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Tivo Quadcard Promises Thousand-Hour PVR
edrock200 writes "The folks over at 9thtee are developing a quad card for Tivo series 1 and Tivo/DirecTV combo units...it will allow you to
add 4 hard drives to your Tivo and also break the 133gb limit for each drive....this will effectively give you a 1200-hour unit with 4 320GB drives. Theres also a fairly detailed thread of the development process over at the AVS forums." Gonna need the space since scifi has decided to air 4 episodes of SG1 a day!
...but, show me where you can get a 320 gig drive.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What does the MPAA have to say about this?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Brain/eye bandwidth is now the real problem. Anyone working on that?
If you have banked 1200 hours of TV programming that you still need to watch, you've obviously been slacking off on your TV watching responsibilities. Come on, people, get with the program... you act like all you have to do all day is work or something.
Quick question, I don't own a Tivo or HDTV but if you were to record an HDTV broadcast would it not require more HD space? Would this not better quality be a better use than more recording time?
how cool is that, 1000 hours. I wonder how much it would cost for all those large hard drives + tivo
My Tivo has 60some hours of recording time. And it's more than enough. The reality of TV watching is that there is very little worth seeing more than twice. I don't know that I've ever had anything auto-deleted that I wanted to watch, and if I did, I'd blame myself for not getting around to it in the first 30 days. If you're shopping Tivos, upgrade, but don't go nuts, it's just not necessary...
That's 50 days of straight programming. 50 days, 24 hours a day.
It's cool, but come on, it's unnecessary. If you are 1200 hours behind in programming, you are just not going to catch up, period.
I suppose this would be cool though if you had 4 smaller hard drives around that you weren't doing anything with, to increase the capacity more without having to buy another hard drive, or swap out one that you were already using for the Tivo.
Mark
Whoo! Now I can sit here and lose my job, so I can't afford the subscription for my TiVO, so I can't record any more TV!
I'm thinking of buying a PVR soon, but I'm still undecided as to which. ReplayTV seems to have more features than Tivo (ethernet, commercial skip), but I'm interested in hearing from the Slashdot folk which they prefer. Thanks for your answers!
http://www.talknerdy.org
...has enough time to watch that much programming???? Isn't the reason to buy a TiVo is so you can watch stuff later that you didn't have time for in the first place???
yeah... like almost two monthes of non-stop, no-break TV.
even if you zap (not skip, zap) ALL the commercials, you still need like a whole month and some such to watch the whole thing.
put on some sunscreen cuz you *will* get tan from the TV radiations.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
1000+ hours is awesome, but what good is it if you want to record more than one channel at a time?
Are there any tuner hacks to TiVo?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Taco wrote "Gonna need the space since scifi has decided to air 4 episodes of SG1 a day." I thought we were boycotting ScFi until they decided to bring back Farscape ;)
.. not that you don't actually need to record and save that much TV/Movies on your Tivo, but rather it can be done and Tivo doesn't seem to be preventing it.
What makes Tivo so popular to "hackers" is that Tivo does not seek legal action on every little hack that is developed. Of course, if one would create a hack that bypasses the subscription process; that's a different story, but they seem to be pretty open to hacks such as these.
Too bad we can't say the same for xBox. I would really love it if I could also use my xBox as a MAME console.
Live web cams
Unless you buy the latest processor simply to burn a hole in your enormous wallet,
the true value of this will be the average person who has a bunch of extra hd's and would like a little more room on their tivo.
Also on the swapping angle: I wonder if you could store the "Kids in the Hall" marathon, or "Law and Order" marathon on a harddrive, remove it and put it on ice for a while, then the next time you have a long weekend and nothings on plug that bad-bwoy in and watch,watch, watch, go pee, watch, watch, watch some more, etc.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Now, if those 4 drives are a raid array, and I can keep my shows through a disk crash, then I'm impressed. Otherwise, nah.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
-Record everything in best quality. Sure you have 60 hours, but that's at the lowest quality. You reallt only have 15-20 at highest quality.
-Record entire seasons. I would have loved to record the 24 straight hours of "24" at highest quality, and kept them around for when friends come over/etc!
