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ReplayTV May Drop "Commercial Advance"
An anonymous reader writes "Wired News is reporting that the new owners of ReplayTV are considering dropping the Commercial Advance and Send Show options features." I had bad luck with that function chopping out bits of show anyway. Between that and the 30 second skip function, I'm surprised ReplayTV has lasted this long!
They sell you these products with the promise of watching "TV Your Way" (or whatever their silly tagline was) and pull stunts like this. It's bait-and-switch.
Trolling is a art,
Would you rather have cat^H^H^HTV detector vans running around?
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I must be a bit confused. Which features has Tivo removed from my system?
I can't think of one.
Software solutions such as MythTV and Freevo (both run on Linux) require fairly hefty hardware to do the encoding of TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc. Then they need to decode it to play it to the screen. Both encoding and decoding is necessary in order to do the time shift.
However, MythTV is leading the charge to offload this processing to the WinTV PVR cards, freeing up the system CPU for other stuff, or just allowing the user to scrape by with minimum requirements. So the feasability is improving quite rapidly right now.
MythTV has also been doing some impressive work on their GUI (check out the screenshots). This was one area I previously thought Freevo had a leg up on, but that advantage is going away.
Links:
MythTV
Freevo
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
DID YOUR MOM SERVE YOU AN EXTRA HELPING OF DUMB TONIGHT?
I believe there was a Ask Slashdot a few weeks ago regarding building your own PVR. The majority of the comments seemed say "Why bother, just buy a TIVO/Replay TV, its already done for."
Well, this is why you roll your own. Yes, its a little more work, the cost is pretty much the same, but there is no monthly fee, and features don't get yanked out from under you.
MythTV is absolutely amazing, and its evolving incredibly fast. If your lookinng for a PVR, I recommend giving it a shot.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
My Parents:
Watch TV all the time. Requests to turn the damn thing off are met with a confused gaze.
My Apartment:
TV gets turned on when we have friends over for the purpose of watching a movie, or we're too brain drained to do anything but sit and watch pretty colors. Oh, and when I want to play with my PS2.
How does that impact our lives? I spend most of my time with my friends. A night to myself becomes a rare and cherished thing spent reading a book I've been looking forward to or on a game I haven't played in ages.
My GF and I throw dinner parties, have nights out with friends, spend time talking to each other and interacting as adult human beings.
Hell, I didn't have cable for four years and never missed it.
Although I do admit, the Food Chanel is pretty fun. Of course, my GF and I end up trying a lot of the tings we see on the shows there.
My mother can give a run down of the entire life story of all the characters on "Friends" and "Stargate SG1" (The latter watched not for the content, but for MacGyver's presence.) Her social life consists largely of people from Church, and she doesn't see them very often.
I prefer my life, thank you very much.
And to add a slice of irony, I'll quote a character from a very bad sci-fi show: "We stopped watching movies when we realized that our own lives were far more interesting."
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
They should do this for the "intent of copyright" with movies. I would love to be able to watch a movie on TV without all the controversial words and scenes cut out of them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I have the DSS tivo, very nice as its all digital, no analog saving. Saw that the Replay was onsale at costco, and the slashdot article on copying files to your PC/MAC.
Bought the replay, found out you had to buy a subscription, it wouldnt work without one. (and it was refurbished...)
Hooked it up off the tivo, and the picture quality saving fromt the Tivo to the Replay was not that great. Could of been the Digital->Analog problem, but even my VCR recorded better. But I was able to move the files to the PC or MAC and edit them. But in the end, I didnt want to pay for the subscription, and he quality wasnt as good. Also, it didnt work with my normal DSS box. (the IR didnt control it) So I returned it.
Even thou Tivo doesnt have an option to copy the movies off, the DSS models have a great picture, even better than the normal broadcast quality. Im thinking of getting the series 2 for DSS, could use more HD space also.
BTW, i used the litttle secret code to enable 30 second skip, works great. Only problem tivo has, season pass manager is slow.
I have not made the move to a PVR, but we use our 9 year old VCR to tape shows and watch later. And guess what, I use the fast forward button to get through the commercials! Perhaps we should remove that button from all remotes.
The real power of TiVo can be found here: -A list of all your recorded programs (just browse through to see what you want to watch) -Program once, record forever (even if the show changes time slots) -Pausing live TV (great for potty breaks & getting a snack - you don't have to wait for a commercial) -Rewinding live TV (Whoa! Was that a boob I just saw?!) -Beautiful & instant Pause -Insanely speedy fast-forward & rewind (60x play speed by default - can be "hacked" to be faster) -Recommended programs that are automatically recorded I have a TiVo & the 30 second skip button is nice (yes it's an easter egg), but the "super-fast-forward" will generally get you through the commercials in 5 seconds (instead of the 2 seconds that it takes to hit the skip button 8 times), and it starts playing the instant you hit the play button. People who make the decision to buy a TiVo based on the 30-second skip button probably don't understand the product. It does so much more... Since I've had TiVo, I watch more television shows than I used to, but I spend less time doing it (i.e. watching American Idol takes 20 minutes instead of 1 hour, most shows only takes 20 minutes instead of 30, you can get right to Dave Letterman's Top Ten List, etc.)
I'm a bit confused as to why commercial skip/advance has become so controversial all of a sudden. VCRs have had these features for years: Panasonic, Sony. So why is this a big deal when it comes to PVRs?
I don't own a TV, and my parents haven't for about 18 years.
They got out of it around the same time TV began pushing the boundaries of what used to be morally unacceptable. Since then, TV has succeeded in programming a generation into mindless drones. They don't interact with other people, so all their perceptions of morality and acceptable behavior come from the TV. They watch the commercials and buy what they see.
That said, like many things it is the abuse which is harmful. Some people are intelligent enough to judge the content, and have the willpower to get up and turn it off. But a lot of people would have no idea what to do with their time. They have no skills or hobbies, because they have spent all their free time watching canned entertainment and laughing with the fake audience even if they don't get the joke.
Not everything on TV is bad, and certainly there are some fun programs to watch (for example, Junkyard Wars or Battlebots are some pretty fun shows for a bunch of engineering students to watch). But you need to be able to walk up and turn it off. Switch your mind from remote-control to self-control.
I wish there was a version of Quicken that accounted for your time and personal development. It would be interesting to track mental acuity, skillset expansion, energy, and rest levels in response to different activities. You could budget in time for entertainment, working on a hobby, reading a book, and even exercise. Then you could plot a graph and see whether you are a skilled and improving person, or a sad sack sitting on the couch, getting sadder and sackier.
...
I wish there were a way to filter out the smug, self-righteous "kill your television" evangelists who invade every TV-related thread for the sole purpose of telling us we're wasting our lives.
TV is no more evil than books or movies, and avoiding TV does not make your life inherently better.
As a long-time ReplayTV owner (have a model 2001, 2020, and a 5040) for me, this really is no big deal at all.
First off, it only affects the 5000 or newer series. So, two of my three ReplayTV boxes will be unaffected.
Second, some have had great success with Commercial Advance, but I never had much luck, so I never use it.
And third, the Internet File Sharing for me is another non-issue. Given the upstream cap on my Internet connection, show sharing is just plain prohibitive.
Dinally, let's not confuse "Internet File Sharing" with in-house program streaming between ReplayTV boxes on the same LAN. This feature is NOT being removed. This is the one feature for me that makes the 5040 worth it--it lets me seamlessly offload shows using the DVArchive app to my PC where storage is cheap and either stream them back to the ReplayTV box or burn them to DVD.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!