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New Linux PVR Box
An anonymous reader points to this product from Interact-TV, known as Telly, writing "Cool little box. PVR, stores photos, burns VCDs or DVDs (if you get a DVD burner), serves up stored content on your home network, nice gui, works with some satellite and digital cable boxes, 2.4.18 kernel. Freevo or mythTV can do about the same thing but this one is ready out of the box."
That's quite relative. It might not sound impressive, but that's probably because you've never attempted to get a Linux box working as a PVR... It might not be software that requires a lot of effort for a programmer to create, but since nothing like it exists in the Open Source world, it is somewhat impressive.
MythTV looks like a good start, but the effort required to get it working is significant, and it doesn't do anything BUT timeshift and record. It can't playback your DVD, VCDs, SVCDs, or Divx CDs, it can't save your recorded shows to CD/DVD, it can't playback music or display images, etc... Once MythTV/Freevo gets all these features, then this current software won't be that impressive. For now, since there is nothing else out there like it, it certainly is impresive.
Take a look at Tivo. People are paying truckloads of money for boxes without half the features this thing has. Admitedly, this is missing a couple features Tivo has, but I believe that could be easily fixed.
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Yep. I think the $99 price point is the magic number to keep the Tivo company going and help popularize the technology before the media companies drive Tivo out of the market with their own branded DVRs which will most likely have some sleeping DRM feature that will one day make that handy commercial skip useless or push ads or who knows what else.
In fact my directivo was $129 at the time. The directv tuner was $60. So for double that I got a Tivo and have been very impressed with the technology since.
A few people I know have echoed similiar statements "Yeah its awesome but I'm not dropping $250 on a kick-ass VCR." Neither would I.
You guys are really missing the point of this device. It's true it's similar to TIVO/ReplayTV but go and read everything in the web site:
;-)
-This is a PVR and DVD player. The only TIVO that has this is the fancy panasonic for 1000$ that hasn't come out yet.
-It's also a cdwriter and can be upgraded to a DVD writer in due time.
-It's network transparent even for Windows/Mac people, no extra usb ethernet needed.
-It's expandable without having to hack it, you can add two hard drives bought of the shelf. I'd put it in the infinite expandable category just for that. BTW the extra space will look like one volume.
-It's standard linux, it has a web server, samba, etc. So it replaces whatever old box that you have lying around as a server, storage or whatever else.
-You can access the interface which seems nicely done both directly and remotely via a web server.
-As a plus it has all kinds of media playing capabilties: video, audio, photos.
-The one linked is the analog one, there is also a digital version for 100$ bucks more.
Finally, and very importantly they give you the SDK for producing your own software, they seem keen on open source and people developing their own little apps. So if you think a feature is missing, heck you can go and program it yourself. Isn't that the most important feature?
That's on the positive side. The one thing that it seems to lack is replay as it records. But that should be fixable if we overflow their mailboxes with requests
Disclaimer: I don't work for them or knew anything about them until I read this post but I've been waiting for just this since forever. It has everything I wanted in a tivo.
Platy