-Go wish-list crazy. I love cops, and it's always showing on 243 channels at once. I could just set it to go cop-crazy, and not worry about it filling up my tivo and pushing other stuff off.
This is absurd. Does the consumerist beast that is America know no bounds?
No.
screw bounds checking, that ADA stuff is for dorks. Even the DOD dropped it!
Mekka- Do-dork-ahedron -B
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Sci-Fi channel is going to be showing four episodes of "Stargate SG-1" a
week, not a day. Now, they are going to show them back-to-back on
Monday night through prime-time and then strip them after prime-time
Monday through Thursday, but that is still only four a week (not
counting season five airing on Friday, but that's only one more
episode).
They're also going to show "X-Files" at eight episodes a week: four on
Tuesday and four on Wednesday. I wonder how long this schedule will
last (I can't imagine that one show will really pull the ratings in when
you run it that much).
This is the sound of a very small violin playing....can you hear it?
That's equivilent to 400 3-hour VHS tapes!!!
I'm pretty sure that you didn't spend 500 days outside last year either. . .
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
YES, for the same reason people pay 250 dollars more for a P4 2.8 over a P4 2.53mhz. proc.
[insert childish voice] "Look what I can do" [End childish voice]
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Yea, but this one goes to 1200 hours!
I have a couple of those little cameras outside my house to see who is out there when I am inside. That would be perfect for recording the days events. In case someone steals the mail again, or is crusing the neighborhood to rip off a car, or those pesky teenagers start bashing mailboxes, I can "go to the replay" and catch that sucker nearly two months after the fact.
That and record every Simpsons episode ever.
Not for me, I record all my favorite movies into divX, hopefully soon to DvD-ROM.
What these things really need is a form of media recorder which they can dump/archive stuff on, rather than superhuge hard-drives.
For all those that want to collect EVERY Star trek episode, a solution will come - phorm
Step 2. Record TV shows using point and click interface in VCD format...
Step 3. Use software that came with CD-R drive to burn VCD's of your favorite movies and TV shows... (74 min per CD and playable in nearly any DVD player!
This is a cheap and effective alternative to TIVO of any sort considering that you probably already have a CD-R drive, and the AIW card is relatively inexpensive... Also, you can store 1000 hours of programming for far less than a single 320 GB drive will cost *when* it becomes availiable. As an added bonus, the VCD's that you burn are very portable and can easily be taken to friends' houses as well as stored for years to come...
Forget about the quad-card. I'm waiting for the Fiber Channel card... 32 TB SAN here I come!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Tivo's only do standard resolution television. Therefore, you would need a HDTV box that has a s-video out to record, and it would be recorded at standard tivo resolution (480x480) on a stand-alone (non direcTV) Tivo.
Dish network is working on an HDTV PVR, the 921, and Sony is rumored to be working on an HDTV unit as well, but no word whether tivo technology will be used on that.
You should check out this forum For the latest on tivo technology. A few tivo employees are active contributers-- and the news always hits this place first.
I can see the headlines already
....
... and now it is even easier to copy more shows at one!
:)
TiVo-ster sued by HBO
It is only a matter of time before some blood thirsty group of lawyers realizes that people are now able to make perfect, digital copies of television shows, movies, sporting events, and special network events and that these people are able to reproduce and sell them or redistribe them w/o the express written consent of Major League Baseball
Seriously, has anyone really taken the time and thought about the possible legal issues with this
Breaking out the crystal ball
This will make a great slashdot follow-up article in a year or so
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
use ShowShifter pro to encode in DivX Pro/SVCD. VCD quality really bites. VHS is superior.
BTW if it were just for PVR, AIW Radeon is overkill. My *vintage* AIW does the task of capturing live streams just fine.
AIW 128 would be reasonable. USB versions get enough throughput to do the job well, too.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
From one of the linked pages:
I know from my own Tivo that heat is definately a problem in these things with only two drives.
What might fit the ticket a little better would be a firewire (or serial ATA ?) interface and external drives in a separate case, with separate power supply. Unfortunately, I calculate USB to be a bit too slow for simultaneous record/playback at high quality.
Or, even better, how about SCSI with external drives? Well, maybe it's not better, given the price differential on SCSI drives. Hmmm.
