A PVR For Two Straight Weeks Of Video

Rob G. writes: "Story from Variety on Y! News this morning about a monster PVR that can store 320 hours of tv; price is $1999. You could tape full seasons of a dozen shows and watch 'em in the summer instead of BB2." There are some other cool features promised here, including free programming service for broadband users. Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.

Comments

Does this one ..

[Augusto]

.. also send all your TV viewing habits to a server ?

Re:Does this one ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but only in aggrigate. There is no personal info stored (currently) on the machine. As close as you can get is the local access number and serial#.

If you want privacy, don't enter an email addy.

Re:Does this one ..

[Anonymous Coward]

is that cmdrtaco?

Re:Does this one ..

[kcroke]

Yeah, the information would say the user watched West Wing and skipped all the commercials. Man I love my replayTV.
For more dialog about replayTV go to the AVSforum. It's a great site with lots of discussion on replayTV, Tivo and Ultimate TV.

Well then...

[spagma]

Sure it is enough room to store entire seasons of multiple shows, but is it enough to store a full Kevin Costner film?

just do it

[Anonymous Coward]

get a nokia media terminal when they come out,
then save your content to your personal video server for retrieval

Homebrew PVR

[wiredog]

Given a BIOS that lets you Boot A PIII System In .8 Seconds and the Hauppage WinTV PVR card ($249) you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000.

Re:Homebrew PVR

[einstein]

that Hauppage card looks really nice. How well is it supported in linux? I've found a project that was started on sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pvr/), but there hasn't been much work on it. Does anyone have more info on it?
---

Re:Homebrew PVR

[mosch]

yeah, assuming of course that you want really awful picture quality compared to what these dedicated PVRs put out.

Try examining the output of Hauppauge->VGA->NTSC sometime and compare it to what you get out of a TiVo. It's like comparing apples to horseshit.

Re:Homebrew PVR

[rvaniwaa]

"...you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000".

Not quite. Pricewatch has 80gb drives going for $164. You would need three of these which comes to about $500. Add in a Duron 850 (don't want to drop frames) and a mb for $100, 128mb, ram, and other minutia for $100. Now you are up to $950 when one adds in the Hauppage card. This is also just a straight PC. You don't have an IR remote or any other features that I am sure their system will come with. On the other hand, it would be quite cool to roll it yourself!

Re:Homebrew PVR

[zulux]

A lot of us don't use NTSC/PAL TV for output, we just use a VGA for our viewing. DVD's look great on a projector swiped from the office, as most DVD software does line doubling quite well now days.

Re:Homebrew PVR

[norton_I]

Hm. Are there any reasonably low cost capture systems that have high quality S-Video replay? I was thinking about doing this sort of thing for archival purposes. I have a TiVo, which I love, but it is a 2 drive 30 hour model, and I don't want to screw it up attempting and upgrade.

I already have scads of unused drive space, I just need the capture card, but I want one that has S-Video in and out at high quality. I couldn't care less about VGA.

IIRC, the TiVo uses an MPEG chipset designed to go with the PowerPC CPU they use, and it isn't available as a consumer board.

Also, how easy/hard is it to cut a mpeg video, say, to remove commercials? It seems to me that roughly every 5th frame is uncompressed, so you ought to be able to slice it on those boundaries.

Re:Homebrew PVR

[phaze3000]

Except that the issue here is the Hauppauge card - I use it to record programs using vcr to compress to divx ;) and whilst the quality isn't bad, it's nowhere near a proper PVR.

The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon has pretty damn great TV capture, although I don't know if there are any Linux drivers for it (I can't afford one, so I daren't look :)), and could quite concievably be used to roll-your-own PVR.

Of course, if I had a capture card with DVI input, and a digital TV service, one could pipe it straight into that and get amazing quality...

Re:Homebrew PVR

[nicestepauthor]

I have a WinTV PVR and I would tend to agree. It does have hardware MPEG encoding but your choices are limited between MPEG1 VCD and MPEG 2 at between 2 and 12 megabytes PER SECOND. Real time compression to MPEG1 does not produce the best quality image. It is adequate to compress with Virtual Dub and watch on your PC but not good enough to watch on a large screen TV. I have tried creating VCDs with their included software and the results have been very disappointing. If you install the latest upgrades you can also create Super VCDs compressed in real time, but while these look better than VCDs the picture gets "blocky" when there is a lot of action in a scene, like explosions. The best way to make VCDs and SVCDs is to record them at a much lower compression rate and then compress them afterwards, a process that takes eight or so hours.

After much experimenting I have decided that the optimum use of the WinTV PVR is to record my old Beta tapes at MPEG1 VCD and then compress them using Open DivX so I can burn one movie per CD. These can only be viewed on a PC, but the quality is adequate for that. Picture size is 320 x 240.

I wish the Hauppage web site had more information on how to use this gadget too. I had to do a LOT of trial and error with this thing to get useable results.

Re:Homebrew PVR

[ncc74656]

Also, how easy/hard is it to cut a mpeg video, say, to remove commercials?

If it's MPEG-1, you can load it into VirtualDub directly. If it's MPEG-2 (which it would be if it comes from a DVD or a TiVo), VFAPI can frameserve into VirtualDub. In either case, VirtualDub can frameserve into TMPGEnc for (re)encoding to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2.

It seems to me that roughly every 5th frame is uncompressed, so you ought to be able to slice it on those boundaries.

If you're recompressing the video (which will probably be needed to fit it onto VCD or SVCD, if that's what you want to do with it), you can slice the video on any frame boundary. If you're trying to slice the video without recompressing, it depends on the GOP setting used to create the video. Most video created with TMPGEnc gets created at that program's default GOP setting of 1-5-2-1, which produces one I-frame for every 18 frames. (I-frames are still compressed; they just don't depend on neighboring frames for decoding.)

Re:Homebrew PVR

[joekool]

you would likely get better results recording raw avi's or straight to divx, if you have the processing power. Going to mpg, and ten to divx is going to compress the picture twice, and these are lossy codecs, so of course that is not the best way o get good pic quality

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[sniglet999]

I guess that's how I went from 14 to -1 in three days....Not that anybody can read this. :(

PVR?

[steevo.com]

The artilce mentions 'DVR', not 'PVR'.

I know what a DVR is, but what is a PVR?

Re:PVR?

[neodymium]

I guess 'p' stands for 'personal', so it would be a _p_ersonal _v_ideo _r_ecorder ???

Re:PVR?

[LordNimon]

They're the same thing. Some people call it a Digital Video Recorder, others call it a Personal Video Recorder.

Re:PVR?

[Hostile17]

I have heard on TechTV, the difference is a PVR comes with a service or requires a service to work properly. the service helps you track shows to record and makes guesses about shows you might like based on what it knows about your viewing habits. A DVR is nothing more than a VCR that does not require Video Tapes, recording shows require manually setting record times.

Re:PVR?

[Anonymous Coward]

some others call it FUD

Re:PVR?

[dpoulson]

Well, I saw the headline and the first thing that came into my head that PVR could stand for was Perfectly Valid Reason!
I guess thats just the way my brain works... like you need a reason for two straight weeks of TV!

Eliminate ads

[pemerson]

The Oregon-based company may once again fuel controversy among advertisers with a function that automatically eliminates commercials during the recording of programs.

I've got a pretty good record pause/unpause trigger finger for the VCR, but I'm curious as to how a DVR/PVR can detect the end of show / beginning of a commercial / end of a commercial / beginning of show sequence. Is there some sort of signal that can be detected?

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the first frame of a commercial will be drastically different from what is on screen you you're looking at a large block of data being replaced. Also volume is pummped. Surround sound is also enabled in a few commercials. There is also a signal that is broadcast when you're getting a feed over statalite that is rebroad cast. It is not present in commercials overlayed by your local station. I Don't think this will be 100% accurate, but even if it skips a few, I'll be happy.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an interesting thing to consider. The various network execs are claiming that no matter what Replay does to detect commercials during a broadcast (i.e. the markers embedded in the signal), the networks will be able to get around this. From the article:

For example, some officials believe the networks will be able to outwit Replay's anti-commercial device.

``There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable,'' one senior network exec said.

This strongly implies that no matter what the recorder does, engineers at the networks will be able to reverse-engineer it and modify their codes.

The question is, what happens if Replay wraps the firmware within their box with a thin layer of encryption? Trying to get around that would almost certainly run afoul of the DMCA, no?

