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TiVo Home Media Rollout
ncstockguy writes "TiVo rolls out its new Home Media option next week. Subscribers with a Series2 DVR box can get some impressive new functions to their TiVos. They'll be able to screen digital photos on their TVs, listen to music stored on their computer hard drives on their home entertainment units, schedule to tape a show "remotely" through the Internet, and watch a recorded show in different rooms on different TVs. Some of the functions will require two or more computers connected either by WiFi or ethernet."
If you are a DIRECTivo user - a DIRECTV user with a TiVo2 box you do not get these features. TiVo has offered them to DIRECTV, but DIRECTV doesn't seem to want them. I'll keep my TiVo1 series box until DTV gets on the ball. When I can get these new features I'll buy two TiVo2 boxes!
tbdean
...or is anyone else creeped out by that TiVo icon?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
"Some of the functions will require two or more computers connected either by WiFi or ethernet" /.ers have more computers than dates in the past 6 months.
What self respecting Tivo owner has less than two computers?
I am willing to bet some
It's a little suprising how much your view of Television in general changes when you get a PVR. When I originally bought mine I thought it would be a nifty little gadget, now it's painful to go to someone's home that doesn't have one. I'd forgotten how obnoxious commercial's can be.
I hope they have some solid security built in with the Web Server, I would be devastated if someone hacked my Tivo and deleted all my scheduled recordings.
What do you mean Dragon Ball Z didn't record?!?!
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Now if only TiVo was still in the UK. We have Sky+ which can "Pause Live TV". Of course things like MP3 playing/Viewing photos can be done on any modern DVD player but it would be so nice to have an all in one solutions
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
IMO, Tivo now offers two services: the ability to find and record shows easily, and the ability to stream information stored on a PC to consumer electronics devices. This last bit will probably be quite useful for those with video clips (*cough*) stored on their PC.
Still, it's worth checking out the alternatives, especially PC-centric ones like ATI's All-In-Wonder cards. Competition is good.
I've been beta testing the service for a while now...
The Apple Music and photo sharing is awesome, total use of Rendesvous and your iBook, Powermac, etc. shows up immediately in your TiVo categorized down to a "T"
Another feature that a lot of people probably wouldn't expect is to try this: Make a playlist with some internet radio stations and share it out to your TiVo. Access the playlist on your TiVo and you can listen to Internet radio stations on your TV! It's very, very cool and works great!
So Tivo users will have the same functionality as Replay 4000+ users do? It's a damn shame that SonicBlue is in the toilet. With the exception of playing music, my 4580 does all the things Tivo just announced. What's even better is that the line protocol has already been hacked and I can watch recorded programs from any computer in the house with mplayer. Also, I can share with my buddy across the country if he ever gets a 4k series.
Truely a damn shame about Replay. Heck, I've been TCPdumping all comms with it since I heard so that I can disect how to emulate the replay server if it comes to it.
It costs $99 just to unlock the software. You still have to buy a USB ethernet adaptor. And for the old-timers like me, you have to get a series 2 TiVo. (And pay for a new lifetime subscription)
All I wanted was to dump the crappy built-in modem that has died twice in 3 years and use my internet link to get the guide information.
Stuff like this makes me want a roll-your-own PVR. (Gratuitous MythTV link)
Well, the RIAA probably won't care too much. You can't share them from the tivo, you can't boy them from the tivo. You can only play them on the tivo. So from the RIAA POV, it's less threatening than an iPod.
The MPAA? Well, the tivo keeps macrovision intact, so it's not going to change the way people pirate movies. And tivo is only providing a way to transfer shows/movies from one tivo to another tivo on the same network. Tivo is activly discouraging people from transfering shows over the net.
Tivo is a small company, and they know they can't stand up to the Instrustry lawyers. They are doing everything then can to stay on the good side of the evil empires.
--ST
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
1. Viewing files from your home computer (photos, music) requires Windows or a Mac. Their "TiVo Desktop" software is not (yet) available for linux as far as I can tell.
2. The ability to share your recorded shows requires you to buy another Series 2 TiVo and buy (yes, it costs money) the Home Media upgrade for it as well. You cannot "share" the file with anyone else's Series 2 either, only ones registered under the same household account at TiVo HQ. You can't "share" with your computer either, BTW, only another TiVo.
Maybe some of these will be improved over time, either by TiVo or someone else.
so does this mean hackers will be able to fill your TiVo with hours of Telletubbies?
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
Congratulations! Your hardware may be useful for perhaps another 6 months, depending on how Sonicblue's bankruptcy proceedings go!
If you RTFA you'll have the answer to your own question.
