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TiVo To Support RealNetwork Formats
rtphokie writes: "The flurry of announcements coming form the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas has started with
RealNetworks ' anouncement that it had struck deals to include its technology in an array of microchips and devices, including TiVo PVRs. This is the latest move in an effort to expand from the desktop to consumer devices."
Standards, standards, we only want standards implemented in hardware!
Please, PLEASE, TiVo, stay with MPEG! The video on my TiVo looks excellent. I challenge ANYONE to show me a Real video that looks even remotely acceptable. I have never seen one. Seriously.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
I thought that was obvious.
It's so you can download content to your Tivo to view on your TV.
They are probably thinking in terms of PPV movies.
Reminds me of that Tolkien battle with all the armies and the Nazgul and everyone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now when you set up your new RealTiVo and you forget to uncheck ALL the boxes, its going to make it your default toaster and blender too.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
Am I the only one who remembers when RealNetworks was Progressive Networks, and Rob Glazer was helping to support liberal politicsl causes?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They should go with Divx. Smaller files and higher quality movies
This idea has no factual support, but what happens if Tivo adds cable modem support. This would mean you might be able to record video that is Internet only. Granted there isn't much worth seeing on the internet video wise, but could it be in preperation for the day that happens?
Sounds like those of us who already own a Tivo would have to buy a "second generation box" to take advantage of this deal with RealNetworks.
For me to shell out more money for a new box, they better be offering some real compelling content. The Tivo already records more stuff than I could possibly find time to watch.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Great, now we can watch "BUFFERING" on TV now, and have it solicit your email address for special offers!
I dunno, but even on broadband connections I have never viewed an acceptable video stream based on a RealNetworks codec. I keep giving them a chance, downloading the new required viewer every other month, click 'No, cancel, no, exit' every time their viewer loads and prompts me to register. But their codecs suck.
On the exact same connection I can get near VHS quality streams (BBC online is a great example with their 300 Kbps feed) using windows media. I've tried many different Real feeds that claim the same bandwidth targets, and I've yet to see one that is watchable. I wish Real were better, but it not even in the same ballpark.
I think Real has done more to give streaming video a band name, than any other company out there.
Perhaps TiVO can figure out what's wrong.
-josh
With Tivo's stock price in the toilet and analysts wondering about Tivo's "business plan and future," it only makes sense that they would try to bring something to the table as far as "on-demand video" goes.
.rm files and display them on my Sony WEGA TV, blocks and all. Give me something a little better by sticking with MPEG and upping the connection speed. I'd pay for it.
Tivo is hamstrung in that it has -- for most consumers who don't specifically modify the device -- only a 56K modem to get video into the device. Tivo's got to come up with something else, and darned if RealNetworks doesn't already have ready-made code that can run on Linux. What else would they choose? Microsoft's Media format?
Seems to me that Tivo needs to take a page from SonicBlue's playbook and start making broadband-capable Tivos ASAP. You might as well forget about asking me to download
Wonderful! Lousy sound quality and choppy video for everyone!
HT
I can't say I much like realmedia formats -- while the compression is decent, the resulting quality is not necessarily the best for the bang. Combine that with RealNetworks's history of installing spyware with realplayer, and I've never been a big fan.
Nevertheless, I'm still rooting for RealNetworks, inasmuch as they're still giving Microsoft a run for their money. It's not that I especially hate Microsoft, although I do; it's that the last thing this industry is yet another concentration of formats in the control of one corporation. Windows Media is no more or less proprietary than realmedia, but when there are two competing crappy proprietary formats, at least they're more likely to keep each other honest that way.
And thankfully, this is just another sign that RealNetworks has what it takes to continue leading in this sector. Back in April, RealNetworks negotiated a deal with AOL to bundle their software with AOL's, putting them at #1. I'm certainly not a fan of AOL, for what it's worth, but that's probably the second easiest/best way to get one's software on the desktop of millions of ordinary users, next to bundling it with Windows itself.
Now if only TiVo would stay solvent long enough for all this to make some sort of difference....
Real - a technology seeking a use.
it is "spyware"
it is non-secure: that is, use of it injects data into your system that you don't have the control over to save, copy, or do what you want.
Unless you are careful, it splatters itself all over your desktop
If you are a real idiot, you get spammed if you enter your e-mail address during set-up.
Unless you are careful, it keeps nagging you to upgrade to a version that is less secure and works worse than the previous version.
Wheres the Open Divx codecs?
Allot of closed codecs with high license models seem to be the only ones competing. I want to see more open hardware and less reliance on costly software.
BTW, Realplayer is icky. With 200meg quality divx ep's of Star Trek Enterprise, I can fit 3-4 on a CD.