Re:Eliminate ads

[Flower]

This is mentioned in the article.

Re:Eliminate ads

[alen]

I wonder what would happen in a scene change. Say from indoors to outdoors. I wonder if you'll get a recording with the quality of the Nixon tapes.

Re:Eliminate ads

[agdv]

I'm curious as to how a DVR/PVR can detect the end of show / beginning of a commercial

It has speech recognition and a library of common commercial phrases ("not-so-fresh feeling", "order now and get an extra...", etc) as well as voice recgnition (can tell the kid from the Gateway commercial from the characters of your favorite show).

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when the volume increaces over normalized by no less than 10x, you can be sure that a commercial is playing.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Zeno_1]

Another thing that it said it can do is just fast forward by 30 second slices, which would be nice, and there really isnt' a way to get around that..

Re:Eliminate ads

[jeffy124]

Yes. There's a signal of some sort that can be detected by some VCR's. The signal allows a distinction between normal television and commercials. I've seen only a small handful (okay- just one) of VCRs capable of this feature. During playback of a recorded show, it would show a blank screen while FF'WD through commercials.

More common out there is a button on VCR remotes that FF'WD through 30 seconds of video upon each press of the button. The button is typically labeled 'Zap' or 'Flash', depending on brand and such. I've found that you need 2-6 presses of that button per commercial break, as most commercials are 30 seconds long, and networks put at least 2 per break, but sometimes as many 6 for popular shows (like the Wizard of Oz, Ten Commandments, etc). On average though the number is 4 commercials per break.

Unfortunately, I dont remember what VCR's can do what I talk about. The one with 30 sec skip broke, and the auto-skip was my uncle's. :-/

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

My ProScan VCR does this pretty well. It screws up something like 5% of the time (probably due to noisy tapes).

It records the show, then rewinds and does a "commercial marking" pass. My guesses is it's looking for:
o Black frames between content and commercials, spaced a multiple of 30 seconds apart.
o Some really obvious change in audio level
o There may be something in the vertical blanking interval (VBI) which local stations can use to replace network spots with local spots.

I don't know for certain, but have heard the black frames were required. Operationally it's a bit hard to avoid them completely. However, I work at a company which makes broadcast video servers, so I can say it is possible to omit them. The audio level changes are a bit harder to omit, since the ad agency and the TV production studio will make different audio choices. That doesn't seem like a really reliable indicator, though. Finally, VBI certainly can be filtered by the local station, so don't count on any signals there.

Personally, I love the automatic commercial zapper, but the 30-FF is certianly good enough. I wouldn't want a PVR to not record commercials (because it does screw up often enough), but would love to have it automagically FF through them.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there is some sort of signal that can be detected. When I pipe our satellite signal into my computer, I can see a thin strip at the top with changing black and white bars. These bars are visible during TV shows, but not during the commercial. I suppose any recording device can just look for the absence of that signal.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, what happens if Replay wraps the firmware within their box with a thin layer of encryption? Trying to get around that would almost certainly run afoul of the DMCA, no?

No, not at all. DMCA is intended to protect against filthy hippies trying to crack commercial softwares, not against network execs who wants to get rich quick. Get it? The American Way(TM).

Re:Eliminate ads

[HiroProtagonist]

Actually, It might not have broken. In my girlfriends version of this (with her RCA VR647HF 4 head stereo vcr), after she had taped over the same tape many times, the VCR was no longer able to write the markers it used to tell where the commercials started and ended.

Using a new tape enabled the features again!

I was overjoyed, as you can imagine, because watching General Hospital is torture for me, but watching General Hospital with commercials is like even longer torture with breaks for maxi-pad and laundry cleaner information. *gag*

Re:Eliminate ads

[Astoundo]

Here is a release from ADLE describing their commercial skipping technology, called "commercial advance." They claim to have licensed it to most of the major VCR makers, with the notable exception of Sony. From the release:

During recording, the television broadcast is monitored for certain video and audio events -- such as black frames and low sound energy -- which occur at the beginning and end of each commercial. The locations of these events, according to the VCR's tape counter, are temporarily stored in memory for processing at the completion of recording. Events are analyzed in relation to each other using a proprietary software algorithm to identify which ones mark the actual beginning and end points of each commercial break.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

How about some volunteers (who watch the show anyway) send a "commercial-start/end" info packet to a central server and that's distributed to the "recorders" ?

I'm sure every show (that is worth taping) is watched by at least a dozen of geeks who are willing to share this info.

And I think a 1 or 2 second lag is acceptable.

anti

Re:Eliminate ads

[Monte]

Another thing that it said it can do is just fast forward by 30 second slices, which would be nice, and there really isnt' a way to get around that..

It's better than that, there's an undocumented "feature" that let's you jump "n" minutes forward (press numbers, then Quick Skip - 5+QS = 5 minute jump fwd), or to jump to any point in the show (23+Jump = jump to minute 23). If you get a Replay (or I imagine a Tivo) be sure and check the web for cool backdoor stuff.

Gad, I love my Replay.

Re:Eliminate ads

[jeffy124]

actually, you missed what I said. The vcr capable of distinguishing between ads and tv belonged to my uncle, and works just fine. The vcr I owned that had a zap button on the remote (no auto-skip features) is what broke - as in the playback heads were permanently damaged.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

My Panasonic VCR has the Commercial Advance feature, and it's about a year old. It detects the commercials as it records and then goes back and marks them afterwards. Upon playback it will automatically fast-forward through the ads. It has a similar feature for skipping through the trailers on a rented movie (though we use DVD now).

Re:Eliminate ads

[guinsu]

You wouldn't need speech recognition, you could use closed captioning.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Anonymous Coward]

The only significant problem I have seen with this on a VCR that I've used is, occasionally, it fast forwards the last 30 seconds of Law and Order. (When they return from commercials and wrap up the show just before credits).

Even then it only happens occasionally.

Re:Eliminate ads

[jovlinger]

the DMCA says very little about breaking encryption. Rather it speaks about circumventing copyright protection devices. I don't see what copyright the studios would be breaking if they reverse engineer the replay heuristics.

On the contrary; All studios need to do is to create a licence that their programming is licenced for viewing as a whole. Any attempt to select parts of the programming could be argued to be an attempt to circumvent licencing, and hence by extension copyright.

Not a watertight case in either direction, but it seems that the DMCA would once again play into the big studios hand if it has any bearing at all.

what a surprise

Re:Eliminate ads

[jovlinger]

The thing that sets this device appart from VCRs is that it can record the entire commercial and not incurr a penalty for fastforwarding through it. So the PVR has the luxury of only needing to decide whether that was a commercial, not whether this is one.

The way I would implement it is to record everything and use a user-tunable heuristic to mark blocks as likely commercials which are then skipped during playback. If you get it wrong, the user can view the block w/o skipping it. For example, commercials tend to be a bit louder than average programming. You know that there will be a big change (got that from another post) in picture before and after the block, AND you know that it will be a multiple of 30 seconds.

The first and last of these criteria, in conjunction with post-facto marking rather than the pre-commercial guessing makes the PVR much better suited to the task of identifying commercials than VCRs.

Only digital product placement is likely to be able to foil these sorts of heuristics, esp if the user is able to write their own rules and assign levels of certainty to them.

Re:Eliminate ads

[dlkf]

That might work for cable/sattelite since you could require that subscribers sign something, but for broadcast it would be infeasible since the broadcaster has no method to compel the receiver to sign any license. That and you would only be able to go after individuals because the maker of the PVR obviously wouldnt agree to any license. Besides, you cant require people to watch comercials. You would have to prevent people from fastforwarding through comercials and/or automatically pause the broadcast if the person gets up from the couch during a comercial break.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Sloppy]

The question is, what happens if Replay wraps the firmware within their box with a thin layer of encryption? Trying to get around that would almost certainly run afoul of the DMCA, no?

It doesn't sound like DMCA would apply. DMCA outlaws circumvention of technological measures that effective control access to a copyrighted work. In your hypothetical scenario: What is the technological measure that is effective controlling access to something? What is the "something" to which access is being controlled?

Re:Eliminate ads

[Sloppy]

To really do it right, requires strong AI.

I wouldn't trust any non-intelligence to keep from filtering out "fake" commercials such as the Psi Corp Commercial in And Now For a Word, The Simpson's "Canyonero", Saturday Night Live's "Colon Blo", etc. It would requires contextual understanding, appreciation of humor, and other qualities.

