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New Sony PVR/DVR and DVD Recorder
i4u writes "Sony announces in Japan a new digital recorder NDR-XR1 equipped with the 80GB hard drive and a DVD recorder.
The unit features a broadband connection to retrieve a programming guide. The system can record up to 90 hours of programming on the 80GB Hard drive.
Recorded shows can be directly burned on DVDs with the built-in DVD writer.
This is the dream machine! Wonder if it will be available on the US market, This baby is poised to 'piss-off' Hollywood. This would be a nice alternative to the ReplayTV box.
The Digital Recorder NDR-XR1 will go on sale April 12th in Japan."
I saw pioneer (i think) had a similar unit. It had a 40GB hard drive though. I'm not sure what this unit does, but the one that I saw, once you burn a recording onto DVD, it deletes it off the HD. I find that kind of annoying, but I guess they had to do that to compromise with the movie companies (only allow one copy at a time, and don't allow mass burns of the same program). I hope this one does not have tha behavior.
today is spelling optional day.
I don't know. Think about this. PVR's piss off hollywood because you FF through commercials. But, even though you WILL FF through commercials on this also, the commercials will be permantntly burned into a DVD. What sales company doesn't like the idea of permanent commercials on a DVD?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I own two Tivo boxes, and wouldn't give them up for anything. Unless I see something better, of course...
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Run the page through babelfish.altavista.com. Not a perfect translation but enough to get the jist. Looks like it's only capable of 90 hours on it's lowest quality setting. The highest results in 15 hours. Gee.. wonder what type of compression it's using... could it be MPEG-2? Must be if it's designed to burn DVD. How much more could it fit if divx were used? It is kind of nice though, with an 80 gig hard drive, it must keep the price relatively low... Aside from the dvd burner, all other features are standard on most PVRs. The variable bit rate encoding is rather nice, but again, what can this do that my computer (with a dvd burner and all in wonder 9700) can't?
The same kind who shut down websites for containing video clips of commercials.
It was one of the dumbest things I have ever heard, when a few years ago a website (can't remember the name) was SHUT DOWN for containing copyrighted material. It was a website of funny/interesting/nostalgic commercials. How stupid could advertisers be, to shut down a website that did their job for them. It's all about control. Insanity.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The history of TV is littered with shows that people like, but the stations drop - the whole reason to own something like this is so that you can record series you really like for later viewing.
Although it would be nice to buy a DVD of the series and help support the actors and such - often there is no way to buy any kind of tape of a series.
Even apart from the series, I'm sure there are many people that would record other weird stuff from TV.. myself, I'd collect commercials I like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can do pretty well with a linux box and myth tv, although its not quite as feature-complete as tivo. A nice solution though :)
God Fucking Damnit
ReplayTV pissed people off because it had features that let you skip commercials, and it had an ethernet port which meant that you could stream video from your ReplayTV to your PC, or just download it directly, which in the MPAA's eyes, means that it'll be that much easier for everyone to become the pirate that they naturally are.
1. For all the Trekkies out there, start recording a season for your own personal use, DVD's will keep better than VHS. It's being broadcasted, we're paying for it through the products we buy. No harm no foul.
2. God knows the Major networks show an made-for-tv movies/specials once and at the very most twice, if you don't get good copy you might never see it again. Example. back in the 80's my brother and I recorded the Kroft puppets (spelling/name may be off, sorry) when the did the "Ronny and Nancy Show". I re-watched that tape till it wore out, now I can't find a copy of it anywhere. If I had one of these, no problems.
Not everyone pirated movies, it's too much crap to deal with. Why would I want a wall covered with DVDs? I barely have enough space for the crap I got now. I don't need/want anymore. I'm sure there are people who feel the same way.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
That's kind of silly since DVDs are drastically higher resolution, better sound (with more channels), etc.
VCD/SVCD would make much more sense... since VCD is VHS quality and SVCD is (supposedly) about the same quality as NTSC is capable of carrying... AND you can play them back in (almost) any DVD player.
Not to mention the fact that it would be MUCH cheaper.
I'd love to have a VCD/SVCD recorder.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Exactly what would you recommend to get decent video capture and real-time encoding, if possible? I built my linux based PVR and even upgraded to a brand new motherboard and processor (1.5 GHz AMD) to see if that would improve video capture. I still only got 15-20 frames per second (because it was captured uncompressed I guess), and capturing sound worked poorly or not at all. Encoding "off-line" (after capture) is fine, but as long as capture was both poor quality and with serious frame dropping, building a linux-based PVR using off-the-shelf components is not something I would recommend.
I also had issues with LIRC. I used the remote control that came with my TV card (a BT based card) and set it up with LIRC. Worked fine - mostly. Unfortunately, LIRC also picked up signals from the other remote controls, and *sometimes* those signals lead to LIRC simply freezing. Restarting the LIRC client was the only solution to get it working again.
Don't get me wrong - it is not that I would not like a "do-it-myself-PVR" running linux, but without proper capture and with the problems with LIRC/remote controls interference, it was very hard to make it easy to use. I set it up so that my girlfriend could use it to play music (mp3/CDs) and watch videos and had to teach her to reboot the box when things froze up and I was not around.
And before people tell me to buy a Tivo - they are not available where I live (Norway), so that is not an option (and the program guide would probably not be supported either, which means it would not be very useful).
So please tell me I am wrong and that everybody else is getting 25-30 frames captured with nice video and sound (preferrably with real-time encoding or an embedded encoding unit before data is streamed to disk to avoid frame skipping) and I might consider giving it another try.
If not, I will wait for more hardware. Either a box that works in my country (Norway), or one that can be hacked to work (scraping programming from web sites), or better hardware to roll my own (a quite mini-itx board with embedded mpeg encoding would be a very nice start).
On a related note, Sony DVD players (well, all in one home theater boxes, which I've been looking at for the past two years or so) used to not play CDR/CDRWs/MP3s etc. I assumed it was because Sony was also a Music / Movie distributor /producer / whatnot and didn't want to encourage copying of its own content (I had to return the Sony unit when I realized it wouldn't let me play anything I'd burned myself, even music CDs. I looked, and at the time _all_ the Sony models at Fry's were this way). Two or three weeks ago I saw the Sony units (they're usually really good looking and I covet!), this time promimently advertising the fact that they could play CDR/CDRW/MP3s/etc (too bad, this came too late for me since I like their units).
Maybe hardware is really just more important to Sony than the other divisions?