"Population 1,656"
For multiroom viewing, you need two tivos, both with active service AND home media option. That's a LOT of money for something that doesn't even seem all that well integrated: the "other" TiVo shows up as a single entry in the "now showing list". It would have been better if the lists of both units were consolidated. I don't really care which unit a show is stored on. What I would like is to be able to simply add another tivo, and have all of them work as a single multi-tuner unit. Now *that* would be nice...
That said I bet its only a few months until the protocol is broken (like replayTV) and you are able to stream movies to an unprotected client.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I was a beta tester for 'HMO', as it's known at TiVo. I've been living with it for the last month--and I'm not going to shell out the $99 to purchase it. Why?
1. Lack of format support. TiVo plays MP3s. That's it. No OGG, no WMA. My collection is mostly in WMA. If I were to start again, it would be into OGG, not MP3.
2. No playlist control. You can create M3U playlists on your computer and play those, but if you don't create playlists ahead of time, you're stuck playing individual songs or folders (which in my case are sorted by artist). You can't switch songs without stopping the current song from playing. That makes it pretty much useless for parties where you'd like live control over what will play next.
3. No photos simultaneously with music. The feature is named "Music & Photos". But it's actually "Music OR Photos". So if you want to play music during your party, your guests get to see a box with song info onscreen, and that's it. If you want to put a slide show up on your TV, your music has to come from somewhere else. Similarly, there are no other visualization toys to play with.
As for the other features, I "only" have one TiVo, so multi-room viewing isn't useful to me.
And in the month I've been using it so far, I've never had the need to schedule programs for my TiVo remotely.
Even if I had, the conflict-resolution options are minimal: record this program if nothing conflicts, or or record it regardless. You don't get to see what may be conflicting, because TiVo connects to the mother ship every 15 minutes or so to check for new orders.
In short, it's a 1.0 feature set, competing against computers in a 3.0 world. If I want music & photos on my TV, I'll just plug my laptop into my AV system and be happy. So sad.
> Any hardware that is capable of decoding video can easily decode Vorbis as well
This is definitely NOT true... TiVo does its MPEG2 encoding and decoding with SPECIFIC hardware that will only encode/decode MPEG. While they could be using it to decode MP3s as well (since MP3 is MPEG1 layer 3 audio) Vorbis is a totally different (and more CPU intensive) audio codec...
Still, this doesn't necessarily mean that the CPU on the TiVo would not be able to handle Vorbis decoding, just that it has nothing to do with the box's ability to decode MPEG2.
You can turn Multi-Room Viewing off on any DVR. You decide which DVRs can share programming. Television programming is not under TiVo's control. Programming providers may restrict or limit the transfer of particular programs. TiVo does not guarantee access to or transfer of any particular program.
They're asking us to pay $100 per unit to let the content providers decide what shows we can transfer? I like how they blame "programming providers" for crippling their software.
My TiVo is a great toy, but it's looking like it's time for this company to die. First they fire RB, and now they snuggle up to the content industry? Screw them, it's time to cancel my subscription and start hacking my box. They had a chance to earn their subscription fee from me, but they blew it when they decided that they were going to give Hollywood control over my own equipment.
Knowing them, they'll probably make the TiVo think I'm a gay, pregnant male.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Why don't you stop using Google, too? They have a "monopoly" in the search engine market. I don't know anyone who uses another search engine anymore, except as a last resort.
The reason Tivo and Google have a "monopoly" as you put it is because they sell a good product, and others have yet to introduce another product that can compete with it effectively.
Nobody is locked out of the PVR market at this point in time, especially since this is a brand new market, and anything can happen. Several big players (e.g. Microsoft, with UltimateTV) have already gone up against Tivo, and failed. It could be in near the future that the perfect PVR will appear that completely destroys Tivo's current dominance, but telling people not to use a product because there are no decent competitors is just wrong. It's still a free market, not a monopoly.
I read your post twice. I read it out loud in a serious voice and then in a sarcastic voice. They both made perfect sense.
:)
And people wonder why we use emoticons?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Tivo has released Developer Resources including an API for creating your own TiVoServer as well as an Apache module to get you started. For a company that is frequently trashed in this forum, they seem to be throwing the /. crowd a rather large peace pipe.
- Craig
The new version of the software (4.0) allows the use of USB network devices to do your daily calls.
,#401 the TiVo used the USB network adaptor.
Additionally, 3.0 and above had (un)support for network connections. By setting your dialing prefix to
1. Piss of the MPAA with movie/TV viewing capability
2. Piss of the RIAA with new music playing capability
3. Fend off huge hordes of lawyers
4. ???