This must have something to do with Real charging for new versions of its product. You can still download RealPlayer 8 for free, it just takes about 15 minutes to find the link. I'm waiting for the day that you have to pay to watch streaming content on the web. Maybe I'd be more enthusiastic if I'd ever seen more than 2 acceptable quality Real Media files, and those were encoded at the highest possible quality for the Real Media encoder. Even those were barely of acceptable quality.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
"One of the emerging themes this week (at CES) is the whole digital convergence in the home, and what we have in place with TiVo is what I think is the most concrete practical example of that," Glaser said.
In short, they are looking at an internet appliance of sorts. Hook TiVo up to the TV and the internet and you have a way of interfacing with internet content.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
I'm still working this out... there's:
Microsoft/Comcast and the XBox, possible further development which ties it and set-top into same platform
RePlay, dunno who they're teaming up with yet
Real & TiVo (I like TiVo)
Microsoft and DVD players for Windows Media
Real in bed with Hitachi, Philips, Sony, STMicroelectonics (They're right across the street from me) for DVD and PS2
What else? A Linux box with Ogg Vorbis or MPEG-4 thrown into the mix?
It's kinda like when all the armies are showing up, dwarves, men, elves, orcs, Nazgul, etc. and ya figure at some point there's going to be a big shakeout (the market commoditizes for good and for bad)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Some how I don't think this will help to bring the current version of realplayer to linux...
Last one in jail is a fascist.
It doesn't say anywhere in the article that the codec is going to be compatible with RealPlayer. Furthermore, the TiVo implementation may have rights management built into it. If you transfer video from the TiVo to your computer, it may not play on your PC even if it is the same codec.
On a lighter note, maybe I can now watch flash movies on my TV. Hyakugojuuichi!
I really don't understand why real has deals on the playstation2 and the tivo... last I checked people don't use either of them for listening to badly-encoded audio or video.
Ye Gods, this thing will take over your living room. I can envisage a large "Real" hallmark on all your TiVo recordings, the "Real" jingle preceeding all your DRMified CDs.
I'd rather have a bowl of coco-pops.
I couldn't agree more...Real Media/Real Player sucks.
Ah, great... now as soon as you power on your Tivo, Real Player will prompt you to register with your e-mail address, install itself as the startup screen, add itself as a favorite recording, and make itself the default for everything else.
Imagine if you could use you digital recorder to rip a few movies into low-res, low bitrate copies and copy them to your iPaq to view on that next plane flight... Wouldn't that be cool?
Apple better come out with a set top QuickTime digital recorder fast. They're getting left behind again (no offense to you Apple folks out there, kudos on OS X).
The regressive, backwards-looking policies of the far left that serve only to increase the power of the rulers certainly are not "progressive". The Real company's association with poorly thought out politics is yet another reason to oppose this company.
Last time I knew, the progressive.com was taken over to sell car insurance.
TiVo wants to allow their customers to record the maximum amount of high-quality video possible to the built-in storage medium, currently a great big hard drive.
I believe that up until now they have used some flavor of MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) compression. If TiVo were to use license Real's software, they could program their boxes to create low-bitrate copies of shows for viewing on PDA's, etc.
What's that you say? Not yet.
Fuck.
This is exactly where the market is heading and exactly why an open source PVR/VOD [personal video recorder / video on demand] machine is needed. You're going to have several different groups enacting their own (proprietary and probably distribution restricted) versions of video formats over the Internet. There needs to be, at least, a single standard that is used that is open and usable among different vendors. (Yes, you say MPEG, but you need to be more specific. Minimum framerate, audio encoding type, resolution, VBR or CBR, etc.)
While I say, "Hurray!" for content being able to be downloaded over the Internet directly to my television, I already know where this is going. Vendor lock-out. And if you want to broadcast your videos over the Internet to your special interest group, you're going to have to marry a vendor. Ugh.
Reason #8 we need an open source PVR/VOD box. Convergence is happening in the television space.
RealPlayer is one of the lamest products I've ever seen. The image quality is bad, not counting the sound. Also, there's this version nightmare where a stream will NEVER play, no matter what version you have.
On top of that their windoze product annoys you enough to classify it as nagware, specially with the impertinent 'agent' or whatever that will not leave your system tray alone.
RealNetworks should just plain die and disappear. They'd be doing a public service.
The addition of the RealOne Player software to TiVo's upcoming line of second-generation boxes would let users record music from CDs on the devices, as well as download music from the Internet.
i can't wait to see Hilary Rosen's comments on this.
possibly the most interesting and contentious item mentioned in this blurb.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
PC owners are with me, I'm sure, when I say that as horrible as QuickTime is on a PC, I would rather QuickTime than RealPlayer for streaming any single day of the week. Real's streaming performance, in my years of experience, is IMHO the sludge below the barrel. Someone had to scrape the bottom of the barrel so deeply that they found this on the other side. If this idea makes it, I'm listening to my New-Age roommate and signing off of TV for good! :P
It's been asked so much that it's pointless, but WHY DO WE NEED proprietary formats?!? What's wrong with MPEG4?
