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Sony's Linux DVR Can Record Two Weeks of TV
DoctorNo writes "Sony will introduce - in Japan only - a Linux based video recorder in early November which can store 342 hours of content with 500GB of hard drive space. As well as the highend machine, Sony will also offer a cut down version with a 250GB drive. They will be priced at $1380(500GB) and $1035(250GB). More information,
specs
, and pictures
(Japanese). Add another to the list of consumer
Linux devices..."
Considering that Sony and Philips used to be the manufacturers of TiVo units, and TiVos are Linux-based - Are these just new TiVos with huge hard drives?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The device comes with a mandatory 'automatic purge' feature. Each recording is marked by a timestamp on disk and thirty one days after a recording has been made, it is automatically deleted. This feature fits in with Japanese copyright rules.
Oh great, what next? A 'will not record porn because it's not good for the children' feature? When will consumers get treated like adults? This sucks about as much as the end of Jeepers Creepers 2 where all the people except the hot chick die.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I have mentioned the fact that companies using Linux and not contributing back to the community is not all that great for Linux and I was flamed to death.
The "community" believes that the press is great. I don't see how it matters.
People using PVRs aren't going to give a hoot if Linux runs on it. They just know it works and that's all they will ever care about.
I think that while Linux is great, it was created from the community. Now these companies are taking everything about Linux that is great and not contributing back to the community.
This is not great.
When you have that much space available, you tend to leave certain recordings for easy access. I have a number of movies - Office Space, LotR-FotR - on my box for almost a year now. Whenever the mood strikes, I can fire them up.
TiVo has the advantage over other video recorders in that it will take advantage of unused capacity to capture programs it thinks you might like. It will frequently stumble upon things I like but didn't know were on since they appear on a channel I don't usually watch. Most recently I rediscovered "Family Guy" on cartoon network thanks to TiVo. TiVo probably predicted that, since I watch "The Simpsons" religiously, I would probably like "The Family Guy".
High capacity DVRs have the advantage that one can leave the programming they like on the machine until they feel like watching it. There is little impulse to watch something now because it will be over-written tomorrow. TNT ran a best of "Law and Order" marathon last weekend. Now I have a resovoir of 10 hours of high quality programming that I can watch when I want.
Disk space is cheap. There is no reason a DVR should have less than 100 hours of capacity. The expense part of the DVR is the mpeg encoder.
Looks like a 500GB fileserver to me. :-)
Not very big, propably rather silent, has 100Mbit ethernet, now all we need is someone that hacks it.
What about when sporting events are on like the Olympics, world cup or (insert sporting event that spans multiple days)? With work and school I can't be expected to just stay up 24/7 and watch, but I think it would be a really cool feature to be able to record all the televised events so you can have the opportunity to watch them later.
[SIG] Far better to be thought a fool then to post on
My girlfriend complains (sort of) that she spends more time watching TV now that I have a Tivo.
My girlfriend doesn't really watch TV anyway. She sits around all day reading books. And I haven't noticed the TV watching reducing the number of books she burns through in a week.
I enjoy tv a LOT more with the Tivo. I can sit down and watch a few hours of tv if I like, or I can stop watching something and meet up with some friends. Come back later and finish watching it.
More than once I've been able to tell a friend that I have that episode they missed recorded and they can come by my place and watch it. Grab some snacks on the way and enjoy it.
(It's funny, I dislike watching some shows multiple times, but I find with the Tivo recorded shows they tend to be stuff I don't mind seeing multiple times, and/or it's worth it to let a friend watch it.).
It depends how you are trying to use this box. If it is a true VCR replacement, it has to replace the tapes too. How many tapes does the average person have? I have about 60 hours of Simpsons episodes on tape, and about 20 tapes total. One of these boxes could let me get rid of those tapes and probably never buy another one.
:-)
Don't think of this box as a VCR with a big non-removable cassette; think of it as a video jukebox. Hard drive capacity is pretty cheap, and I'd rather have too much capacity since these things are probably not upgradeable when you fill the disk.
Now, having said that, I understand this model deletes shows after 31 days; so never mind, the capacity is useless
-- Pot is safer than Beer
The stock TiVo kernel doesn't support anything better than LBA28 but with a custom kernel you can do better (I have a 300GB maxtor in mine). Currently Series1 only but now that people are hacking Series2 TiVo proms it would be trivial to add LBA48 support to the 2.4 kernel on those boxes.
The only problem I have with MythTV is xmltv. When Zap2it takes a shit or decides to change their format, xmltv's program guide grabber breaks and I get no new guide info. With the monthly subscription to Tivo you don't have to worry about that. On the other hand, having dual tuners (2x Hauppauge WinTV dbx stereo) in my MythTV box makes up for it since I would've missed many shows without it. Time to see if I can fit a third in there for the hell of it (WinTV PVR 250). Maybe I'll just put three WinTV PVR 250's in.
- Company cleverly circumvents GPL to have its software development subsidized. No source code to community.
- No average end-user will ever know what the underlying operating system is.
- The OS licensing bit is less than 2% of the final cost of the product - in other words, the price savings will not appreciably passed along.
In other words, to parahprase that clever