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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 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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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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
..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
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.