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Nokia Enters PVR Market
Daaelar writes "Nokia has just recently announced their entrance into the PVR market with the realease of their Mediamaster 260 S. It apparently has PVR capabilities as well as the ability to receive small images via Bluetooth for viewing on a larger screen, i.e. your television. It also includes some built-in games, as well as a feature to record from a digital camera or camcorder."
Wow, if the pictures taken on a mobile phone didn't look bad enough..wait until they get transmitted to a 36" TV...yikes!
Nokia is a phone company. Just because they can buy some cheap Taiwanese crap and slap their logo on it doesn't mean that it has any of the Nokia quality that we are programmed to expect.
here. The flash intro linked in the article doesnt even provide any specifications.
As long as I can stick a flashing antenna or two on it, I'm game.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
the link in the story gives 404 error, go to nokia's home and click on " Nokia Mediamaster 260 S " link in the middle, this is the only way ican find to get to the product page.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Screw the PVR capabilities. IT PLAYS GAMES!
Only partially kidding...
====
Crudely Drawn Games
this was supposed to be a microsoft article. It's sco, riaa, microsoft, not sco, riaa, nokia.
With the Nokia Mediamaster 260 S, you can pause live TV, answer the door, and continue watching right from where you left off.
Ah, the satisfaction of putting the Commander in Chief on hold.
The coolest voice ever.
Are they a little bit worried about the way in which their indescribably inept, frankly insulting marketing campaign for the N-Gage might have alienated a large part of the exact same target market likely to be buying a PVR?
You really shouldn't combine your carbs and fats like that.
Nokia...a PVR? Buh?
Yup, seems like a stretch.
Still, can't hurt if it ekes out a little more visibility for the idea of PVRs in the first place. I just wish we'd stop naming things with TLAs. Overseas, apparently, ATMs are known as Autobanks. Or Bankomats. I like those names a lot better than Ay Tee Em. So, PVRs should be...ummmm...ok, so I'm no naming genius. That's why I'm in technology rather than marketing. (Any suggestions?)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It will be flashy but work poorly and if it somehow falls onto the floor it will break into 5 or 6 different pieces...
Does this thing require a mountain of licenses from the MPAA?
No, I thought that the Ark of the Covenant was God in electronic device form. Or at least the cellphone to connect to god.
it apparently can play video games
Like the Amiga?
it apparently has a framebuffer
Like the Amiga?
It apparently hooks up to your TV
Like the Amiga?
(sorry...not dissing the Tivo, but why are Slashdot readers dissing competition in one area, (PVRs) while whining about the lack of it in another? (Microsoft)
Why not play between programs? The Nokia Mediamaster 260 S has games built-in so you and your family can play
Man, what would my family do without those built-in games? Interact?
Nokia classics, such as Snake, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Card Deck
Dude! Nokia invented Tic-Tac-Toe? I have all sorts of overdue kudos to give them!
The coolest voice ever.
But does the Nokia go the other way, from the DVR to my Nokia handset?
With my Windows Media Center, I have DVR functionality where I can transfer recordings directly to my Smartphone/PPC. I can also burn them to DVD for archiving. This is where MCE beats TiVo.
Live with it.
Wasn't this one of the problems in the dot-bomb? Haven't companies learned that it's better to be really good at one thing, and stay out of markets for which they are not suited, rather than be mediocre and lose money hand over fist? Not that I have a problem with companies trying to innovate, but I just wonder how wise this move is for them.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
But does it run L...
Nevermind, I'm sure this is posted about 80 times above.
And here is another reason for why this might be a LOT more interesting than a Tivo.
There's no information anywhere with the most important information about the box: how many tuners it has. You need more than one tuner, if you want to watch one program while recording another. And, I wonder if it has good electronic program info (with program information, times etc). The technical specs are extremely weak: System Resources * Processor: 32-bit / 166 MHz * Flash memory: 4 Mbytes * SDRAM: 16 Mbytes * Display: 720 x 576 * Colors: 256 You can't really do too much fancy stuff with a 166MHz processor and 16MB (!) of SDRAM.
The company I work for ordered several Nokia firewall devices. They list for about $35,000 US.
Not one of them worked.
We ended up having their top tech staff in the country give us a visit, with everyone wondering why a six figure purchase should be quite so DOA. At first, there was a lot of head scratching, but it turned out that the machines had a variety of hardware and some software problems.