5. Death!
"Dear TiVo-
I would gladly buy your service if you included Ogg Vorbis [vorbis.com] support. Any hardware that is capable of decoding video can easily decode Vorbis as well. I am not about to re-encode my CD collection to an inferior proprietary format for this feature."
Dear TiVo,
I'll buy your product if you support Ogg Vorbis. I know you won't meet this demand because a.) it's frivolous and b.) because not enough people are using it, but I intend to rack up a good deal of karma whether you support it or not.
Time once again for my obligatory alarmism about TiVo's anti-privacy potential. Unless you opt out, your TiVo can send info about every button you've pushed on your remote back to the mother ship.
Because it can do this, I don't trust it not to do this, even if I have opted-out. And under the Civil Liberties Nullification Act, if TiVo can get this data, the gummint can get it, too.
I was young and impressionable when I read 1984, and I still don't like the idea of my TV watching me.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
What's to stop everyone from registering under the same household address? Then we can all share our shows. All Tivo has to do is overlook the fact that a few thousand people with Series 2 Tivos live at my house. Seriously though, how are they controling which Tivos can share their digital media?
For multiroom viewing, there is some DRM, it's called TiVoGuard. It basically encrypts the transfer. To decrypt to it:
1. The TiVos must be under the same user account; and
2. The TiVos must be located on the same subnet.
There have been talks about defeating requirement #2 by using a VPN, however, that still wouldn't get around requirement #1.
For the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."
As anyone who is familiar with the MythTV project will attest, the feature list trumpeted by TiVo is precisely what is available for MythTV, an open source, volunteer effort (although MythTV supports more, and more diverse features). Isn't competition grand!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Hey, I'm married 12 years now, so no dates at all.
That said, I think I might have more computers than I've had sex in the last six months. Hmmm... almost.
Guess why I'm posting anonymously?
You can share between two TiVo Series2 DVRs? Well that would be nice, except...
So to do this you need:
-2 Series2 TiVos
-2 active accounts (for 2 that 25/month or 598 lifetime)
-and 2 Home media options (99 each!)
I can't believe that they require both Tivos to have both the active accounts and the media options. Does SonicBlue's ReplayTV require that double charging??
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
No offense intended to anyone ... I just see these Ogg letters all the time and I think they're hilarious. ;-)
Dear TiVo -
I would gladly offer to buy your service if you included Ogg Vorbis support. (As you know, Ogg Vorbis is currently used by upwards of several people, many of whom are doing so on an operating system you don't support with your software right now. So I think you can see your economic imperative here.)
Notice that I did not say that I would actually buy your service if you spent the time to include Ogg Vorbis support. Much like the letters I keep sending to Apple about the iPod, if you did support Ogg then send you a letter saying I would gladly buy your service if you made your software open-source. Assuming you somehow did that, my next letter would assure you that I would buy it if it used open hardware. This series of letters would continue until finally I offered to gladly buy your service if you gave it to me for free and sent a supermodel to my house to deliver it.
My fellow technologists who don't like to pay for anything are eagerly awaiting your efforts to satisfy our statistically insignificant needs. So please don't ignore this potentially incredibly unlucrative market and give us Ogg support today!
"95% of all Slashdot
Pardon the ignorance here but can any explain why these devices aren't being used as consumer video edit decks? With all the digital camcorders and the like out there seems like an obvious feature for such a device. Perhaps its in there. I don't see any info on it :(
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
The long-awaited TiVo HDTV is on it's way.
You can view the press release here:
TiVo HDTV DVR press release
I'd also recommend checking out the various forums at the TiVo Community Forums, where discussion about the HDTV models has been underway. There are some very knowledgeable folks there.
http://customersupport.tivo.com/tivoknowbase/root/ public/tv451619.htm?
HD support from TiVo is coming RSN... I think I heard rumors on the community forums about HD support by year end, but who knows if that's accurate? (And they never said which year ending....)
Dave
I got an ethernet card from 9thtee a while back, it is great! I then got a program called "tivoweb" which lets me remotely record, and even search future listings with a REAL keyboard (I like to compare it to my NetFlix list every now and then and queue up movies on the TiVo that I don't care about all those DVD goodies).
;)
Then there is my e-mail on my TiVo with the shameless plug of tivo_mail that I found a while back and people seem to like it.
- RR
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Found this link on another posting that didn't get modded up yet. Seriously, folks - bug the hell out of DirecTV and let them know that you want this (if you actually do)
Someone's unemployed.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Freevo does some of this now and should be able to do more in a few months. Plus its got that open source roll your own feel to it. What more could you want? (don't say "a finished product now", that would be obvious...)