Video On Demand Almost Here For San Franciscans

BeatlesForum.com writes: "Looks like San Francisco-area folks could be in for a taste of video when you want it, according to this article from Reuters. The article mentions that we will be able to start and stop the on-demand stream whenever we want. Kinda sounds like TiVo now, except you still have to fit around the broadcast schedule. Interesting statistic quoted from the article, though: it is expected that 5.5 million homes will have VOD by the end of the year. Imagine being able to pull up 2001: A Space Odyssey at 2:38 a.m.."

Comments

My own video on demand system

[NonSequor]

Lately I've been recording my favorite shows using my TV tuner card and downloading others from Morpheus. What I would like to do is have some sort of program to select among my different video files with a remote. Ideally I would have a program to provide a unified interface to DVD viewing, TV, and playing video and audio files. What I really need is some sort of conglomeration of Ogle, MPlayer, Zapping, and some sort of file browser with which a snapshot from a video can easily be associated with a file (perhaps some sort of integration with Nautilus). I would like to put this together myself, but I'm not sure I'm up to it.

Some means of scheduling when to record something would be nice too. I think that simply bttvgrab and cron would work, but it would be nice to have the ability to set up the recording from this program.

I'd also need an extra hard drive or two, as my current 45GB one is going to be full before long.

Something like this could offer all of the capabilities of video on demand.

While I'm on the subject, does anyone know of a program I could use to cut the commercials out of my video files? I've got one file with 4 episodes of Samurai Jack, commercials and all, that is rather unwieldly.