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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.
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 $19 a minute. Virtual Spanktravision might even be a better name or sub-brand as long as it doesn't canabalize the main brand.
Porn is BIG business and why hasn't a visionary other than myself come up with this?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Here in the States, middle-aged nerds like me think of England mostly in terms of Monty Python. When I heard the name and saw it's Linux based, I immediately thought of the "There's a penguin on the telly" sketch. In this case, there's a penguin IN the Telly!
MythTV looks like a good start, but the effort required to get it working is significant, and it doesn't do anything BUT timeshift and record. It can't playback your DVD, VCDs, SVCDs, or Divx CDs, it can't save your recorded shows to CD/DVD, it can't playback music or display images, etc... Once MythTV/Freevo gets all these features, then this current software won't be that impressive.
MythTV has most of these features as add-on modules. MythTV's modular design means that there are an ever-growing number of modules that can be used to extend it's already rich feature-set.
You guys are really missing the point of this device. It's true it's similar to TIVO/ReplayTV but go and read everything in the web site:
;-)
-This is a PVR and DVD player. The only TIVO that has this is the fancy panasonic for 1000$ 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
A while ago I might have said the same thing.. but to a lot of people, time is more valuable. I've had a PVR since they were pretty new (3 years+?) and even though I paid something like $699 for it, I consider it a terrific buy.
I figure I watch 10 hours of TV a week. Probably 7 hours are stations with commercials. 20 minutes per hour X 7 hours, that's 2 hours and 20 minutes a week I *don't* spend watching tampax ads.
In other words, in last three years, I've avoided wasting 400 hours on commercials. I figure my time is worth about $50 an hour, so that's $20k in "free time" I've had available to do other things.
Valuable things.
Like posting rants on slashdot.
I think you have a lot of us "anti-capitalists" and our open-source fanaticism all wrong. For many of us, the sticking point is *not* price, whether it be music or video recorders. The value is in our own ability to maintain/upgrade/customize whatever we have, and have the confidence that if anything at all goes wrong, we aren't held hostage at bugpoint at someone else's mercy. That's a good way to get raped.
Its just a philosophy. Some of us are very uncomfortable with the idea that somebody else controls something we have. Its bad enough the government traces us and taxes us on our homes, cars, and jobs. But if there is anything the electrical power brokers in California have taught me, its don't let myself get cornered. Don't let businessmen ever get you in a spot where you have to do whatever they say in order to "protect" your investment. Our California governor Gray Davis made like a nice guy and gave in to all the guys who knew how to play him like a fiddle. Where did that get us? Was that Pro-Capitalism? Or was that greed and control gone horribly wrong?
I don't like the idea of being a sharecropper.
Nor do I want to try to build a long-term investment with ephemeral building blocks.
If its a nice box, well designed, open source, etc, its worth the price. I don't expect to be subsidized by someone else who had a plan to force me into other business with them. I consider myself honest, but I have every expectation they be honest with me. Open source to me means they are willing to be completely honest with me and are holding no surprises. Its all on the table, subject to any verification I feel I need to do. In most cases, I probably won't verify anything at all, but should something not work as I expect, I may have to verify something.
I wrote another post in another forum regarding my disappointment with a termite contractor. Nowhere did I say I was unhappy about price.. no, I was mostly lamenting on my inability to verify the quality and quantity of termiticide used. I have no problem with paying the man for work done, but when I have a fast one pulled on me, it really pisses me off. Do you think it would minimize the number of "fast ones" a termite contractor could pull on the public if he knew that the product he used could be verified? How would it look in a jury trial should one of his customers, who discovered his house had been "treated" with water asked the company to assume the costs of replacing the termite-damaged lumber in his house? Or, am I just being "anti-capitalist" here by suggesting that someone's work be open for verification?
I am delighted to see this in Linux, as I fundamentally do not trust Microsoft. Nor do I trust that mechanic who claims he's going to work on my car, but goes to great lengths to make damn sure I can not observe nor verify his work. And I don't trust that termite guy either. ( But if he had given me a sample in my jug, then upon my suspicion something's wrong, I sent it off to my friend, and he found pyrethrins in the proper strength, my opinion of that contractor today would be completely different. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]