Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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.
.@.
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.
3 04 .html
. ht ml
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum1/HTML/008
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/005596
They're the same thing. Some people call it a Digital Video Recorder, others call it a Personal Video Recorder.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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...
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
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
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
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.
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.