Re:Eliminate ads

[unitron]

"can tell the kid from the Gateway commercial from the characters of your favorite show"

My favorite show would be the one where the kid from the Gateway commercial suffers horribly for the entire episode, every episode, all season long. :-)

Okay, not really, but you know what I mean.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Zeno_1]

I need to get one of these..

Tivo had this thing where if you wrote them an essay about why you should get a free tivo from them, they would give you one for free. One of my friends here at work won one, I tried about 3 times, but I think they realized that I was making all my essays up and never gave me one.

Anyway.. Does anyone know if tivo or any of the other devices will work with Digital Cable (from Adelphia@home if that matters)?

Re:Eliminate ads

[Astoundo]

IIRC, VCRs, like PVRs, do all their decision making ("was this a commerical?") after the recording is complete, then go back and mark the beginnings and ends of commercial breaks, not actually edit them out. If commercial skip is enabled on playback, then the VCR automatically fast-forwards through the marked commercial breaks.

So the advantage is still with the PVRs, but only because they skip commercials seamlessly while the VCR still must fastforward--not because of superior decision-making.

Re:Eliminate ads

[Monte]

Anyway.. Does anyone know if tivo or any of the other devices will work with Digital Cable (from Adelphia@home if that matters)?

I'm not sure how you mean "work with" - I've got Time/Warner digital cable (which sucks IMHO) in the Akron OH area, it hooks up to that just fine. It uses an "IR blaster" (LED on the end of a wire) to change channels on the digital cable box, and it's not much harder to hook up than a VCR (add phone line, essentially). More info at www.replaytv.com.

Here's a PDF User's Guide for the Replay if you're really interested.

Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasure!

[YIAAL]

Coming up with a dozen shows good enough to be worth taping a whole season's worth!

Why is it that as TV viewing technology gets better, TV seems to be getting worse?

Oh, great...

[Mike Schiraldi]

ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.


Oh, that's just super.

"I send you this episode in order to have your advice"

On a serious note, that feature is going to kick ass, and is much cooler than a couple (hundred) extra hours of storage. Imagine:

- Your favorite team makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip

- You're flipping channels and come across a show that you really like. So you download every previous episode.

- (I know these things are supposed to come in threes, but that's all i can think of, so use your imagination)

Re:Oh, great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your favorite team (the Butte pirates - http://www.d111.k12.id.us/BHS/BHS.htm ) makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip of goatse.cx\hello.mpg

You gotta be kidding

[boarder]

$2000 freakin dollars?! I'm sorry, but for that kind of money I can go to ebay and buy an HDTV projector that can put a 300" screen on my wall if I want it. I can also take the extra $500 I'll have after buying that and buy a few 60 GB harddrives and make my own 320 hour DVR using Linux tools that already exist and a simple $40 TV card.

Re:You gotta be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm sorry but you can't get a decent HDTV projector for $1500... not even on eBay.

130 hour Tivo

[glinden]

You can already get 130 hours (basic quality, about equal to VHS) on a TiVo easily by just adding an 80G drive to a 30 hour TiVo. See the TiVo Hack FAQ.

130 hours an incredible amount of TV. You can sit and watch TV for every waking hour (16 hours/day) for over 8 days with a 130 hour TiVo. Switch to the high quality setting and you can still store 10 full length movies permanently on your TiVo and still have enough room left over to watch TV every waking hour for three days. Even on the highest quality setting, a 130 hour TiVo records 40 hours of TV, enough even for the most dedicated of couch potatoes. How much more do you need?

Re:130 hour Tivo

[FortKnox]

I've heard of hacks that can upgrade the primary harddrive AND add a secondary to provide OVER 200 hours on a single TiVo. And I'm sure it'll cost less than two grand, and that's if you make a mistake and roast everything and have to buy ANOTHER TiVo and two new harddrives.

Re:130 hour Tivo

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to this that even if you burn TiVo you will have to pay subscription until after first 12 months expire.

Re:130 hour Tivo

[Cramer]

I've had a 200 hour (198h, 34m) tivo for almost a year... two 80G maxtors. There's a guy that did the same thing with two 100G drives for a total of 234hrs or something like that. My attention is now on building a tower of firewire drives *grin*

Note: I don't recommend doing that with the tivo versions around now. With 1.3 it's fine, with 2.0+ the tivo never deletes anything until it has to (nobody made the "undelete" menu?) which creates some very expensive calculations everytime it wants to record something. I lose the first 30seconds or so of everything. (And it started stuttering like a mother****** once both drives filled up -- of course, that was during the 2.0 beta so I didn't say that.)

myanus is not uranus

[isotope23]

If only I could download a whole series of say
X-files rather than Pv-r I'd glady keep the commercials in them.

;-)

RIP to DVD

[chill]

Hmmm....

1. Record entire season
2. Remove HD -- place in PC
3. Burn MPEG-4 of entire season to DVD-RAMs/VCDs
4. Replace HD
5. Share with friends (*NOT* the TV show)
6. Repeat

Re:RIP to DVD

[Mononoke]

7. Realize you've wasted an entire season*3 just to impress your "friends."
8. Discover your "friends" disappeared when they hadn't heard from you in a season*3 worth of time.
9. Get new friends and new life that isn't based solely on the consumption of passive entertainment.
10. Live happily ever after.

Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[boinger]

two grand? Give me a break - if that's not an obscure niche market, I don't know what is. Most consumers aren't even aware of DVRs existing. I'm very talkative about how great TiVo is and it's rare that I don't have to explain what it is.

So, now, a unit that's over 6 and a half times the cost of my Sony SVR2000 (i.e. an expensive model of TiVo) is supposed to revolutionize TV viewing? My ass. Sure, I plan on putting another larger drive in my TiVo, but I'm not whining about lack of space - it'll just be a nice cushion for when I'm away for the weekend.

btw, 8 times my current capacity isn't a whole season. It's maybe two months. Three tops. And I'm not particularly psycho about my TiVoing.

Tivos can come close now

[.@.]

With Tivos (which run Linux), you can add hard drives as large as you like (though nobody's tried to break the IDE 128GB limit yet). Current owners can put in two 100GB drives, for well over 200 hours of recording capability.

Re:Tivos can come close now

[Anonymous Coward]

you fucked up a really good troll by giving away the link

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[mosch]

unfortunately rob also didn't do that compression test against actual code. this must be why the few times i've attempted to paste in some C it got caught by the "lameness filter".

I guess being able to program makes me a 'luser' in Malda's squinty little eyes.

Wow!

[graveyhead]

No more late-night fights over what programs to keep: public access yoga vs. Doctor Who. If I had a spine, it would always be sci-fi over metaphysical crap, but apparently in a "relationship" you have to make "comprimises". 320 hours means no more comprimises over my precious PVR space! Woohoo!

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a very narrow-minded view of how your relationship should function.

P.S. Is she hot?

Re:Wow!

[Pasc]

I feel your pain.

My TiVo has way too many episodes of Oprah, Yoga Zone, and E! True Hollywood Stories taking up space.

Ah, the joys of marriage. :)

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pussywhipped! Pussywhipped! Don't you know you're pussywhipped?!

This is a rumor gone out of control...

[Anonymous Coward]

ReplayTV recently sent out email questionaires about a speculative product that matched this one. Typically these questionaires ask about a product that isn't even close to existing and may not ever exist, because the whole point of the questionaire is to find out what products the company should bother to spend money developing. Note that while the article mentioned $10/mo for dialup and free broadband, others were asked about $10/mo for dialup and $5/mo for broadband so the specs and prices aren't set in stone, even if the machine is anywhere near production. Someone decided to take their version of the questionaire and misrepresent it as a product announcement.

http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum1/HTML/0083 04 .html
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/005596. ht ml

You'd think after VCRs the networks would learn.

[OS24Ever]

If i'm taping/pvr'n something, I'm going to bleep out the commercials. The feature I can't wait for is the ability to email programs.

Think about it. How many times have you seen on big newsgroups for sci-fi programs someone missing something and wanting someone to mail them a VCR tape. If you could email a copy of a show you missed, that feature alone is worth the cost for us die-hard Farscape & Trek fans.

Friends

[Anonymous Coward]

As al bundy said:

Friends, don't have em, don't want em, and danmn sure don't want to watch em.

