Slashdot Mirror
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!
I love my RTV, and I'd still buy another even if they stripped out CA. As long as I can still pull the shows off to my pc and burn them to DVD, I'll use it. BUT, if they keep taking out these features, then they are removing the exact thing which makes them different (superior?) to Tivo. I hope D&M know what they are doing...other than avoiding lawsuits.
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
Actually, the new TiVo kernel (4.0+) finally makes use of the USB ports in the back. You can connect either a Wireless or Wired Ethernet device (http://customersupport.tivo.com/tivoknowbase/root /public/tv2006.htm?) and you are good to go. I do this with my TiVo and wouldn't go back to regular TV, ever.
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.
I'm noticing a lot of posts along the line of 'This is why you should use MythTV..'
Don't overlook SageTV!
While it's not free, nor open source, it's the most incredible PC-based PVR I've seen to date. At only $59.95, it's a bargain. Program guide data is FREE! Upgrades are FREE! And the pace of development has been outstanding.
In it's current build, it supports;
- Multi-tuner, multi-lineup recording (satellite on one card, cable on the other.. or two cable captures, or five.. whatever.)
- Recording to either Mpeg2 or Mpeg1 format (for easier portability to DVD-R or VCD.)
- Network streaming to other PCs
- Automatic recording of favorites, as well as suggestions based on your viewing history (which is easily disabled.)
- XMLTV listings import (if for some reason, free listings aren't good enough for you.)
- Dscaler support and plugins (much better quality than MythTV, Tivo, or Replay on my HDTV.)
- Audio library management..
Features they're saying will come 'soon' include;
- HDTV Support
- DVD Playback
It's not free, but it's definitely a value. The way the guys at Frey Technologies are adding features is just unbelievable. Sometimes, free solutions are not the best.