Allegedly these systems are well tested prior to shipping. At that price, you'd hope so! I hope they test these PVRs well, otherwise they're in for a world of support pain.
The LocustWorld meshbox was doing this back in march. BBC did a story about it.
Is it just me or does Nokia make some of the ugliest equipment you've ever seen? It matters in terms of color coordination within the home.
I think Nokia should send their engineers to Japan to pick up some design skills. Panasonic, Victor and Sony are good companies to learn from. Unlike a cell phone which you can conveniently hide in your pocket, everybody will be facing your video equipment when you invite them over for movie night.
are you calling my NASCAR hat fat? PUNK?
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-- INSERT --
that I too would appreciate it if the notch were kicked up. Thank you.
I would like to buy a replacement for my VCR, but have been holding out for a few reasons.
1. If I'm going to get another device that has a TV tuner in it, it will have to be ATSC as well as NTSC (satellite ready would be nice, but not entirely necessary);
2. I'm not keen on additional charges for watching/recording TV (I'm already paying way too much for cable TV as it is). I have seen other Tivo like devices, but the quality has been lacking. RCA makes one, but it's from RCA. The Home-Theater PCs are way too expensive and the quality is worse than a VCR;
3. I'm not impressed by the current array of DVD-recorders that are on the market. See point one above. Also the quality of recordings is a joke. You'd think that for $600 or more it would be a leap ahead of VCRs in terms of ease of use and versatility.
I'm sticking with my old VCR. Doesn't care about macrovision or blue-coatings. Gives me just as good a picture as TV recorded on DVD at a fraction of the price.
in all that tracking, hacking, and cracking, did you have time for any whacking or jacking? TIA.
As opposed to "fakelease"?
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
Sorry to sound lame..
I've tried getting MythTV working twice in the last year, the first incarnation with RedHat and the 2nd with debian. Despite being able to get web/mail/samba/netatalk and various PHP applications (nuke/forums, ect) I still can't get it to work.
Someone should work on making a MythTV distro or liveCD (not me, cause I can't get it to work) Has anyone started or made such a distro yet? I really want it, as i'm sure many others do.
out of me like chocolate pudding out of a whoopie cushion?
$35,000!? My gosh, that's an expensive firewall.
They have TIC TAC TOE on that thing! I'm first in line for one of those babies!
Ok, so I could probably find out what a PVR was easily by googling, but instead I'm going to make a suggestion and see what people say.
Why don't Slashdot stories have abbreviations surrounded by ABBR or ACRONYM tags? This way you can insert a title="Expanded form of Acronynm" inside the ABBR/ACRONYM tag and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE) a little tooltip will pop with the fully expanded acronym displayed!
In Mozilla ABBR/ACRONYMs are even highlighted with a special dashed underline to alert the user that this particular acronym can be decoded without the use of ones imagination.
Here's an example or two.
Bah, checkpoint forces you to sell limbs and family to get a license...
Seems as though Nokia has an entire line of Mediamaster products. Also notable is the inclusion of RS-232 ports on the products. That means you can control them off a computer or other devices. Anyone know if Nokia makes such control devices?
My organization uses a Linksys BEFSR41 for firewalling. Works great.
I was thinking the same thing. But check here for a list of countries where this PVR is currently available.
No Canada, or US for that matter. All European. I didn't see any specific reason why. Maybe it's a PAL/NTSC thing, or a patent thing, or simply an early stage of the product rollout thing. Too bad, it's a pretty nice looking box.
Maybe, but here is a reason that you shouldn't discount TiVo.
so it's basically my ReplayTV with some crappy games and bluetooth?
:)
sign me up
You can watch other channels while recording using the tuner in your TV. That's how people used to tape shows on their VCR while watching another on the TV.
Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously. Which would be kinda sketchy anyhow due to limits on how fast the hardware they're listing could do video compression on more than one stream.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
http://panasonic.jp/dvd/index.html
This is Panasonic's PVR.
DVD recording, Compact flash drive, 160 GB HDD, max 212 hours of HDD recording.
This makes Nokia look like a lemonade stand ran by a bunch of snotty little kids.
Well... the first thing you should do is apologise profusely for holding up play and then get up and drag your damn couch off the pitch.
What's this thing supposed to be - some kind of holodeck?
Looks cool, but am I going to be able to transfer shows to my computer to burn to VCD/DVD? Or is this yet another PVR to be filled with DRMific goodness?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Actually, Nokia has been making Digital TV decoder set-top boxes for a while in the UK - probably Europe, too.