Two Weeks of Everything

[DeadSea]

The next big step for a PVR will be when it can record two weeks of everything on every channel. I find there is plenty of space on my Tivo for everything I think I might want to watch in advance. The problem comes when there are two or more things you want to watch that are airing at the same time. Also, every once in a great while I will realize that I don't have anything on the Tivo worth watching. At that point, I would like to have a two week archive of everything to browse.

Sounds great... Take notice, TiVo!

[AtariDatacenter]

Well, they're looking to fill the market that TiVo is refusing to touch... that is, the transfer of programs between TiVo units. And if it is able to transfer video, you can almost bet that it has an ethernet connector, and doesn't just do it over dialup. Good for them. Competition is going to make the PVR market better.

Regarding the 320 hours, that's going to be in low quality. I'm assuming that the ReplayTV has a two-drive limit. Either they are banking on future technology (2 x 128gb drives) or some additional compression, or both. (Additional compression is still possible, using existing methods. Anyone remember the TiVo bug where vertical resolution was lost, but was only noticable on SVideo units?)

In any case, I'm glad they're taking a stand on the sharing issue. That alone might be enough to make me switch.

Re:Sounds great... Take notice, TiVo!

[sik puppy]

Last year at the Western Cable Show, several pvr manufacturers were showing pvr motherboards with scsi connectors, so the 2 drive limit would be raised to 15.

Of course you've got to pay for all that storage...

Re:Sounds great... Take notice, TiVo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, ReplayTV has always been more receptive to the consumer than Tivo has. Tivo sends your info around and is very pro-advertiser. ReplayTV had ads for a while but then listened to customers and removed them forever even though it lost them some money.

Re:Sounds great... Take notice, TiVo!

[Syberghost]

Last year at the Western Cable Show, several pvr manufacturers were showing pvr motherboards with scsi connectors, so the 2 drive limit would be raised to 15.

You're thinking small. One of those SCSI drives could be a 9TB EMC cabinet...

security

[British]

Has something like this been used to record security camera footage, for archival purposes? Sounds like it would be perfect for that.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Several people have. Go to www.tivocommunity.com and do a search in the underground and coffe house and you should see the treads about it.

It's new

[wiredog]

So it's probably not supported. I don't know what chipset it's on, though some of the other Hauppage cards use the bttv set, which is supported, unofficially, under Linux and, IIRC, FreeBSD. The cool thing about it is the hardware mpeg2 encoder. All the others I've seen under $500 are software encoders, requiring a GHZ processor for realtime work. Now I can finally put all those episodes of Buffy on VCD ;^)

personally....

[Atrophis]

i like to see devices like these. ihave a tivo and love it, except for the $hitty modem they put in it.

Mod this guy up!

[BillyGoatThree]

I realize he's a troll. Nonetheless he makes good points that desperately need discussing. The current state of slashdot it pitiful--my karma dropped 30 points over a 2 day period. A 2 day period in which I posed possibly as many as 3 comments. Legitmate users are being blocked by the "lameness" filter while ascii pr0n is posted as a real comment.

I've said it many many times (as far back as 1998, IIRC) before but no one backed me up. Finally we have somebody with a factual analysis. Rob, gestapo-style bitchslaps and thought-police moderation have an effect opposite the one you want. Please, for the love of god, try something else for a while and see the difference.

Thank God

[ryanvm]

I don't necessarily want a PVR that can store 300+ hours of video - I watch too much TV as it is on my 30 hour unit. But, anything that raises public awareness of TiVo, and PVRs in general, is a good thing in my eyes.

TiVo is a great product, the problem is that the public just doesn't understand them yet. I've pretty much given up explaining them to people, as they invariably respond with: "my VCR can do that."

I just hope TiVo can hold on long enough for the critical mass of TV viewers to catch on. And things like this with a big "gee whiz" factor can only help.

Re:Thank God

[David Greene]

TiVo is a great product, the problem is that the public just doesn't understand them yet. I've pretty much given up explaining them to people, as they invariably respond with: "my VCR can do that."

Count me as one of those public. What is so great about TiVo?

Is it the TV-guide integration? Certainly that would make things convenient, but I really only regularly watch about 3 shows a week anyway so it's not difficult to keep track of things.

I can see how TiVo's suggestions might be useful -- kind of like Amazon's recommendations which I have found to be very useful. However, why do I need that in a recording box? Why not just surf to some sort of on-line guide? I realize that this is how TiVo makes money but I'm looking at this from the consumer side.

Ideally I'd like to see the hardware, schedule and recommendations separate entities so you can mix-and-match. I realize this will never happen unless there is some sort of community effort because it's tough to make money off of them individually (except maybe the hardware).

Re:Thank God

[ryanvm]

Count me as one of those public. What is so great about TiVo?

Okay, let me establish the major capabilities of a TiVo.

• TV guide - This shows you exactly what channel and show you are watching, how long it is, what it's about, and who is in it. It can show you all of that for every channel for the next two weeks.
  
• Automated recording - The killer app for TiVo. You tell TiVo to record "South Park" and it will do it indefinitely. Your VCR can do this too, but TiVo can do it for dozens of shows, 24 hours a day. Each is labeled and available for viewing whenever you feel like it. Fast forwarding through commercials is a breeze.
  
• Pause live TV / Instant replay - Watching live TV and the phone rings, no problem. Just pause it and you can jabber on the phone for up to 30 minutes, when you get off the phone you just un-pause it and continue. You can even fast forward through commercials to catch up with the broadcast. The instant replay feature comes in handy if you missed something (e.g. dialog, action).
  

Those are the features that I really enjoy. The TiVo suggestions feature, although neat, isn't really that handy for me. If I wanted to watch a particular show I would already have a Season Pass for it.

Anyway, I guess you have to try it to really be hooked on it. But, I can assure you that if something happened to my TiVo, I would buy a replacement within days.

Re:Thank God

[Hostile17]

but I really only regularly watch about 3 shows a week

Tivo is definitly not for everyone, if you only watch between 1.5 to 3 hours of TV a week, I'd say a $99 VCR suits you just fine, I would not waste the $299 + service fee on a Tivo. This is especially true if you hate TV as it is. Remember though, back in the mid 70's, not everyone needed a VCR or for that matter in the 50's not everyone even needed a TV.

Re:Thank God

[David Greene]

Pause live TV / Instant replay

I can see how this would be very nice to have, but for me it just doesn't justify the cost. The other features I can really do without. I just set my VCR weekly timer and that's it. Why does it make a difference whether I specify a show by name or by date and time? I do admit that the programming capacity of most VCR's is pathetic.

I suppose it is one of those things you just have to try before you get hooked. Strange that I have not seen much advertising for these things on TV.

Re:Thank God

[StormCrow]

There are a few hidden benifits of Tivo's method vs. setting your VCR

1. You don't have to wait for the Tivo to stop recording before you can watch something else or something you came into the middle of.
2. If your show is moved to a different timeslot, the Tivo picks this up automatically.
3. You don't have to remember to change video tapes.

Re:Thank God

[bludragoon]

Would I be able to hook this up to my 4dtv sat. ?

Re:Thank God

[HobNob]

Apart from the live TV stuff, the thing I like the most about my ReplayTV is that it's random access. Want to watch a particular episode of a recorded show? Easy. It's labeled by the name of the show, and the episode title. Just choose it, and it starts playing immediately - no looking through tapes, no fast-forwarding and rewinding to find the beginning. Magic.

-- Bob

Re:Thank God

[IronChef]

I suppose it is one of those things you just have to try before you get hooked.

Find a friend that has one and check it out. No written explanation can do it justice.

They really are as cool as the owners say they are. Unless you just don't like TV, that is.

And here we go again...

[NetJunkie]

Sure, you can build a device to record shows. But the great thing about these PVRs (I own 2 TiVos) is the integration they provide. It's not like having a seperate box to do these things. It fits in very nicely with an existing AV setup and soon you forget it's even there. The interface is great. It will be a while before you can build something as seamless and nice.

Re:And here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure the interface is nice for Johnny Couchpotato, but with a homebrew device, the tradeoff is that you are not trapped in the PVR's interface.

Personally, I love being able to ssh into my linux machine at home and/or edit my crontab to encode a show to divx. (using Bram Avontuur's vcr program or Justin Schoeman's NVrec ). AFAIK this is not something you can do with a Tivo.

There's even a web interface for doing it, if want to get fancy.

