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Sony Announces PVR PC
vfvthunter sent us linkage to a story discussing Sony's new PC which combines the functions of a PVR (ala Tivo) with a PC to form an (expensive) integrated solution. 100 hours on your PC is cool (although personaly, excluding watching DVDs on airplanes, I hate watching video on a PC). What will really make or break this is of course the software. If it is easy to use, and also provides basic editing capabilities, we could really have a break through.
After browsing thru the spec sheets at Sony's site it appears like the Yahoo! news where not entirely correct. It's not a TiVo at all. Rather it'a a highend PC (It's a P4 1.7GHz for christ's sake!) with a TV Tuner built in. It's for editing your movies, not for recording TV shows. (Sure you can do that too, but who wants to have a monster like that in your living room sounding like a jet engine?)
If you want a TiVo with DVD-RW your best bet is still to hack it together yourself it seems.
I'm only doing the DVD audio out through the digital -- unfortunately the docs say to do TV out through another sound card you have to do the loopthrough of TV card out->audio in.
Given the quality of broadcast TV audio, I can't say i'd be overly concerned about the degradation by not doing an all-digital transfer, but it's just less convenient so i just do all the TV (non-DVD/DivX) stuff through the TV itself...
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$100? hah! I got my STB TV card (with FM tuner too) from www.computergeeks.com for $37!
I note that the low end model is not all that bad, and costs 1500 USian.
what is not mentioned is whether or not this has "advanced technology" to make it fully compliant with MPA and RIAA legal restrictions.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I certainly wondn't go out and buy an ISA card now. I've had this card for over 10 years. The more modern Hauppauge cards are certainly better (and use modern bus architectures). They also make USB devices, although I have no information on the quality of their USB products. Intel also makes a pretty good TV card.
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Sony makes overpriced proprietary solutions. You can get the same functionality with off-the-shelf components for less than half the cost. Or just wait until these features are mainstream and ship with more standard home PCs.
Supposedly this was a surprise, and a source within Sony tells me that meetings have been scheduled by the "CCC" with Sony for some reason. I'm going out on a limb and going to say that it is to ask Sony to not sell the unit (although with Sony's experience with actually releasing things on time, with enough products for all interested consumers isn't that great [i.e. Playstation 2])
The reason for the meetings? The system can stream TV programs to its monitor, then record them to its hard drive. You can copy the video to DVD as well. And get this - normal people (read "non techie" / my mom) can use the interface.
Although it's $2500 price tag may shy some consumers away, this represents (im-very-ho) a giant leap towards selling what the consumer wants, and not what the "people who pay for the production of entertainment" wants to give us.
In the last few years, we have seen manufacturers bow to "certain members" of the entertainment industry (i.e. DVD players only made by major manufacturers because of a chip shortage, Creative abandoning a DVD-RAM drive (which I hear that they were making a fair bit of money on.), a shortage of DVD-Ram disks, DVD Watermarking, Macrovision, Tivo being called "the greatest threat to intellectual property" (or some other load of bullfeathers - way to go Mr. Valenti) et al.
What conclusions can be drawn by Sony's and the CCC's actions? It seems ironic that one of the few people who can actually protect our fair use rights are large corporations. Should we expect these kind of actions in the future and in what way we should (if we should) reward companies who make stuff that we want to use.
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I love watching video on my PC.
Of course, it's hooked up to a sony VVega flat-screen TV, not a 15" monitor, so that may have something to do with it.
Considering we have an "Ask Slashdot" about once a week on the topic of a PC as home entertainment center, you'd think more people were doing it.
Get a PC with S-Video out TV Card (ATI All-in-windoer Radeon), digital audio out (TOSLINK on an old Aureal Vortex2) to Dolby Digital decoder/amp, and PC Remote Control software and a programmable remote.
If someone could come out with decent TIVO *software* I'd be thrilled, it would be the only thing I'm missing...
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with watching video on my PC is that my monitor is only a 15".
However...
My TV is a 14". What a cheapskate I am...
Summarized it details a wireless tablet PC that can stream audio & video from a "base station". Who wants to bet that these are two halves of a whole? The next step will be Sony TV's that can also have wireless capability and can display video from the base station.
