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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."
Now that I have a TiVo I could never give it up. But the fact this offers network connectivity, 5.1 digital out, and composite video is quite impressive. The price may seem a little steep, but a new TiVo with a lifetime subscription is about 650-700, but this box is subscription free.
The real question is the interface going to be able to compete with TiVo? The ability to do season-passes are (IMO) what will make it or break it.
Mike
Can you record and store TV programs and later burn them on a CD?
Yes, Telly's Video Library supports an archiving feature. Eventually Telly will support DVD burning; the current MC1000 supports a CD-RW drive. You will be able to expand your unit to include a DVD-RW drive in the near future.
Also you can't pause the live feed which is imo one of the best features of Tivo
Is it possible to pause/rewind/skip-commercials of live TV broadcasts?
Currently not on live TV broadcasts, but once recorded, you can skip 30-second intervals, pause, and rewind.
Buy your Telly MC1000 Home Entertainment Server today for only $899.00
Hell, pick up three or four.
Until these things cost the same as a VCR I couldn't possibly justify paying the price.
Of course, I am just about to justify the price of cable, so I guess I'm already a step behind most couch jockeys. It's just that the return of Ren and Stimpy is such an enticing reason to get cable.
Bad choice for a trademarked name?
Here in the UK, "telly" is the generic term for television.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Actually my DirecTiVo. Beautiful digital signal from the bird so high in the sky straight to disk. No recompresssion. Far higher quality than this or any other PVR (other than DishNetwork's PVR).
Hell I can build an "almost" top of the line PC for that. The software doesn't look all that impressive and it is still a PC that doesn't look like an entertainment center applaince. Reading the specs of a VIA C3 sub 1 GHz processor with 256 megs of 2100 Ram. This thing is a $200 PC for almost a grand.
But it runs linux, wait no, that's free.
Seems like quite the not good deal ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Cool.. but my Xbox does that as well...
I can't find anything on the marketing overview page about it being quiet or not. You'd think they would trumpet, so to speak, the fact if it were a quiet box.
Why hasn't a company come out with an adult version of the PVR?
Name it the "Porn-O-Tron" or "Porn-O-Matic"
Include a subscription business model with various channels of varying fetishes, etc. and market it as just that. Tie it all together and the customers will flood the place...ok bad pun but you get the idea.
You could even tie in various adult products that plug into the box and someone on the other end could operate them for $19 a minute. Virtual Spanktravision might even be a better name or sub-brand as long as it doesn't canabalize the main brand.
Porn is BIG business and why hasn't a visionary other than myself come up with this?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Who loves ya Baby?
You can get network connectivity with a non-authorized ethernet card for Tivos. Do a google search, I think they run about 60 bucks. As far as composite out goes, maybe a video geek can help out here, but considering the source (cable/satellite) it may just be that the law of diminishing returns kicks in real hard after a point and its may not be worth it.
I kinda dig the standard directivo. Dual tuners, S-Video out, etc. I'd much rather see a cheaper tivo that doesn't hurt the pocketbook too much than just more feature creep.
From the website:
>Buy your Telly MC1000 Home Entertainment Server today for only $899.00
Err no thanks. Where's that $100 Tivo?
From the description of their "media OS" based on Linux, http://interact-tv.com/EOS.php, I noticed something...
ItvXUL: XML based description language for describing itvgui based applications.
Does that mean their UI is based on http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/?
Sounds like a neat unit, but I have one question...
TV-Out cards (or video cards with TV-out) generally deinterlace the signal in the process of converting the signal to something that the TV can understand.
The advantage of this is that the picture can easily be scaled to handle overscan. But the disadvantage is that the image quality, especially in panning scenes, is compromised. An interlaced NTSC signal will display 59.94 fields per second. This will allow for smooth motion, especially in the example of a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. When the signal is deinterlaced, that rate is cut in half to 29.97 and there can be blurring in areas of fast motion.
If this unit is using standard PC hardware, then it is likely deinterlacing the output. If so, it would make a pretty poor replacment for a DVD player. So much for an all-in-one solution...