BigBrother2

[VonSnaggle]

Now I can record a whole season of bigbrother and watch it over and over.

In the Summer? Goodness, no!

[David Greene]

You could tape full seasons of a dozen shows and watch 'em in the summer instead of BB2.

What?!? And miss the Summer of SciFi with all-new episodes of the fabulous Farscape ?

Or do I record those and watch 'em in the winter? :)

BTW, Mon-Thurs showings of Farscape on SciFi start tonight at 8pm Eastern/Pacific. Watch it from the beginning!

Dual Tuner

[NetJunkie]

The DirecTivo has two tuners so you can record two things at once.

Re:Dual Tuner

[John Jorsett]

Last I heard, they hadn't activated the second tuner. Have they finally done so?

Re:Dual Tuner

[SgtClueLs]

There is current betaing of 2.5 and some people have gotten 2.5n (Non-beta). Expect it VERY soon. And it totally rocks. (Please don't remove me from the beta tivo! What nda? :0 )

Re:Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[aozilla]

How many years ago was it that an 80 gig hard drive would cost $2000? It is becoming likely that everyone will have these one day, since I don't see random storage devices cheaper/better than hard drives coming out any time soon. Unless of course you count the internet as a random storage device... That *might* win (if the phone company ever got its act together).

Vaporware - Check these links

[Otto]

It's pretty much agreed among all PVR geeks that this is likely vaporware. The "source" for this info was a survey that Replay sent out asking "Would you pay this much for this feature in a future product?", and then whoever came up with the story took all those features, and decided it was a product announcement. Don't expect to buy one anytime soon.

See the following:
Tivo forums discussion
Replay forums discussion

Overkill

[IvyMike]

About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV to have 100 hours of record time. (I did the fast-n-easy swap out the old drive for a 100GB drive.) It's overkill, and there are some problems.

First of all, the interface wasn't designed to cope with that much TV. To get down to the Simpsons (alphabetized by "The") I have to page through like 12 pages of other junk. Yuck.

Second, that's a hell of a lot of TV; I don't want to let the thing fill up, because when will I possibly find the 100 hours to watch everything it records?

Third, it does encourage you to watch more TV. There are shows I used to watch only when the opportunity arose, but now, since I'm recording EVERYTHING I might ever possibly watch, I end up watching all of them.

The real problem I have now is not the amount of record time, but the fact that it only has one tuner.

P.S. Do you know how long it takes to low-level format a 5400 rpm 100GB drive? About 15 hours!

Re:Overkill

[John Jorsett]

I upgraded my Tivo with an 80 GB hard drive and have @120 hours capacity. The interface doesn't bother me, as I can page around pretty quickly. Tivo arranges the playlist by time, so the newest stuff is up at the top. The only problem I have is that the new drive is quite noisy. You can hear the thing in the next room. I've probably got a notch in my hearing at that frequency now.

Re:Overkill

[IronChef]

About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV...

I am not especially interested in an upgrade right now, but I am very interested in making a backup. Can the software you linked to let me image the boot partition so I can back it up?

Is it possible to back up the "magic" part of the RTV drive onto a CD, or is it too big?

I love my RTV and I want to keep it alive. If the drive croaks, I just want to pop in a new one - I don't want to be forced to upgrade to a Tivo (with fees), or whatever RTV is selling at the moment (which may be missing features or whatever, who knows).

Right now it looks like RTV is definitely NOT getting in bed with the networks, what with their survey questions about commercial skipping. That's cool. But if things change, I want to run my RTV 3030 as-is until the end of time. :)

Re:Overkill

[IvyMike]

I am not especially interested in an upgrade right now, but I am very interested in making a backup. Can the software you linked to let me image the boot partition so I can back it up?

Yes. You can read the detailed instructions here, but basically, they discuss backing up the 300MB "magic" partition in step 10. These instructions are actually the upgrade procedure, but the actual software lets you do the backup without having to do an upgrade. If you look at this image , you can see the "Copy System Partition" button that you would use. I assume the "Restore Target Drive" is what you would use to, well, restore a fuxored drive.

These pages carry all sorts of warnings of possible problems, but for me, everything went exactly as the instructions described. (Then again, those warnings are there for a reason.)

P.S. Why did I use the W2K software, and not the Linux? Because my Linux server is too important to bring down for a day. My W2K machine, on the other hand, is always rebooting, so it was no problem to have it disassembled for a while.

Re:Overkill

[shogun]

---- The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. (Try actually thinking about that for a minute.)

I did, I stopped to consider it for a minute but while I was doing it I found my rights had been bulldozed and found myself living in a police state.

Re:Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasu

[Anonymous Coward]

lets give this a try (12 shows worth watching)

1) Dark Angel
2) The West Wing
3) The Sopranos
4) Junkyard Wars
5) Battlebots
6) Sex and the City
7) The Family Guy
8) The Simpsons
9) Comedy Central's Daily Show
10) Who's line is it anyway (US)
11) Law and Order
12) The Practice

Add to the list anything on TLC, the History channel (plus the obscure stuff I love, like the various car shows on TNN, and anything on the food network Iron Chef, Naked Chef, Good Eats etc)

S.

And while you're enjoying your price war.....

[Picass0]

Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.

...also watch copyright content control features go into you hard drive and feel your stomach turn as the MPAA and RIAA reach into your computer.

(2-3 months != season)???

[maddogsparky]

It's maybe two months. Three tops

How long is a TV season? Last I paid attention, they followed the calender seasons. What are you comparing? Some shows run every day for a half hour, some run once or twice a week for a half or full hour.

Re:(2-3 months != season)???

[Overt Coward]

In the U.S., a TV season is one year, or about 20-24 new episodes for a prime-time drama or comedy. Shows that run on a daily basis, of course, will have many more episodes per season.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

great reading my man, keep it up

132232.com
243243.com
332567.com
453647.org

poll

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a poll on slashdot "Who do you prefer getting blowjobs from: 1) Women 2) Men 3) CowboyNeal" I would vote 2, women don't suck hard enough, and cowboyneal is ugly.

Re:poll

[Anonymous Coward]

stop posting that! Slashdot users are gay so they don't want to see naked women.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

except it looks like i need to re-read it then ...

Re:Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasu

[jackb_guppy]

Iron Chef
Invisable Man
FarScape
Sex in the City
Junkyard Wars
Good Eats
Robot Wars (all versions!)
Witchblade
Star Trek: Enterprise
Outer Limits
The Cronicle
7 Days

Re:Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasu

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot believe that you place WestWing as #2. God willing, if I ever met any of the actors on that show in a dark room, I'd be the only one walking out alive. Same with Sex and the City, Law and Order, Te Practice, and Ally McBeal. You know, I just realized what they all have in common: The entire show is about LAWYERS! eek!

NO!

[twitter]

From the Variety article:

a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.

If you thought it was bad that people mail Power Point presentations around, just wait till they start clicking the send to so they can share their favorite sit com. ARGH! What kind of jerk would encourage this sort of thing?! No no no no!

penisbird.com

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW... I let the domain name expire. Want it?

Nothing special

[RedX]

For around $500, anyone with decent technical skills can grab a TiVo and 2 80GB harddrives and make their own 245 hour PVR. Toss in a TiVoNet kit for ~$75 and you've got your broadband-enabled PVR. Check the TiVo FAQ for details. Of course you still have to include the service fee, but that hardly justifies the $1500 markup for the Replay device.

This ReplayTV device doesn't stand a chance at the $1999 price, and the TV executives are quoted in the Yahoo article as saying they'll fight the commercial skipping and the ability to share the recordings.

Re:Nothing special

[Saeger]

Even if ReplayTV doesn't cave to the networks'/advertisers' demands (and they will), you can bet that the MARKET for filtering out commercials/banners/spam/etc will continue to grow -- in spite of the pleas from advertisers that you must subject yourself to mental engineering.

Anyway... all that will accomplish is the line between content and product becoming even more blurred. We'll see even more pathetic product placement, like we've seen with: Castaway/FedEx, Dracula2000/Virgin, Conan O'Brien/Budweiser, and The Sopranos/Coca-Cola (with the label perpetually facing the camera), etc...

Then comes the next step: "Phantom Edits" of content where the crap (branding influence) is removed completely, or replaced by generic "Acme's".

Yes... my hatred of advertising is extreme, and I recognize that. :-)

</mini-rant>

Re:Nothing special

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: What is a sheep without a sheepherder?
A: Wasted economic potential.

