Ricor PVRs To Hit Russia

BlackShirt writes "Mediacenter acts as a digital video recorder, i.e. it enables the viewer to plan his/her future television broadcast recordings. 'Live' broadcasts can also be recorded. Program recordings are stored in the video archive, and the user can playback, delete or unable deleting of recordings (here are some screenshots). I personally like their advertisements more than their product. (Shopping-tv style, wife doesn't allow to watch football, so disapponted husband knocks on his neighbors' door, as they turn their fabulous Ricor TV box from pause to play.)" It looks like this is being marketed to Russian cable companies as an all-in-one portal, since they also include electronic ordering capabilities and "near video on demand"; I wish American PVRs had all these features by default (ethernet, USB, microphone, camera inputs ...)

Comments

The reason is...

[Bugmaster]

IMO, the reason for all the features of the Russian PVR (as opposed to the American one) is that copyright enforcement in Russia is nonexistent. There is no DMCA, no patent protection to speak of (except on paper), no RIAA/MPAA, etc. A right-thinking Russian would never think of actually paying $10k for some piece of software; he'll get the bootleg version for $5.

This is bad for software/music/video companies, but good for the consumer. Unlike their American cousins, Russian PVRs don't need to be crippled just to appease some content cartel. Hence all the extra features.

Features...

[evilviper]

I wish American PVRs had all these features by default (ethernet, USB, microphone, camera inputs ...)

Oh the joys of living in any country without an MPAA/RIAA... Ummm, except France.

Anyhow, my PVR happens to have Ethernet, USB, Firewire, etc. It's just a PC with a TV-card.

It's unfortunate if you ask me, that better software doesn't yet exist to make your PC a DVR. Sure, MythTV is there, but quality is so horrible that it uses MPEG-4 and still needs a bitrate of 2000+ just for a watchable picture.... Might as well just be using MPEG2/MJPEG. The only Linux app I've found that does good quality recording from the TV card, and great quality MPEG-1/MPEG-4 encoding is MPlayer, and, unfortunately, it isn't really optomized for TV-encoding, so I can't do anything else with my Athlon XP 2000 while it is recording. It would be nice if a package like NVrec made an 'mencoderec' program to compliment 'ffmpegrec' and 'nuppelrec', and hence have the power and quality of mplayer with NVrec's TV recording specific modifications.

MythTV has many other drawbacks I could mention as well.

What is there to use? They all seems to have quite a number of their own serious drawbacks.