Suddenly you'd have a PC/TV/DVR/Music system that would work on your desktop, in the livingroom with the whole family, or in your lap out on the back deck, all wireless & all from a name-brand consumer electronics company.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
As with all other similar solutions (ShowShifter, Telemman HiPix, Hauppage WinTV PVR & HD, AccessDTV, etc), what will make or break this product is the level of integration, and the quality of the SW. So far, the integration with existing A/V equipment has been rather poor. The Destination had to use expensive Computer-IR out transceivers to control your cable/satellite box and VCR, plus the input remote (and I think they never got the SW quite right), and most solutions right now don't offer any kind of IR control integration.
Currently, SnapStream is working on adding more support for this type of integration. John Vanderbeck is leading an Open Source project (IRTuner) to support multiple IR out transcievers. He has written a driver to use the ActiSys 200L (~$65) from SnapStream. He is working on adding support for the RedRat2, and future candidates are the CiR and LIRC. We are also looking into integrating with Girder, making the interface available to other applications beside SnapStream, and adding more functionality and in general, making it easier to turn your PC into a real A/V integration tool...
I bought one of those PVRs only to discover that my local cable company broadcasts the analog copy protect signal on all channels from 8:00pm sharp to sometime in the wee hours of the morning.
So I took it back, wrote a scalding letter to Sony which was likely ignored, and bought an Radeon All-In-Wonder for my PC. The "Guide Plus" software needs some work (and there is no feedback option on their web pages, Guide Plus being provided not by ATI but a third party) but it generally does what I need it to when I want it to do it and no pesky prime-time blue-screens (except when windows is involved)
Now if only there were proper Linux drivers for the PVR features...
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Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Actually, I paid about $50 for my FireWire cards. However, for about $100, you usually get better video editing software (a VE/LE/SE version of Media Studio Pro or Premiers or somthing like that) -- I already had what I needed, so I didn't spend the extra $, but to do everything that you'd want to with the PC, you'd want the better software. And if you're going with a higher-end mobo, the PC cost will go up. In the end it doesn't make much of a difference.
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
Sure, there's even an HowTO about setting up such a beast: VCR-HOWTO
;-)
/linux/init/main.c
The VCR program is currently quite unstable, since it frequently freezes my 2.4.4 kernel, but even that doesn't stop me from having a bit of fun with scheduled realtime DivX video capturing
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"Tell the world that we're going to be the grim reaper of innocent orphaned children." -
I think we're going to see a real shake out of these products, hitting a critical mass with the number of tapeless set-top video recorders. With the ecomomy in a slump and companies like Palm that can't sell off their toys, these guys aren't going to have as much success either. Replay, Tivo, UltimateTV, and now this...
Can they be like the Playstations and Nintendos that still sell for $299 after all these years, or will the Dreamcast out of existence?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
..For those of us that already have a PC, you can get a hundred dollar TV tuner card and software like snapstream and do the same thing. Not only that, but if you feel like it, you can set your recording schedule online through that service. I havent tried it yet with my old ATI tv card, but it looks pretty cool, and the limited version is free (as in beer).
air and light and time and space
RatingsBooster(tm) recorder!
OK, rant over.
43rd Law of Computing:
This may be really interesting if it actually allows you to burn TV shows recorded with their "Giga Pocket Personal Video Recorder" to DVD. The collateral on the web page is pretty vague. It states that you "can record TV shows to your hard drive" and that you "can save your home movies to DVD"
If they don't have some kind of software lock to prevent saving the PRV files to DVD, I can see the TV networks getting upset. It would be trivial to save a whole season of the Sopranos on a couple of DVDs.
I was composing almost an identical post. Hauppauge has been providing excelant TV cards for over 10 years. I have an old ISA card from them that still works like a champ. I'm now a bit more motivated to test it out under Linux though, given the comments of the previous poster.
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The things that make this system special is the a)MPEG2 (DVD format) capture, and b) DVD-RW. Most inexpensive video capture is firewire these days, which has a high bitrate compared to MPEG2.
Of course you could put together a similar system yourself:
computer ~$800 (PIII, 1+GHz, 256 MB)
MPEG2 Capture ~$250
FireWire ~$100
80GB External Firewire HD ~$350
DVD-RW ~800
Total:$2300
So it's not really much cheaper for DIY, though you could probably save a hundred or two on the PC if you really tried.
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
This is the kind of produt that Hauppauge are offering with their WinTV PVR. It's really nothing special - just a standard TV card and software that captures and compresses the video and writes it to hard drive. I have been doing this for many years with an old WinTV PCI card and the excellent vcr program for Linux. All Sony are doing is riding the PVR hype with this one, and it seems that they're succeeding.