come in 30s blocks, it would be nice to just hit the button 3-5 times (depending on the network) and be back at the show, rather than using the fast forward button. Also a button that would take you to the start of the recording buffer would be useful (there is already one to go to the end).
Tivo records things that it thinks you may like on tv. It records these at the default quality setting (which in my case is Best). These shows are deleted first if the unit needs more recording space. It is possible to save these programs for longer, but you can't lower the quality setting (if it is using the Best quality for a cartoon it is wasting a lot of space). I don't know how they compress the video, so this may not be easily possible.
An expansion port. ReplayTV used to have (but no longer does) a firewire port that you could hook up an expansion hard drive to. This would be great. Hook up a hard drive to the firewire, tivo sees that it needs to be formatted to "Tivo" (whatever format that is), and offers to do it. At the end you get a message saying you now have 30 more hours of recording time.
This has been mentioned before, but I would also like to be able to give priority to certain shows in season passes.
If you like any of these suggesions, send them to Tivo (info@tivo.com) and tell them that you would like them implemented. Several of these require hardware changes, but some of them could be implemented on the units that already are in use, with a software upgrade during the dialin process.
Also, if you are getting shows like cartoons you don't want after asking the Tivo to record a cartoon or two, all you need to do is go to the show you asked it to record originally and give it a Thumbs-Down. When you record a show it automatically gives it one Thumbs-Up. If that is the only program you've rated then it only thinks that you like cartoons. This will get rid of the cartoon "preference" from the Tivo. That reminds me -- another feature I would like is to be able to get a list of all the Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down preferences that have been given. At one point I actually reset my Tivo, because my father-in-law had given Thumbs-Up to all kinds of old western movies and that was all the Tivo was recording. It would have been nicer just to let me see all the shows that have been rated, so I could re-rate them.
All in all, the Tivo is a wonderful gadget and I find it indispensable simply for its ability to merge satellite and antenna tv. It would be nice to one day have one that didn't have visible compression on the lower settings and supported things like an optical dolby digital connection, but we will probably have to wait for much larger hard drives.
This box could definetely use another feature -
Remote programming and scheduling. It already has a modem - why not enable dial-in capabilities? Say, you're in hawaii and your unit is somewhere in upper michigan... And you forgot to program the darn thing to record your favorite show!
Just think how cool it would be to have a terminal window open to your VCR...
--- sig moved for great justice.
I got an email yesterday that the next version of the software was released. It is now supposed to be able to mark a show for recording when a preview comes up. Further making things easier for lazy folk like myself. I just have to find a channel that has this feature now. :) The most useful thing I've used so far is the automatic pause. So many times I accidently hit the Tivo button on the remote during a show, and then had to fast-forward in the recording to get back to where I was...
And sometime this year there's supposed to be another update to fix the season pass overlap issue. You will give a season pass a ranking, then the higher ranking pass gets recorded when there are overlaps.
I have a Tivo in my home, and I can tell you a few things about it...
Firstly, regarding the crashing, it DOES crash occasionally, but not nearly as often as what Rob said. I agree that he had a bad unit. My unit needs restarting probably once every two or three weeks (hey, at least it's better than a windoze machine, right?). This is a concern, but realize that the product was just rolled out, and the software supplied for it is in early stages. Rob brings up some great ideas for future features, perhaps he should email TiVo about it so they could consider developing some of these things?
Regarding privacy, all of your preferences are left on your own TiVo, and although it is possible for TiVo to get this information and sell it, they have promised over and over again that they won't. It uses the phone line every night to download programming information--it keeps a program schedule for about two weeks! That's about 13 days more than my DSS dish keeps, and of course regular cable only keeps what's on right now.
Also, keep in mind that while Philips manufactures the machine itself, there is a seperate company called "The TiVo Service" that actually provides the programming stuff. (That's who you pay your subscription fee to.) So if anyone is doing anything sketchy, it's TiVo, not Philips. I don't think they are anyway.
The best feature, IMHO, of the TiVo is ability to pause/rewind/slowmo live TV. I use this constantly during sports programming. A huge play in the NCAA tournament, but no replay on CBS? Make your own replay. Want to see if Keyshawn stepped out of bounds? Do a frame-by-frame. On several occasions I have been watching sports, and by using the TiVo have determined that the referees have made a bad call. And, like Rob said, it's great for if you get a phone call or something, or have to go to the bathroom during a program. Also, if you use TiVo for this reason, you can fast forward through commercials later, a definite plus.
TiVo is expensive, but if you watch a lot of TV then it's definitely something you should consider getting. Video quality ranges from excellent to average (depending on how much HDD space you want to take up). I'm confident that new features are forthcoming--the nightly modem call can also update the software, a good feature.
Got 500 bucks to spare? Like TV? Thinking about buying a new gadget? Get a Tivo. They rule.
You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off.
And just how happy do you think advertisers will be about this idea? True, you can turn off your normal TV during commercials, or tape it and fastforward through it -- but this box makes it so much easier! Then, I'm guessing it won't be another 2 years before someone comes along with a plugin to automatically filter commercials out. Hey, I'm all for it, of course -- no one likes commercials anyway, right? Well, we tend to forget that commercial money is what fuels the TV networks. As commercials become much easier to screen out, the money is going to drift off, and, inevitably, program quality will go (further) down. Not that I blame TiVo for this phenomenon -- it's most likely coming no matter what, but it's a concern nevertheless.
// zyqqh