Does this Telly unit have true interlaced TV output? If so, how is it achieved?
It is a very nice looking box, but it is BIG and most likely too noisy to put next to your TV if used with anything but the ITX boards. It's the size of the old desktop PC cases. There are two 5-inch and two 3-inch bays in the thing. If you fill it with peripherals it will generate way too much heat.
The Hush looks like it would be much more compatible with an A/V stack, but notice the price and you'll see that the Telly isn't that far off price-wise. And the hush is "just" a PC with no PVR functionality set up on it!
This Telly device does seem expensive. What's exciting is the prospect of better, cheaper, and more mainstream products to come.
When this concept becomes mainstream things will really get cool.
It took mp3 players to legitimize the mp3 format and show consumers that audio cd's are limiting. It will take PVR/media playing hardware to do the same for movies and tv.
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
Sure. Buy the unit and make a formal request in writing for the source code to the GPLed software that you have just purchased in binary form. If requested to do so, provide media (such as a CD-R in modern times, though the GPL mentions tapes) and return postage for that media.
Once you have said source code, you are free to redistribute it (unmodified or modified) under the terms of the GPL.
Until you have the binary, you have NO rights to request the source code under the GPL.
What bothers me most about your comment is the way you think you are somehow entitled to receive the source just because you exist. There is a good balance in the GPL (source needs only be provided to those who have received the binary) and this kind of demand for source code you have no right to receive really puts a black eye on the free software movement.
Have you even bothered to read and understand the GPL? By the sound of your comment, obviously not. Forget about current practice, pretend you are a lawyer for a bit, and read it. Then wait a few days and read it again. Then wait a few weeks and read it again. It's not a particularly difficult document to read, but like anything it helps to read it multiple times to get a better understanding of it. Any programmer with a modest amount of legal experience should be able to grok it. The GPL is something that anybody serious about writing free software should be quite familiar with. Why trust some schmuck's "Reader's Digest" version of it when you can read the real thing?
I am at about $500, plus a bit of blood/sweat/tears, for mine. Admittedly, the video card was one I had lying around (an old TNT2 with a broken GPU fan that is still holding up nicely).
Still, the biggest thing holding back MythTV and Freevo is the periodic changes made to the TV listings (the most recent one involved me making manual database changes to get it to change the channel when recording). Until a free, low-bandwidth solution to TV listings is devised (good luck there), this will always be a problem.
For starters, I bought a Ultimate TV unit for DirecTV for about $35 after all the rebates. I know you anti-capitalists want 'freedom' to use digital recorders to record staticy broadcast or analog cable.. Yeah, you do that. I'll live in the 2000's, thank you very much. Any digital satellite service is superior to any cable or broadcast network on the planet in regards to quality, quality, and price. Want to argue about that? Ok. Fine. You have reality issues.
Secondly, You could build a AMD K7 box, get a lian li mini ATX case (the new pancake fits in with AV components really well), 100 gig drive, ATI all in wonder pro, DVD, and a good sound card for less than this box -- but have greater performance. Plus you'll have access to all the great PC applications and HDTV outputs ($35 dongle required).
You could also get a used Xbox and a mod chip for 1/5th the price of this thing and get most of the functionality with Xbox Media Player. It also supports HDTV..
I'd suggest not getting excited and feeding the hype for these over-priced hacks. There's just no excuse to spend 900 bucks on something that doesn't do anything ground-breaking.
If they don't provide the source code with the product, then section 3b of the GPL requires them to provide the source code of the GPL'd software to ANY THIRD PARTY, not just those to whom they have distributed the object code. The written offer of source code only has to be provided to the party to whom they distributed the object code, but that offer must be valid for any third party.
In fact, technically if someone has made a commercial distribution of object code of GPL'd programs, and not accompanied it with either the source code (section 3a) or the offer to provide the source code (section 3b), they are already in violation of the GPL. For noncommercial distribution, there is a third option (section 3c), but that wouldn't apply here.