I upped my Series 1 to 143hr(1-120GB HD) at basic. I have 3 full pages(screens) of movies and all the shows I ever wanted to see. How much space does one really need. I could put a second 120 in there but I dont see the point. The only thing I record at best is NFL and I delete them after I watch em. I am not studying plays and formations so .... Time shifting live sports sucks if you know the final score anyway.
The problem is that they need to GET SOME PRIORITIES.
I think we have 10 comments already on how you don't need this much to keep up with your tv watching. Which is of course true.
But what makes this compelling to me is as a permanent storage medium. You can store entire seasons of many of your favorite shows. Every Seinfeld, Buffy, +20 other shows episode available within a few seconds, in perfect broadcast quality for ever.
I'd pay for that!
Yeah. We need TV time regulation. Hell, screw regulation, straight up codify it into law. You have no rights.
I want to know about the wireless NIC in the picture!
Would be nice if you can mirror the two drives with the other two. Hence preserving your recorded shows on a more perm basis. Perhaps there might be a BIOS hack for this to perform this at a lower or software level.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Replaytv 4000s and up can support dedicated video servers (with the help of programs like DVarchive). You could put terrabytes of storage on the server, service both replaytv and pcs, and implement fault tolerance. Who wants a noisy, hot, electronic device in their living room?
Don't think of it like your current Tivo, where you record shows to watch later in the week; instead, think of it as a video archive machine. I was just going through my old video tapes last night, and was amazed by the things I have on tape that I totally forgot about. Imagine that instead of having every episode of the Simpsons on tape somewhere, you have every episode archived and instantly available on your Tivo. And heck, you would probably put all of your home videos on it; now you can re-watch the birth of your son at the push of a button!
Of course, this probably actually requires more space than 1200 hours (you would want redundancy, so RAID eats some of that, and you would want to record in a higher-quality mode, eating even more.) This is ridiculously expensive today, but I bet that in 5 years, the "Tivo video archive" will be common.
SVCD/Divx Pro is better quality, yes, but when played back on a television, there is very little noticible difference, and the formats you mentioned are not so easily playable on nearly any DVD player. AIW Radeon 7500 has hardware MPEG2 encoder and free TIVO-style programming guide, which are the only two reasons I chose this over an older AIW board...
Whether or not this is necessary, or the right allocation of home disk storage, I find it oddly charming to think of a terabyte disk array as a home appliance.
I think Farscape was the first program they carried longer than 2 seasons. They disappoint anybody who follows a show. Stargate will disappear after the next season...
..you can capture nearly all of the SNL skits that weren't funny!
Haven't we all been waiting for a way to archive all our movies the way we've archived our music? Just because TiVo records 1200 hours worth of programming doesn't mean you have to watch it all!
Mine has 120 hours of capacity and I've always got some Hitchcock and Woody Allen movies along with the regulary Buffy, Simpsons and West Wing stuff.
More capacity means I can keep stuff on the TiVo much longer and still use it like muggle TiVo owners do.
And no, you CAN NOT make a PC do this with ANY capture card. TiVo's software rocks. It's like Mac OS X vs. DOS. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video inputs. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video outputs. It's virtually silent. On-screen programming guide. Two-button recording. Wish lists. And a whole bunch of other stuff you just can't appreciate until you have one.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
So what you're saying is that they both look like crap? Personally the vcd format makes me sick. Do you output the captures you make to a tv?
With 1200 hours available, I'll be all set to follow the next O.J. Simpson murder trial.
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Copyright Industry Association of America spokestrog Vilary Halenti today lamented "the emergence of a new and more deadly form of IPiracy that will soon raid the and pillage the IP repositories of this great nation. The IPirates have upgraded from their little rubber dinghies they used to IPirate Copyrighted Protected Digital Intelletctual Property and are now getting TiVo-class heavy freighters that they can use to IPirate even more than ever before. We are disappointed that the US hasn't gone after these terrorists with the same vigor that they've gone after the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We can only hope that Rep. Berman's legalized hacking for rich copyright holders bill will set the precedent necessary for giving us the broad powers we need to defeat the IPirates."