I can't imagine it's much of a stretch, therefore, to move into the PVR market.
too true... slashdot never ceases to surprise me. I thought they posted utter crap years ago, then it got even worse when jon katz showed up. then came karma whores and va linux and I thought slashdot couldn't possiably get any lower. however, the total incompetance of malda & company surprises me yet again.
bravo taco. you are ruining the internet.
Nokia what you do?
You once made phones that are poo
DVR is too
True, but you'll notice that this is being released in countries that don't have access to TiVo. Not all of us have access to cool stuff like commercially-available PVR's yet.
The information on TV reception mentions Analog and Digital reception. For Digital, they talk about DVB digital Satellite TV, which is used in Europe. In the US, we use a terrestrial broadcast mechanism (ATSC).
Zenith/LG has an . But it doesn't do satellite..
Tivo has been rumored to have an HD/ATSC DirecTivo for forever. Who knows if it will ever come out.
This can happen to anything. I ordered an APC UPS for a data center and this thing was a mess. First it had the wrong badging on it (said 8kVA instead of 4kVA) and after the electrician wired the data center for 8kVA i noticed the mistake. The elctircian wouldn't hook it up as 4kVA because of electric code issues. We had to ship it back and after much deliberation (APC says this never happens) they shipped us the 8kVA UPS at no extra cost. The only problem was that the 8kVA model they sent us was dead and APC was shocked. They said this never happens. The third they shipped was alright.
At my present company we use Nokia firewalls / checkpoint VPN software and we've never had a problem with them.
This type of stuff can happen to any company.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Geez, you got screwed. That'll teach you to buy Checkpoint Firewall-1. Should've bought a firewall from a security company, not the Israeli secret service.
Other new products soon to be released:
Motorolla lender 3000
Microsoft refillable #2 Pencil
Symmantic Hugh Pulp Orange Juice
What is it with companies expanding into unrelated industries...(ok, so they're both electronics) Shouldn't they be investing money in smaller companies or : invest it in making their own cell phones and equipment better?
(for those of you scratching your heads at the joke -- The nGage phone/hand-held game device is so badly designed that you have to remove the battery in order to change game cartridges)
What's this facination with PVRs? Who's still finding enough on TV to justify the purchase of such a device? DVDs, CDs, books, magazines, video games -- who has time?
Nokia already makes satellite tuners. Slap a HDD on that, and pretty much have a PVR already. So it's not exactly a huge leap.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It'll all be controlled by one button, the die-hards will swear by it, and anyone who doesn't know how to find their way around the interface will think it's utter crap.
Is t his project in the US market? It might be Euro only.
What is interesting is that it is compatible with DVB-S which is basically digital Sat. TV. DVB-S and DVB-C are used in the use. DVB-T which is digital TV "over the air" is standard everywhere but in the US (and maybe South Korea).
The same group also has MHP, Multi Media Home Platform, which is based on JavaTV. In the US we have ATVEF which is basically DOM 4, basically WebTV.
It would be really neat if the MediaMaster was MPH compliant.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Seriously, from the list of features, it sounds like "one of their cell phones, one of their cell phones, one of their cell phones, OOOH a PVR!" It seems as though they may not pay enough attention to the meat and potatoes, and instead ported their cellphone to a PVR encoder...
New TV sets are starting to be introduced with "digital cable ready" tuners. That means that they can receive digital cable channels without an external converter box. Hopefully this feature will be included in future PVRs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
But not here in North America. Nope, everything here has to be proprietary. We have to "let the market decide" (translation: "let the corps screw us over"). The result less competition and little innovation. I am guessing Europe is at least three years ahead on TV tech and they are pulling away because they picked ONE standard and ran with it.
Serve Gonk.
You can find out about the UK's digital transmitters here.
Of course, DVB is just an output format.. DTT (digital terrestrial tv) is a way of delivering DVB).
The Nokia Mediamaster 9600 digital satellite reciever had SCSI connector. You could plug a HDD or PC to it and after OS upgrade (DVB2000) you had a perfect PVR which recorded nice MPEG-2 files without any stuped DRM etc restrictions. I just hope this new model allows me to burn those recorded show on DVD.
- Raynet --> .
OK, well, this might have been your experience, but to be honest, I know of much more people who had an excellent experience with Nokia routers. Some said that they are considered some of the best available, in fact. I wouldn't vouch for one or the other opinion, but fact is, you are the first case of nonworking equipment that I have ever heard of, in contrast with tens of positive feedback.