***sigh of exasperation***
Now of course everyone's response to this is that TiVO should start using open-source codec x or version of DiVX y, but let's face facts people, huge corporations aren't going to give some little-known format a try in their mass-market products just for kicks. If you really want to see RM and WM go away, you have to look to MPEG-4. I would expect to start seeing the big names involved in the format start rolling out big-name products that use MPEG-4 this summer. Apple just started including MPEG-4 support in their OSS QuickTime Streaming Server and it seems likely that they will start including the codec with the player so everyone can export MPEG-4 streams sometime this year.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I think (hope) you all are overreacting. Nowhere in the press release did I see anything about TiVo switching to Real format as its internal storage format. Nowhere did I even really see anything about using this for video, though it was mentioned that RealPlayer plays video (on the PC)... What I do read into this is that it will allow me to use my TiVo as, essentially, an MP3 jukebox. Plus the ability to download new tunes from the net or my PC. That sounds pretty cool to me...
I been thinking, you can buy a hardware decoder for DVDs. But you have to use software decoding for all of the other digital video formats. If I could get a decoder that did mpg, avi, quicktime, real, windows media, and divx. That would kick ass. I wouldn't have to have 100 different media players either. All I would need is a tiny little program that takes the output from the decoder card and puts it up full screen. It would let me actually use my computer while watching videos too!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The TiVo is equipped with only a 50MHz PowerPC chip, IIRC. I remember when running RealPlayer on my PII-266 was like pulling teeth.
I'm just wondering if the poor little TiVo will be able to cope with all the rest of its housekeeping (like streaming the broadcast data to and from disk) and still have enough left to run Real's codec. Perhaps I underestimate the TiVo's CPU power here, but there are times when it definitely chugs (e.g. in displaying the menus after hitting the TiVo button on the remote--that can take up to 7 or 8 seconds in some cases).
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
...the consumer market. Wonderful. Of course, we had a foreetaste of this with the DVD market (gratuitously incompatable movies, buggy players, buggy titles), and it will no doubt get worse. Soon, desktop software manufacturers will no longer have to suffer unfavourable comparisons between their buggy, unreliable products because they'll have invaded the market which has reliable ones!
I haven't seen a Real Video stream in ages. Sure I used to get some Anime in them, but shoot thats been 6 or 7 months at least and even then they were considered 'lame' and somewhat old fashion.
Somebody besides Microsoft _REALLY_ needs to develope a good streaming MPEG4 video codec implementation and start licencing it off for cheap.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I love TiVo, I really do. I have two of them and it's hard to watch TV without them..but...
For my next one I want HDTV support. Right now I have to switch in and out of TiVo to watch HD shows.
I want broadband support. My monthly service for TiVo is effectively doubled since I have to keep a phoneline around for it. I guess I could hack in TivoNet...but I don't have time right now. I want to totally switch to my cell phone.
I want the ability to move shows to other recorders..or better yet, have one master box and several slaves on other TVs similar to that new one that was just announced.
As may have been pointed out, the quality of the RM stream and such has much more to do with how the source material is handled than other factors.
I encode a fair amount of content using they're free realproducer frequently. The difference between something as simple as s-video sources rather than composite video or coax.
Also, the bitrate and how it is allocated makes a big difference, I don't mean just throwing the highest quality samplerate at it and letting it go. I've seen to many people encode something at 200kbps+ and leave the audio at "Voice Only" which sounds like absolute crap
a little consolidation in the home media market in the near future... Maybe Sony buying Tivo, incorporating it's technology into a future version of the Playstation, along with the ability to play Real Media files. You know XBox will have this capability with Windows Media files in the future. Then you also have companies such as AOL/TW who could become a player. I'm sure there are others too.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Or they just stop supporting the old boxes. But such a blow to their established market would be a fatal error, no matter what promise the new technology holds.
Suppose, though, that cash strapped as they are, they offer you a trade-in/upgrade. What would you do?
As far as I'm concerned, the choices are getting muddier. Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse because some of these companies are now soley focused on profit. Technology of tomorrow with the quality of VHS, all for a subscription fee. Gee, thanks.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
People's TiVos also went and recorded a Lexus commercial which many claimed interfered with another program they had expected the TiVo to record. People were up in arms about this, and for a time, the online TiVo forums were swamped with requests for information on how to opt out of this nonsense. (To opt out, call TiVo. They'll gladly kill future adverts for you. I did, and haven't had any more junk.)
Presumably what TiVo wants to do now is to have video downloaded during the nightly call, so they can do future video advertisements without interfering with program schedules and, more importantly, avoid paying broadcasters to display the commercial/video they want recorded.
As an aside - how many of you bought your TiVo to avoid watching commercials, not to have new ones added?