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
The main reason that most people hack the original Tivos is to get more HD space so they can record more shows. The problem with this is that when you update the "Season Pass" (the list of shows to record), it gets slower as the list gets longer. A lot slower. Modifying a Seasons Pass with > 20 programs can take minutes. A friend of mine has to wait for 10 minutes every time he updates the list. A 1000GB Tivo would be completely unusable.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
nt.
Has your head exploded yet?
Best Slashdot Co
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
With only 2-3hrs/week of TV, yeah, you'd be fine.
1200HRs of TV means you are look at the TV too much. Even over a year.
Hmm, I think I'll select Tuesday.
Damn, never have mod points when I need them.
Best Slashdot Co
First of all, you're saying it's cheaper, but it's not. You're leaving out the cost of your computer, hard drives, etc. Now add $150 for the special video card. And to top it all off, what you're left with is nowhere near as easy to use or as convenient or as smart or as living-room-appearance-friendly as TiVo.
Although it would be nice to have an easy way to pull and archive video off TiVo, it's not crucial, and if it was, I could use one of the TiVo net hacks to implement it.
"And like that
If you do what you are saying, you then have an archive of all kinds of crap that you don't want to watch more than once, you don't get automated selection of shows to record, you've got to swap disks when you're not home, you need to have a PC dedicated to the task, and you waste an infinite amount of media.
I'd rather spend $100 and get a TiVo, plug it in and have it work, and delete the shows when I'm done with them. I love the suggestions, too.
What you suggested isn't TiVo like at all. It's a VCR with a fancy interface and discs instead of tapes.
Where are you getting this "$100" tivo?!
All I see is $250 used!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
1.2 terabytes should be enough for anyone?
Tivo service is not available in Canada. Are there any competing products that are available up here (that don't require satellite tv service, I don't want bell expressvu). I can't find any info on availability on the ReplayTV website. Am I going to have to build a small form factor windows box with an ATI A-I-W 7500 in it?
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Not to rain on their parade, I like saving shows as much as the next packgeek and it is nice to just let the TIVO record what it will and then delete what you aren't interested in.
:)
The problem is, when you get up to only 100+ gig of storage space on it, even with the memory modifications, the TIVO takes a while to bring the recording lists up (~1-2 minutes on my full 120 single drive unit). Having all that space isn't really going to do much if it takes 5-10 minutes everytime you want to look through your recording list. On the bright side, the guys at 9th tee know this already so I have high hopes for a solution when the drive expansion unit becomes available
Star Trek, Farscape, South Park in the day...
Hot Les Porn at night.
$1 / month service charge, no commercials, anyone interested? Heh.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"The folks over at 9thtee are developing..."
NOT!
The QuadCard, like the AirNet and TurboNet adapters also sold through 9thTee, were developed by a TiVo user named Nick Kelsey (known as "jafa" on the TiVo Community Forum.) 9thTee is the distributor - though I don't want to take anything away from them, they have been remarkably supportive of the TiVo community and they deserve kudos for taking the financial risks of selling these add-ons.
It is truly amazing what Nick has been able to do with his electronics expertise.
May be susceptible to TiVo automatic software upgrades.
I think it would officially _suck_ to spend 1k+ on all this, only to have a software update render it unusable.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Like the nomad jukebox, when you add a large new hard drive to the tivo the interface gets much slower. The only way to fix this is to increase the memory. Although there is an upgrade kit to do this it is quite difficult.
haven't you(presumably isnce you seem like a fan) already seen these? And if so wouldn't you have already Tivo'ed them?
You mean fed and shod.
The reason you can't support your family is because you are an illiterate CLOD.
This is cute and all, but imo, it'll end up doing the same thing that the 2x120gb upgrades do to the TiVo: Just show how miserable the TiVo is at dealing with a big number of programs.
It does work, but the results aren't something I'd like to deal with. One big list (at least you can change the sort order with the latest version of the software). No folders, no searching. Oh, and from what I hear, it can really slow down the TiVo. My un-hacked TiVo takes minutes to exit the season pass manager, and often stumbles for a few seconds pulling up the now playing list. I'd hate to think how long I'm staring at the "Please Wait" display if I had one of these uber-upgrades. Heck, it's bad enough on my unit: Which of the four South Parks is the one I haven't watched yet, and which three are the ones I'm saving for my SO to watch? No way to know from the list, and since it's a show on Comedy Central, there's no way to know without going into the program itself because guide data is sketchy.