Sigged!
Lemme know if it has these features:
-Funtional commerical skip (with an automatic mode).
-Network support (for streaming to AND from the PVR).
-Polished user interface.
-Reasonably priced tv-listings (or the option to function without).
*Of course, having an user upgradeable HDD is a bonus.
Nokia doesn't deserve helpful people like you --- with that obnoxious crap I was just going to ignore them, but now I guess I'll look and see what they've got.
Anyone at NAB two years ago would have seen this product at the Nokia stand in a mock-livingroom setting. I tried it at that time and was not at all impressed. It acted and felt like a glorified webtv.
Yeah, there's the problem that anyone can spout any kind of bullshit on Slashdot. And on marketing articles like this, you invariably end up with some counter-shills for competing companies. Not that I have anything against all that.
> You need more than one tuner, if you want to watch
> one program while recording another
This isn't necessarily true - it depends whether the program you want to watch is on the same mux as the channel you want to record. If they are, then one is enough.
(If not, then yes, you do need two.)
PVR stands for 'Personal Video Recorder'. It's basically just the idea of letting your set-top box or whatever do timeshifting, picking program it thinks you'd like, etc.
However, as the subject says, PVR has now apparently been trademarked by Tivo. I think everyone else is now moving to DVR (Digital VR) instead, to avoid problems...
Dear Nokia,
I notice that you are bundling a game called "TicTacToe" (TM) with your new "Mediamaster 260S" PVR system. It may interest you to know that this game was bundled with our SCO Linux (TM)(C) package, and as such, is automatically our copyright and patent. Henceforth you will need to pay a run-time license of $699 per unit sold, backdated to the beginning of the universe.
Have a nice day.
Darl McBride, SCO.
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
From the article: ... it's only those friendly people form the RIAA and the MPAA asking some questions.
What if the Doorbell Rang Right Now?
No sweat!
It has good technology, good style that appeals to both corporate and teens, and it has great marketing.
it's one company that seems incapable of doing any wrong.
I live in Europe.
That FAQ question tells you that they don't sell Tivo any place other than USA and UK. Too bad for the Canadians, but between the Nokia thing and the Nokia thing, a lot more people get this kind of technology - and for the most part, they aren't even in competeition.
I live in Europe.
;-)
That FAQ question tells you that they don't sell Tivo any place other than USA and UK. Just because they have a poor choice of title doesn't mean I'm automatically Canadian.
I suppose that means either that your problem was very rare, or that nobody else had bought them. I mean, the top tech staff doesn't generally have a lot of free time to visit clients...
If Nokia wants to help their N-Gage sales, they should make a TV desktop box that can handle N-Gage games. If people had the chance to play those games on the big screen as well it would be a nice bonus for the (would-be) N-Gage owners (although that tall-screen aspect ratio would suck on wide-screen TVs). Now it obviously wouldn't help the N-Gage be a huge success or even a small one (the only thing that could do that would be N-Gage exclusive original quality games, and plenty of them, to be able to compete with GBA's current and upcoming games collection), but it should make it sell a bit better.
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
Nokia has branched into mobile phones.. from tires, rubber boots and sattelite receivers.
When I was a kid, we had a Nokia sattelite receiver (and dish). That's a long time ago now. They started making mobilephones only fifteen years or so after that.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Nice, I guess...but I think I'll wait for the KISS DP-558 to be released:
DivX!
Ethernet
Webradio
MP3, Ogg Vorbis
JPG
80 GB HD
TV-tuner
DVD
Extremely slow site here.
From the website:
Record, Store and watch... Replacing VHS The KiSS DP-558 DVD Player has it all. It can offer playback of many different formats, from DVD, Video with DivX(R) 3.11, 4 and 5 and MPEG-4, or Audio with MP3, Standard Audio CDs and Ogg Vorbis, or Pictures with JPEG. You will also find on it all the features that has made the KiSS DP-500 famous with an Ethernet Connection in the back. If connected to a Broadband Internet Connection it will enable the user to play Internet Radio Station on his Player with WebRadio or enable the user to view or play his Audio/Video/Picture files from his PC with the user Friendly Software KiSS PC-Link. On top of these well known features, the KiSS DP-558 offers recording facilities, thanks to its TV Tuner, recording TV on its built-in Hard Drive will be as easy as it was done on VHS, with some major advantages such as very high sound quality, a sharp and clear image, no alteration of the content with time or easy content search. The KiSS DP-558 comes with an 80GB Hard Disk where the user can record TV programmes (average of 34 hours depending quality on settings) or store up to 117 good quality DivX(R) movies, easily accessible and downloadable on the Player's Hard Disk from a PC. The KiSS DP-558 also comes complete with the standard CD/MP3, Ogg Vorbis, DivX(R), XviD, CD-RW and DVD+-RW playback.