Our planets axle is greased with exploitation if you hadn't noticed. Without sheepherders the world economy would grind to a halt. It's time to grow up and join the rael world now slashbot.

Re:Nothing special

[Saeger]

Q: What is a slave without a slavemaster?

A: FREE.

Don't try to water it down.

Re:Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasu

[Zaknafein500]

Why is it that as TV viewing technology gets better, TV seems to be getting worse?

You obviously don't own a TiVo. You would be amazed, there is actually good stuff on TV. TiVo makes it much easier to sift through the garbage and locate the gems. I know my TV watching has gone up drastically since getting my TiVo, and I'm actually watching stuff that I LIKE.

Easier than hacking the TIVO...

[ArticulateArne]

is the SnapStream PVR software. The demo version is free, and the only practical limitation is a 2GB storage limit. But, if you move stuff out of it's directory, it doesn't know to add it into the 2GB quota. I've been using it for a few weeks now with a Hauppauge TV card, and it works great. My TV gets recorded, and I watch it whenever I want. The only bummer is that it currently only records in ASF. They once had an AVI recording feature in Beta, but I don't know what happened to that.

No subscription, please

[Reality Master 101]

What options are out there nowadays for digital VCRs similar to TiVos that don't require a subscription? (and no, I don't care about the guide).

Re:No subscription, please

[RedX]

A TiVo box with a software version earlier than 2.0 can be found for $150-300 (depending on size) and will allow you to do manual recordings. Just don't plug in the phoneline and your software won't be upgraded (2.0 "mistakenly" disables manual recordings without the service, 2.5 is supposed to fix that "mistake"). Old ReplayTV boxes are normally a bit more since they include their service and guide in the price of the unit. A PC solution would also be viable, but you're probably looking at close to the price of the lower-end TiVo's once you figure the price of hard drive, TV card, etc.

Re:No subscription, please

[jroysdon]

Buy Tivo

Monthly$9.95

Product lifetime**$249.00

Call me crazy, but when I do buy my Tivo (after I break down and get cable), I'll just get the product lifetime subscription version. Two years of service and you break even vs. the monthly payment, and I'm guessing I'd keep it twice as long.

hmm..

[qwixotik]

still waiting for UPS to come and play santa, but i'm building a 320gb raid array for the purpose of PVR/emulators/MP3/Ogg/Video serving.. Any idea how much space I'd need for roughly 100 hours of space?

Ho hum ...how 'bout something real

[Overzeetop]

For two grand, it had better have:

2 tuners (capable of NTSC and ATSC)
40+ hours of HD / 100+ hrs high qual NTSC
A DVD-R tray for archiving
Commercial pruning for the DVD-R (even if manual)

Otherwise, I'm not interested.

PVR E-mail

[asv108]

ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs. It may also allow users to copy photo files from a PC to the DVR.

Great, now people can spam my TV!

DMCA? Oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to pass along a video. It's something else to let one person pass along a program to hundreds of people at once,'' a network insider said. ``That could be a violation of our copyright.''

and better yet

Many major media companies invested in Replay in 1999 and 2000, including News Corp., Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co., NBC, Showtime Networks and what was then Universal's parent, Seagram.

So will NBC be 'suing' its investment for copyright violations? Or just going after the hapless evil hackers that are *gasp* trading shows on the Internet?!?!?!

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

GOAT. (as a refresher: Go Away, Troll, or just STFU.)

246 Hours with 200GB

[BigSlowTarget]

246 hours with 200GB on mine as of last Friday. Did it myself too - very easy given even less than a rudimentary level of Linux knowledge and the ability to read FAQs.

Given the ability to connect Tivo to ethernet (www.9thtee.com) and a bit more Linux knowledge someone could probably build a script to archive and restore shows at will, effectively making the storage infinite -

Re:246 Hours with 200GB

[SuiteSisterMary]

Nope, they haven't figured out the file format yet. But I'm thinking (gotta check if their guide works in Canada, otherwise I'd have a tivo by now) about getting a Hauppage WinTV PVR which has the ability to archive recorded stuff onto CD-RW in VideoCD format for playback in your average DVD player.

Re:246 Hours with 200GB

[ncc74656]

Nope, they haven't figured out the file format yet.

I'm pretty sure ExtractStream has been brought up on /. before...but search isn't turning up anything for it (or for TiVo, for that matter...the database is probably still fscked up). 9th Tee has it available for download from its TiVoNet page, and you could probably find it in other places as well.

Re:246 Hours with 200GB

[SuiteSisterMary]

I stand corrected.

Free Skylarov?!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn! Whatta deal! I'll take two!

RE: How much more do you need?

[Anonymous Coward]

About 190 hours worth it seems :)

Linux project & recycling "old" hardware?

[Drashcan]

Hey, ho,

Isn't there a Linux project which does just that: recording scheduled TV and radio progs, maybe even remotely scheduled over the Net?

What about recognition of a starting signal of a given TV program?

Anyway, a Linux proj which would also offer writing TV hard disk recordings to CDR (e.g. in DiVX) sounds very sexy!

No, seriously

[twitter]

- Your favorite team makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip

Does this thing do clips, or do you have to mail the whole freaking game? One day, the whole game might be the better choice. You know, you just had to be there...

Video over the net does not make me happy yet. This stuff is going to clog up the world. Imagine your email having to compete against a sea of this shit. It's bad enough that the warez crowd hoggs up the net swaping around comercial movies, songs, M$ software and other trash. Encouraging Everyone to do this is irresponsible. Keep broadcast junk where it belongs. Leave the net to original content until it can handle much more.

If you absolutly must share that golden clip with your friend, host it on a web site! Email the link and let your friends decide on their own if they want to look at it. Cramming this into email is just rude.

You've got spam!

Re:No, seriously

[jovlinger]

You could never fit a show inside the message size limits most email has. However, if I have Broadband and you have broadband, then I could send you a somewhat secure URL that points to my net-enabled PVR where you could stream it from.

I'd imagine that the URL is all you are emailing.

Of course, this feature alone is going to keep the lawyers busy busy. And for once, I kinda see their point.

Re:Who would want to?

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir are definitively gay. i never would have thought about that.

hard drive wars not only means lower prices...

[frknfrk]

but hopefully much more reliable and portable drives. Think VCR tape: consumers are going to want VCR tape sized (or smaller, of course) hard drives which they can pop in and out of these devices. this will mean a lot of good eventually for those of us who dig hot-swap storage.

Watching everything...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with watching everything. Just don't focus on it. When your watching the not-so-good Simpsone episodes for the 2nd (or 3rd, 4th, 9th) time burn some VCDs on your computer and flip through your bills and mail. When the good bit comes up, stare at the screen for a bit, then get back to the tedious busy work you'd have to do anyway.

Odds are, you would have had the tube on anyway while dealing with that crud, so this way you you see classic good (as it gets) tv instead of whatevers on. It's no worse than slashdot... Oooh! ten thousand knives for only $33 a month with stretch pay! gotta go...

The solution is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to see all the ASCII crap, just raise your threshold. It's that easy.

Commercial skipping

[Kevin DeGraaf]

"There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable," one senior network exec said.

Correct -- but there doesn't need to be. So long as commercials are fixed at 30 or 60 seconds, bypassing them is as easy as one or two presses of an instant 30-second-skip button. Four minutes' worth of advertising crap? How long does it take to press a button eight times?

Take that, corporate bastards! [cue maniacal laughter]

Re:Commercial skipping

[Anonymous Coward]

better yet, what about getting an Email at a later date that has all the commericial locations tagged. Say, 10 minutes after the show aired? The provider of such data could use any number of methods to validate the data, etc. (including manual adjustment).

Good News

[ioman1]

I am glad that ReplaTV is staying in the game. It just goes to show that a great product does stand a chance in the market if you beleieve in it enough. Marketing and advertising dollars should not determine what makes it in the industry and what doesn't. I hope they are here to stay this time.

Basic quality VHS

[erice]

Basic quality is more certainly not equal to VHS. In my experience, High quality is roughly equal to, maybe a little better than VHS EP.

Basic quality isn't just jerky, it distorts the colors. Even low frame rate animation looks bad. Useless.

I do most of my recording at High Quality. Some animation is OK at medium quality.

A "30 hour" TIVO records about hours of 15 hours at High Quality on a 36GB disk. So a good rule of thumb is 2GB/hour of usable quality.

Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't bother to get a login because, frankly, I don't see the point. As an anonymous Coward, I get to see all the +1 stuff, and if the thread looks good, I'll read the "below threshhold" Score: 0 ones too.

I'm sure I miss out on some insightfull stuff that never got modded up, but if it was good enough to get a reply at +1 or so, I get to see it anyway (unless I'm First Read!ing :)

Some of the trolls are just ignorant or naive (i.e. think differently than you or I, and are therefore wrong :) Some are Trolls, who know better, but are pushing for anarchy and mediocrity. (If you like that ast line, read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead - good book, if thick.)

Moderation is a reall easy thing to fix if you genuinely want to, unlike my poor typing ability/keyboard.

1) Eliminate negative moderation. Sure, trolls will still mod each other up, as will boosters of misinformation. But they do that anyway now.

2) Allow borda count moderation on comments while the articles on the front page. That's "Am I hot or not?" for the trolls reading. Those comments which get broad support go up a point, those which don't stay where they are. Default browse score for archived articles can be set to 2, since most of the valid / ontopic score 1's would be boosted to 2 anyway.

It's pretty simple really.

Bu then there's no reason not to allow the submissions list to be seen. Preface the link with an anti-porn/crackhead/idiot/minor disclaimer and show only the title, not the submitter. Legitimate whining about submissions goes away and no one else checks it anyway, so it doesn't matter what the trolls do to it. A week or so later, either ditch it all, or if the editors look at the list, grab the good stuff which you reject anyway, and put it on a rejected page.

But what do I know? I'm just a no cookie Anyonymous Coward.

Obscure reference: Call me Tramper, these are my siblings, Guest and Visitor.

Re:Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you mean borda count. That's something entirely different. Hot-or-not is more of a ratings voting system. Borda count is based on relative rankings (1st, 2nd, 3rd place etc.) and would be very hard to implement in a slashdot-style forum.

Re: How much more do you need?

[Anonymous Coward]

for $2000 i want much more, 120960 hours minimum.

If you think SPAM is bad now ...

[Ldir]

... and send programs by email to other DVRs.

Boy, if you hate SPAM now, I can just see it: come home from work, plop down in the recliner, and fire up the ol' mega-PVR.

"You have mail! Downloading message 1 of 73 ..."

Two hours later (after everyone in the neighborhood complains about using all their cable bandwidth), you find that the helpful folks with the "FREE PAGERS" have sent you 12 identical infomercials, several fly-by-night lenders sent feature films showing how they can refinance your [mortgage|debt], you have 17 MLM videos that all begin with, "This is NOT an MLM", and a dozen pr0n companies have sent you samples of their latest films (OK, so it's not all bad news).

Meanwhile, Aunt Emma sent the latest home videos forwarded and re-forwarded from distant relatives you've never met ("Here's Johnny Applesmith's complete graduation ceremony. You can see him at about 2:50. Johnny is my neighbor's second cousin-in-law on his uncle's side, twice removed."), Uncle Joe sent a Norton infomercial (fowarded from a friend, etc.) that he wants you to see "RIGHT NOW" because of that "Good Times AV Virus" he heard about (acutally shreds your PVR drive into its component electrons, then melts everything in your freezer, or so he heard from his buddy Tom), and half-a-dozen old friends with way too much time on their hands forward all the latest compilations of stand-up routines snatched from Comedy Central (and each other, over and over again).

Two thoughts:

1. We're going to have to get a bigger Internet.

2. Time to dig out my library card.

(Come to think of it, the pr0n by itself would consume every Hz of available bandwidth. Death of the Intermet, film at 11!)

Technology can be a wonderful thing. Just keep it away from Marketing.

I never thought I'd see the day

[BobGregg]

... when I'd actually praise a TV network executive for being clueful. Did anyone catch this quote at the end of the article? In the context of whether a humungous PVR would be the death of network TV:

``Everyone said the VCR would kill network TV,'' one exec said. ``I don't think people are shivering over this.''

Gee, someone who actually gets it. What are the odds? Now if only the MPAA / RIAA executives would wake up and realize the same thing.

An interesting quote

[acrhemeied]

From the article:

``It's one thing to pass along a video. It's something else to let one person pass along a program to hundreds of people at once,'' a network insider said. ``That could be a violation of our copyright.''

I see no difference. When passed to a friend, the media still has the potential to reach the same number of people. That friend could perhaps copy it for two other people (and they do the same, making the total number of recipients grow exponentially).

You just invented Kuro5hin!

[BillyGoatThree]

Submission voting, no negatives, hot-or-not style scores--that's exactly what K5 does.

I started reading /. a LONG time ago. Like, 1997. (I remember railing against threaded comments.) Finally I had enough and moved to K5 (except for a few brief visits to this cesspool) about 9 months ago. The relief is palpable.

Re:You just invented Kuro5hin!

[IronChef]

I have checked out K5, but all I see posted as "news" are lame things like racism tirades and obvious trolls. yuck.

checking today's page... OK, a couple of good posts about the DMCA and the UN, but then there's more crap like "why do you get out of bed in the morning?" C'mon. At least the news here is better.

All-In-Wonder Radeon

[John Jorsett]

The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon has S-video output. I can't say how it looks, as I've never used that feature of the card.

Re:All-In-Wonder Radeon

[Anonymous Coward]

The ATI cards are nice, unless you wish to do videa capture. They would be much nicer if they supported Mpeg2 compression in realtime on board. (ie: Not dedicating my PIII/500 to the task.)

Piggy back

[dickDragon]

I just get a new Tivo when one fills up.

DVD is too small to archive a full series.

Overkill is the best way

[erice]

Second, that's a hell of a lot of TV; I don't want to let the thing fill up, because when will I possibly find the 100 hours to watch everything it records?

I think that's the point. Or at least it's my point. With a TIVO, my own tendency to procrastinate works toward the goal of watching less TV. If I can watch the show anytime I want then I don't need to watch it right now. So, instead I'll do something else that is not so flexible. Repeat a few times, and maybe I'll never get arround to watching the show. That's probably a good thing. When I do get arround to watching anything, I cherry pick the good stuff and discard the rest.

The trouble comes if the storage is too small. Then I face the delima: If I don't watch it now, it will be gone later. Maybe I should watch it now. To prevent this from happenning, make the disk real big. :-)

Re:Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[Webmonger]

TV dramas typically have 25 unique episodes per season and a 1-hour duration. That's 25 hours/season.

Or if it's a 1 hour show on every day except Sunday, that's about 313 days. Again, 313 hours/season. But I think only news programming is close to that.

And of course, if it's on every day of the year, that's up to 366 hours/season.

And if you sleep 8 hours a day and watch TV the rest of the time, that's 20 straight days of TV.

Networks want it both ways?

[Standfast]

It's interesting to consider the following quote in the context of intellectual property rights and copy protection:

``There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable,'' one senior network exec said.

Content owners will finally have to recognize this. Just as what that exec said is correct, it is also true that all technology to restrict the copying of copyrighted material will be unsuccessful. The two problems are equivalent.

-David.

The Equivalent of the 2' High Magazine Pile

[milo_Gwalthny]

Great. I can just see it. 5 years from now I am going to find an entire unwatched season of Six Feet Under on my DVR. Like the five year old issues of Wired that I never read. Avatars anyone? (Look, here's the 8/97 issue with the article "Linux: The Greatest OS that (n)ever was").

The critical market acceptance question: Will we be able to sell old episodes on eBay?

Any other products using broadband for programming

[CptnKirk]

I'm interested in getting a PVR. I'd like it to be able to record two shows at the same time, or at lease let me watch something and record something else at the same time. I'd also like it to be able to use my existing cable modem/Ethernet connection. I know of products that use a modem and my phone line, but my phone line isn't near my TV, and I'd really like it to use my existing high speed internet connection. Other than the above product, are there any other PVRs that will do that?

Re:Basic quality VHS

[John Jorsett]

Maybe I just have low standards, but low quality is plenty good enough for me. The only time I even notice anything is during rapid screen changes.

Somebody had to say it...

[psxndc]

Can you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these things?

psxndc

OSS project for a PVR?

[MadCow42]

Has there been any Open Source PVR projects started? Hey, if TiVO can do it on a Linux box, why can't the Open Source community do it better, faster, cheaper, and more customizable?

Hey, at least then we wouldn't have to worry about them advertising to us, limiting what we can/can't record, disable sharing features, etc...