Until TiVo really speeds up there system (assuming they can, there's not a lot of horsepower in your average TiVo box), and adds some more advanced options to organize and maintain shows, I think I'll just stick with my ~35 hours. 100+ hours is a nice idea, but IMO, TiVo just doesn't scale that well yet.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
They cancelled Farscape. After the last ep of Farscape, I won't watch that lousy network again! That goes for Spewburg's latest, too. -DNA
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
I mean really, there's always someone who says:
Get old (486/Pentium/PII), install capture card, xxx GB disk, xyz software, burner and its "as good as Tivo".
Occasionally you can substitute in "install linux, xwindows, etc" in there someplace.
Having upgraded my TiVo to 120ish hours, I can say with some certainty that you aren't going to like your base model TiVo very much if you do this upgrade. Apparently the RAM in a TiVo is very limited (32MB), and even with only 120GB in there it can take sevaral (usually 2-5) seconds to pull up the list. I can't imagine what a 1000Hr TiVo would be like.
OTOH, you CAN upgrade the Ram in a TiVo, but it's not something just anybody can do (you'd better be good at sodering surface mount parts on expensive hardware).
I read the internet for the articles.
Now all I need is a way to have 1000 hours to watch the shows I've recorded. Anyone developing a time machine that'll be ready for consumers this holiday season?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
We've got a 60 hour gen II (love it!), and never run out of space, usually have 20-30 shows stacked up at higher quality. ONly purpose I guess is if you wanted to archive stuff, but its not really a good long-term archive, unless they also figure out how to support hot-swapping and RAID for failsafe.
RAID can also be faster, you know. If one disk can read one file in 1 minute, then three can read it in 20 seconds if there's an equal piece on three drives. (You stick the checksum on the fourth.)
I've never understood why RAID technology hasn't made it to the desktop. You get speed and realibility.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Well, first, the TiVO hack to enable the skip is not quite the same as the comercial skip on the ReplayTVs. The ReplayTVs automatically detecte the commercial and skip over it. It works about 80-90% of the time for me. The Tivo Hack gives the same abilities as the ReplayTV 2000/3000 (and 4000) to jump quickly 30 seoncds ahead (which is still great).
But, the ReplayTV 4000/4500 series have a ethernet plug AND have DVArchive that allows you to turn a PC into a virtual ReplayTV - downloading and storaing shows and serving them back up to your replay TV. You can keep adding disks and space and never violate the warranty. It even has an automated scheduler so it can sweep good stuff off your ReplayTV while you are away (keeping things from rolling over and losing good shows from lack of space).
You've been warned, if you're here to mod offtopic, have some heart man.
I took a year long break from conan myself. He's always funny, but his jokes are identical (he's done that new Quarter graphics joke at least 5 times). He gets old, but a long break can make him very funny again.
I just threw him on the other day and enjoyed him a lot. He's exactly as he always was... I'd flip him on again if I were you. A couple nights ago he did a bit on Triumph the Comic dog at the VMA (video music awards). It was pretty good, and I'm not really a fan of Triumph.
I never watch the interview unless they're with someone outstanding... without them, it's only a 15 minute commitment, and that's worth the effort.
WARNING: NEW BAND LEADER, and he's not very good. At least, there was a new band leader on a couple nights ago and he wasn't very good them.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
IMHO, 1.2TB would be better located on a file server or workstation than in a TiVo. With Ethernet or wireless networking added to a TiVo, you can always offload stuff you want to archive to somewhere else on the network. Edit, reencode, and burn to SVCD, and you can play an ad-free show in your DVD player. If the drives in your TiVo go tango-uniform one day, your SVCDs will still play just fine.
(I'd like to upgrade from TiVoNET to TurboNET sometime, though...even with the TiVo's fairly slow processor, the move to Fast Ethernet is still supposed to be good for a 2-3x speed increase. That'd be more useful to me than more storage. I already have 100GB in mine, and even with everything recorded at best quality, I'm not cramped for space. At most, I might stick another 100-120GB hard drive in.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Here's what I see as the problem with this much storage:
If these issues can be resolved, I bet quite a few geeks would actually get some use out of 1200 hours of programs.