"APC shocked"? Not using their own equipment, perhaps?
What amazes me about all those "big brands" PVR is the fact that they all miss lan connectivity to enforce a "hardware" copyright control on what is recorded.
In Europe the Dreambox is becoming a big hit ... let's hope they dont get sued too fast!
I still can't read that. It written in some kind of marketing language designed to confuse and excite rather than inform. Couldn't the just come up with a short phrase describing each feature and then list them. Instead they make up a fake name for each feature, the write a paragraph talking about how great it is.
Maybe they were, and that's why the UPS was DOA.
Great! I was tired of analog Virtual Reality.
Why bother?
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
I periodically peek at the MythTV site, and it strikes me that the biggest obstacle to Myth TV is the apalling small list of reliable, inexpensive MPEG hardware on PCs and the fairly bad support that does exist has for Myth TV functionality (tuners, TV in and out, MPEG hardware capture) under Linux.
Somebody (and NOT Hauppage) needs to make an inexpensive MPEG2/tuner card with:
DVD-compatible MPEG2 capture and playback at various bitrates
MPEG2 engine usable for accelerating video file conversion to MPEG2 in at least real time
At least 4 inputs, including two with component connectors
At least 4 outputs, including two with component connectors
Support for 16:9 ratios
Under $300, no proprietary codecs.
I say not Hauppage (hodge-podge as my friends and I call it), because I've owned the PVR-350 and suxored big time. I had to get "beta" drivers from support to get it to work at all; MPEG playback and recording, which was supposed to be hardware accelerated, dragged my system (a PIII-933 Dell) to an unusable crawl; their MPEG2 files were NOT compatible with the generic DVD MPEG2 codec.
1. This machine only has a 166mhz processor. The TiVo Series2 has a 200mhz processor (Series1 had a 50mhz PowerPC deriviative). 2. There could be various IP issues relating to transmitting and storing pictures from a Nokia camphone on the PVR's hard drive...Replay received several patents about transmitting and storing media files on the PVR's harddrive - this is one reason why TiVo's Home Media Option only streams pictures and music from a PC/Mac to the TiVo and doesn't actually store it natively...of course, this was done before TiVo and Replay ended their foolish lawsuits and cross-licensed their IP portfolios, right before SonicBlue went bankrupt. 3. What Replay didn't have in patents on PVR, TiVo does, and you can expect lawsuits on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA using TiVo as the proxy... In terms of beating them on features, I guess its time for TiVo to bring out a Series3 unit with Bluetooth built in and a slot for an Airport Card for wireless networking without having to buy a bunch of third-party Ethernet-to-USB adapters...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Cisco's PIX are a much more affordable solution, and for most people, the differences in the ways each firewall operates isn't a concern.
Plus, I think Cisco's PDM (Pix Device Manager) Interface has surpassed Checkpoint's configruation interface in terms of useability.
Does this mean I can play snake on my tv now?
I read a print review of the MediaMaster T a few months back, so I might be able to fill in a few blanks. This is all from memory, so don't take it as gospel.
The T model receives Digital Terrestrial broadcasts, rather than Digital Satellite broadcasts, but the technology is not much different, so most of what applies to the T will apply to the S.
Unlike a TiVo, the MM does not compress video: it simply dumps the MPEG stream that's being broadcast onto disk.
Pro: no loss of quality
Con: you don't get to choose your own quality/capacity tradeoff
Pro: in the UK at least, there are digital "TV" channels that are audio-only. TiVo wastes space recording the screen the STB displays in lieu of video. The MM can store hundreds of hours worth of audio.
I think the MM has two recievers built in, so you can watch one digital channel while recording another. I'm not sure you can record two at once, or pause one channel while recording another.
There are no suggestions or automatic recordings you didn't explicitly ask for. Nor are there any subscriptions to pay: it gets the EPG from the DTV service (a problem in the UK, because since OnDigital went bust, the EPG doesn't go all that far into the future, nor is there a great deal of detail in the program summaries.
Not much else to say: the review was positive, no complaints about build quality or UI.