I'd gladly help out with such a beast...

MadCow.

Linux support

[nicestepauthor]

It is based on the Covenant chip, so you can do captures in Linux. Unfortunately, the MPEG encoder is not supported so if you just want a card to use under Linux a cheaper model of the WinTV would be better.

Re:Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasu

[IronChef]

Yess! "Good Eats" rules. It's the show that inspired me to start cooking. Emeril's not bad... but Good Eats teaches the fundamentals.

Re:Hi!

[Ralph JewHater Nader]

Beware the zionist threat.

Wait till you have kids

[Tassach]

If you think it's bad now, just wait till you have kids -- then your TiVo will be clogged with Sesame Street, Dragontales, Teletubbies or even [shudder] Barney.

Personally, I watch maybe 2 hours of TV a week. Until my stepdaughter came to live with us, we hadn't had cable TV in over 3 years. My wife insisted that we get cable so that the munchkin can watch kid's shows on PBS and Nickelodian.

Of course she let the salescritter talk her into getting the $65 deluxe digital cable package with umpteen channels of HBO -- which we have yet to watch -- instead of the $28 basic analog package that I though we had agreed on. [Grumble] Waste of damn money, if you ask me -- even with the munchkin we're still watching less than 10 hours of TV a week, at a cost of $6.50 an hour. Ahhh, the sacrifices we make to help ensure marital bliss...

Re:Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[Anonymous Coward]

OBEY.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

SLASHDOT IS A COMPANY THAT EXISTS ONLY BECAUSE IT HAS POSTERS.

If you went to Best Buy, bought a stereo, and it refused to turn on because you didn't speak to it in an Asian tongue, would you be happy? No. Now, what if the manage told you to go away when you told him you wanted your money back?

Well, then you might bitch about the store. If you found hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the same position you'd organize a protest at the store. Why?

BECAUSE CONSUMERS OWN COMPANIES; COMPANIES LIKE SLASHDOT

The corollary to this is:

CONSUMERS OWN SLASDOT

and since the bulk of slash-information is made by its consumers, the posters of comments, then:

SLASHDOT IS COMMENTS

Re:You'd think after VCRs the networks would learn

[Anonymous Coward]

that feature alone is worth the cost for us die-hard Farscape & Trek fans

YOU SAD, DEMENTED LITTLE NERD

Re:Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[boinger]

I'm not sure what your point is, exactly.

I watch more than one show.

Great New Hobby, leading to new TV industry

[TomRC]

Hobbyists will begin posting web sites with their own picks for the coming week, plus edit lists of recent shows.

Some will edit shows to compress them - first knocking out commercials, then dropping bits or fast forwarding through bits that they decide are useful to see but not critical to hear.

With audio processing, they'll add processing to allow some segments to be watched up to 2x faster but with audio frequencies adjusted back down to normal.

Others will use editing and interleaving of programs to create their own satirical productions - the nightly news mixed with political commercials and sit-coms, etc.

Once this sort of capability takes hold for PCs, it'll be replicated into consumer equipment. Then things will probably cycle back and go commercial, as people find that local hobbyists can't be relied on for the long term, and decide to tolerate a few ads in their mix in return for not needing to keep searching for new hobbyists that match their tastes.

Once this gets going strong enough, commercials will be transmitted once or twice a day, your system will record only those likely to target your consumption patterns, and you'll sit through them once or twice because you will often find them entertaining or interesting.

A new stability will form. With a lot more bandwidth for transmitting commercials (by eliminating redundancy), there'll be many minor variations on commercials, professionally edited to appeal to specific groups. "Trekkie In-Joke variation #2", "Upscale edutainment ages 6-8"

WTF? live nude cultists! WTFFFF!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time to grow up and join the rael world now slashbot.

re: space nazis must die!

[Anonymous Coward]

Should read : "It's time to grow up and join the rael world now slashbot."

sorreyyyyyyy!

$1999? F that.

[Ratbert42]

I must have a mental block. When I first scanned the story, I thought that $199 was a decent price for a box like that. Imagine my suprise when I finally realized it was $1999. For that price I could build a monster homebrew version with IDE RAID and Hauppage's card, spend a couple hundred on beer and pizza to fuel my development time to build a slick interface, and still have enough cash to order enough pay-per-view porn to find something worth recording.

Re:Any other products using broadband for programm

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a Dishplayer from Dish network that works well for us. You have to mount the satellite dish and run coax to the receiver, but then you can watch a previously recorded show while another show is recording. Rumor has it they're working on a two receiver version that will allow you to record two live shows simultaneously, or several variations on that theme. And, all the programming is stored in compressed digital format, meaning you don't have the analog to digital to analog issue you have with an over the air unit. The playback picture looks as perfect as if you were watching it live off the satellite feed. Slap in a 40 or 60 GB hard disk, and you have 30+ hours of recording time.

As for the broadband access, it is available through dish, but we subscribe to broadband cable for data purposes, and only use the satellite for tv programming. Pretty sweet setup so far.

http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/products/dpla ye r/index.shtml

By the way, when I was shopping for a receiver, I bought a full direct tv setup the first time. Turns out, if you have more than 1 direct tv receiver in your house, they *all* must have a phone line run to them (not dedicated, just a phone line). That equipment went back in a hurry. Dish network does not require a phone line to be hooked up - having one hooked up just allows you to order pay per view movies under Dish network.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just metamodded this comment, and although you make many good points I had to mark the OT moderation as fair -- although had someone modded it "Insightful" I would have marked that fair as well. You really ought to consider submitting this and any sequels to Kuro5hin or some such, where there's a chance it will be widely read. Fascinating as it is, it's unfortunately OT to almost any discussion you're likely to post it to on /.

Touche!

[BillyGoatThree]

I agree, the "news" on K5 has started to suck ever since Rusty "fixed" the submission queue. But the diaries are alive and well.

However, you are right--I come to Slashdot for the news in the morning...but then I spend the day at K5.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[unitron]

However, many of us feel that Slashdot would be just fine without certain categories of comments, that the interesting on-topic comments would continue to be posted, that the people the advertisers want to reach would still come here just as often, and that it would actually be a better site.

It would be interesting to see if a separate site dedicated just to those categories could survive on its own. I suspect not. Even if someone donated all the money necessary for its existance, the potential posters, once they found themselves deprived of an audience to offend, would probably lose interest rather quickly.

In other words, despite all this talk of democracy and censorship, and empowering the users, what's really going on is that a bunch of immature jerks like to post stuff just to annoy others and draw attention to themselves, and whenever anyone doesn't want to bother wasting their time playing along with their silly game, they whine about it.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

"It would be interesting to see if a separate site dedicated just to those categories could survive on its own. I suspect not."

www.geekizoid.com

Re:Two words: Cost Prohibitive.

[Webmonger]

I'm starting to see where you're coming from.
They say 320 hours is enough to store "full seasons of a dozen shows"

You say 320 hours isn't enough to store a whole season.

But you're talking about your TV viewing season, not a television show's season. They're talking about a television show's season.

You can store whole season of Star Trek:Enterprise, and a season of The X Files, and a season of Earth: Final Conflict, and a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a season of Roswell, and a season of Dark Angel-- that's only six, and it takes about 150 hours. 12 will take about 300 hours.

That's how you store full seasons of a dozen shows on the thing.

Re:Understanding Slashcode!

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical kuroshit user. You could have choosed not to rate it at all. Easy. Or just rate it as unfair (but 2 unfair mods -> -3 karma. /code again, but wtf ?).

But this whining ("I am sorry but it was offtopic") is really typically k5. Remember me the article (on k5) where a poor asshole was talking about its feeling because he denounced a guy that had child-pornography on its hard drive. Makes me barf.

actually

[RatFink100]

the Hauppage card comes with a remote and an IR receiver.

ReplayTV guide in Canada

[REden]

While the official Replay service doesn't support Canada, someone on the AVSForum has written some code to fetch guide info from web sites, reformat them, and then load on his replay so he can get Canadian listings.

He doesn't even dial the official service any more.

Robert

check before you post

[boarder]

All you have to do is check over at EBay for "HDTV projector" and you'll see that you can pick one up for between $1000 for a bottom of the line to $15000 for top of the line. Sure, $1500 might not be the best HDTV projector out there, but it sure as hell beats spending twice as much for a similar TV that can only display 60" and is monolithic in size and weight.