Hmmm... Thats all well and fine... but a bit excessive I'd say. I dont currently own a tivo - many of my friends do - and although I think they are nice, I dont think that I miss all that much not having 1200 hours or any other number, worth of space for recording.
however! please contact me when they have come out with a tivo that has an automated DVD burner in it - where I can schedule a show to be recorded - burned - deleted all while I am out at the beach!
1) I have my TiVO record my favorite shows.
2) I dump the saved programs (over Telnet) to my main computer.
3) I de-interlace and convert the MPEG2 stream to a 452x460 (from a 480x480 source, but with the TV noise trimmed off the sides) DiVX or SVCD.
4) I have a perfect copy of the recorded show.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
I could transfer my porn collection from VHS and free up a lot of physical space.
I seem to recall people having trouble with the speed of the "now showing" window after their upgrade to 140hrs. If that's true, I can't imagine what 700 would do...
Anybody experienced this firsthand?
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I wonder if you could hook up a hardware IDE RAID box to this. 4 of those boxes with a 3x360 gig RAID5 in each one...That'd be 2880 gigs.
Exactly my point. Why bother with having HUGE TiVo hard drives when you can just dump either to a PC and then record as divX, or just include a semi-permanent storage device that works with TiVo? It'd be sweet to have an addin that hooks right to TiVo and burns DivX CD's, or maybe SVCD/DVD-ROMs. Maybe there is stuch a device, and I'm not aware?
Personally, I haven't had broadcast TV for over 2 years now, never missed it - phorm
No no, I was laying out what I do to contradict your "no huge tivo" argument :) I just let the TiVO do the hard work (actually capturing the MPEG2 video), and then dump it off to my PC for conversion. I have yet to find a PC-based PVR that works reliably (as ATI cards are filth.).. Maybe I'll give Sigma's PVR card a shot someday though.
I do agree that TiVO should use some sort of network attached storage, or be capable of storing it's data across a network.. but I think the Tivo corporation is a little wary of this, as it might make "pirating" video an easier task.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
I'd rather have the option to either burn to DVD or transfer the programs to a computer so I can edit them down and burn to DVD.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Is the unit also modified with 802.11?
You have really hit on a big issue from my point about TiVo not recording particular scenes. I've got several programs that all I'm keeping them for are particular scenes. Nikita meeting Jurgen for the first time ("Why are you here?"), Byers' dream from the X Files ep "Three Of A Kind (best scene in the whole series - one fantastic, continuous shot that ends "I lose it all"), the brain surgery scene from RoboCop 2 - the most chilling scene ever filmed in sci-fi in my opinion, perfectly balanced by the absurd telethon scene that follows...People do "best mix" CDs of audio all the time, I wish we could do TiVo mix disks just as easily...
Why does everyone have the false impression that the AIW Radeons have hardware mpeg2 encoders? They don't even have hardware decoders.. and why do you think the minimum specs for PVR functionality are as high as they are? ATI has done a wonderful job of making it look like there is hardware mpeg2 encoding and preventing anyone else from saying one way or the other. Search long and hard enough and you will find that behind ATI's confusing marketing there is no hardware encoder.
If you want a REAL PC PVR unit look at the soon to be released WinTV-PVR 350. Mpeg2 decoding/encoding, s-video/composite/coax input, s-video output, and OSD all built into it... altho the software admittedly blows and the remote is a total piece of shit... however if you really wanted to hauppauge has a really easy to use api for making 3rd party programs for their cards and you can get a better remote.
The original DirecTV stream saved by DirecTiVO is a modified 480x480 NTSC SVCD MPEG2 VBR stream, running at above-normal bitrates. I've heard there are utilities that will readjust the data stream to use standard MPEG2 VBR formats so that they can be dumped off for later viewing.
The problem with that is that the vast majority of set-top players can't handle that high an SVCD stream rate, so playback is an issue. If you copy the SVCD data to HDD for playback, the data rate isn't an issue, but you can't do that with a set-top player.