It's people like you who put Netscape where it is today. While MS was improving IE, you and your ilk were sitting around saying, "Hey, it's okay that Netscape munges tables and needs to reload everything if I *gasp* resize the page -- everyone should support them because they're not Microsoft!" Keep supporting screw-ups just because you hate their enemy and you'll ensure that they always remain screw-ups, because the only thing they need to do to retain that particular business model for a while is to not be bought out by said enemy -- that is, until they finally go out of business because people couldn't take the crappiness anymore.
Oh, and this is coming from someone who prefers Windows Media Player 8, hates all versions of QuickTime, and is happy enough with Real to be a GoldPass subscriber ('though not a Real One subscriber, although that's the player I use for Real now). And call me crazy, but I let them bill me every month because the service they provide is worth it to me, not because they ain't Microsoft.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
In the future, computers will not be programed to help you select the content you want, they will be programed to force you to watch even more comercials. "Don't touch that dial while I play this new Lexus advert. I won't let you anyway."
Really, I hope not but it looks like the TV is creeping closer to my computer than the other way around.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"Would you like some open source fries with that?" :)
What is the benefit of having TiVo support Real's formats? I just don't see it.
An hour, tops, if you have any ability to follow directions at all.
Getting more useful things like TivoWeb set up takes a bit more time, and some Linux experience, but I'd be shocked if anyone who could basically follow a sheet of paper with directions couldn't install TivoNet without any problems at all.
I had to install real to view some videos on my Windows machine and it was a nightmare. Plenty of forms to fill just to install the thing. All of a sudden, Real became the default Media Player for my MPEG files. I tried to change the default MPEG player to Windows Media Player but RealOne messes with the settings everytime and reestablishes itself as the default player. Finally, I uninstalled it.
And QT6 should be coming out pretty soon... I'm not sure exactly how they will distinguish quicktime versus other MPEG4 solutions (not that I've heard of any), but the potential for doing great things with quicktime is obviously there. Of course it remains to be seen whether a robust, standards-based architecture can stand up to less-functional proprietary formats with that have negotiated control over content and distribution.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I can finally watch streaming video on TV!
err. wait. That's what tv is.
Even when I paid my money to get the non-nag-ware version of Real, it still did all of this rediculous marketing garbage! I uninstalled it
and am not looking back.
I like my software to be unobtrusive and dependable. Real just really wants to get in my face.
-Jim
Celebrate Excellence!
looks like Tivo are desperate to link their customer profiles with those of the online users , Real are masters at tracking and do everything in their power to hide it from encrypted links in their players to deceptive tactics to get their TSR player in your start bar
/. readers it seems , my privacy however small does matter to me and ill be dammed if its for sale to anyone
by teaming up with Tivo they will be able to incorporate tracking and profiling technology that you will not be able to examine or even question, AND you will be paying THEM for the privilidge.
personally i wouldn't have a Tivo even if you paid ME if it needs to connect to the phoneline
i would be very suspicious when my video or hi fi wants to connect to a telephone and then sends encrypted data (Tivo) to a commercial company which of course is "anonymous" yeah right like it matters anyway
Unlike it seems many of
Windows ME and QT whatever is on Apple's site right now.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I tend to agree with the Troll. I have not had good quality encodes with Real compared to Microsoft's MPEG4. It seems to me the best video encodes on your favorite file sharing applications are usually in MPEG4 or DivX. Is this a coincidence or is there another reason this format is preferred in that community?
Real (as opposed to RealTM) viruses are coded well.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
The MSNBC article is lacking in details. RealNetworks press releases are here and here. Anyways, I would assume TiVo would get some of the $ from the RealOne subscription service. Apple could learn a thing or two from RealNetworks and M$ about marketing Quicktime.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
Technically, it gives them (Tivo) a low-bandwidth streaming video option for PPV flicks, cross-feed from your home network perhaps.
Politically, after the WMV-on-DVD-players announcement, it gives Real a PR counterpunch.
As little as I like the quality of most RM files, I'm glad to see a response to Gates' latest push to *really* become King of All Media.
Just pirate it. If they're gonna release shitty software, why spend your money on it? I suppose this should apply to Windows, too, but...hmm...
[insert witty comment here]
I believe you're referring to artifacting. The blocky look sometimes.
:) Digital Cable and DVD have about 5 to 10 times the rate of your average DiVX. Thats why you see blocking. But it's not a failure of Divx. It's a failure of CD capacity.
That's a quality of ALL mpeg formats. I've seen it on digital cable, and on DVDs. One of the things that defines MPEG is that the image is broken up into 16x16 pixel blocks, which are then compressed. The only reason you notice it on DiVX videos is that they are low "bandwidth", or kilobits per second. The higher the bandwidth, the less they have to compress, and the more the compressed image looks like the original.
In closing