Some people have had luck with using MPEG editors to clip commercials from the data stream, tie the two MPEG segments together, and burning them off to DVD-R. Some set-top players can deal with that and will display a full NTSC screen with such a source, but it is not a standard DVD format so there are no guarantees.
Any direct data stream work assumes you're going to muck around with various kernel patches and stuff to disable the encryption of the data during the write to the HDD.
Personally I just settled for doing S-VHS wiring to an ASUS GF2MX card with video capture. Edit the HuffYUV files with VDub, and save as DiVX. Takes hours of CPU (PIII933), but it works. I find quality based 1-pass at 2.1 or 2-pass at 1500+ is indistinguishable from the original source, provided you've got enough CPU to turn some of the playback filtering on.
Eventually I got tired of wasting my time with all the editing and stuff, so the box is back to running SuSE 8.0. It was a very educational few months, though, and I learned a lot about video processing, filtering, and formats. I ended up with a few seasons worth of series archived, but movies are easier to just buy.
If finances permit, it's a lot cheaper to just buy season box sets, even at $80/season. Even at 15 minutes to edit out commercials, 20 episodes/season, you're still looking at about 4 hours of manual labour to capture and save a season. Add some more time for burning (say an hour), a reasonable pay scale in the tech industry, and it costs less to buy DVDs that use higher resolution and a much higher data rate.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I wouldn't mind using my Tivo as a permanent storage medium, but the software isn't really built for that. My unit only stores 30 hours, and at lower qualities, that still makes a mess. If I had entire seasons of shows on the same scrolling list, I wouldn't be able to find anything.
I think some work needs to be done on the software before Tivo can become usefull as permanent storage.
I have a stock 30 hour TiVo standalone.
When I leave the Season Pass manager after rearranging a couple things, it can take a couple of minutes for the Please Wait to finally go away. I actually curse when I accidentally leave the Pass Manager before I'm done -- at least it gives me time to go grab a snack from the kitchen.
Just FYI, I only have about 17 Season Passes and I keep my Now Playing list fairly clean.
I've always attributed the sluggish (sometimes sloth-like) performance to the combination of pathetic RAM and also the 50MHz CPU. I really wish I could increase the RAM easily (at my own expense obviously) via a DIMM slot or something similar.
Despite all of this (and maybe this is the reason it never gets better), I love my TiVo and will never go back to normal TV watching. I continue to recommend TiVo to all of my friends, just with a warning about the occasional performance issues.
Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
Problem is that with approx 60 hours of recorded material when clicking on the "Now Playing", the upgraded Tivo takes about 2 minutes (feels like 2 hours...)to update and display the list of recorded programs. I can only imagine how bad it will be when I max out all 184 hours (if I don't hit some magic limit in Tivo indexing by then).
Unless Tivo fixes its indexing mechanism -- expanding a Tivo much beyond 150 hours capacity is going to make for a very frustrating hack. (BTW - thanks to the guys/gals at 9th Tee who sold me the mounting bracket for my Tivo upgrade -- their web site is invaluable when doing the hack. Now all I need to do is case mod my Tivo and I'm done)
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
There's yet another reason for a 1TB-TiVo - OCD!
:-O
Yes, there are several forms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. There are the "cleaners" - can never get clean enough. There are the "checkers" - always checking to see that something was done... and there are the "hoarders" - can NEVER have enough stuff. I know several of these - and yes, one of them is a MEDIA Hoarder... can never SAVE enough media - after all there might be a NEED for that 20yo first episode of Night Rider... really.
A 1TB-TiVo will make these people SO happy
++Bill
Take a look at pvrcompare.com. Eric Lund has also finally updated his site to include the new Tivos and Replays.
Sorry, not calling you stupid, that was just the title of a great networking article a few years ago, pointing out an analogous problem.
With 50 days of straight programming, you can watch shows that far behind.
So, for instance, I could record the entire season of Dead Zone, Justice League, and Stargate, then watch them all back-to-back. I happen to mention those shows because they build a story over time By back-to-back, I don't mean in a marathon, but whenever I choose to watch TV.
It completely destroys the network's concept of 'seasons', though, so don't look for them to cheer-lead this one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I feel it's a great example of the strength of TiVo's software. That 3rd party hacks like this can be made is a testament to the device and it's design (HW and SW).
"And like that