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Major New TiVo Service Offerings
Jeff The Riffer writes "At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Mike Ramsay of TiVo announced three major new product offerings to come in the next year. First off there's the DVD Recorders, HD DVR, and Home Networked Enabled Products. TiVo/DVD Recorder boxes have been out for a bit now but looks like the offerings will continue and there's going to be new units by Pioneer. Second we have TivoToGo, where TiVo users with Home Media Option will be able to transfer files off their TiVo onto their PC and either play them locally or burn them to DVD. And finally there's XM Radio for TiVo."
stuff
MythTV is TiVo on steroids. It's not for newbies though so I won't even pretend to suggest your dear Aunt Ida can go install her own without spending 8 hours of your time setting it up. For those of us who like working on fun projects with Linux though it's a blast. This weekend I'll be building my new MythTV backend server with dual Hauppauge PVR 250 cards, a 3ware 8506-4lp SATA raid controller, and four 200GB Maxtor (quiet fluid dynamic bearings) SATA drives. I haven't decided whether to go with RAID-5 or RAID-0 yet so I'll have somewhere between 600GB and 800GB of space for recordings. At 2200bps and 480x480 resolution my testing with the PVR-250 has given me files about 1.2GB/hour. I may crank it up to 3300bps to get around 1.6GB/hour and deal with that for improved mpeg-2 quality.
Anyway, if you're not interesting in Linux projects stick with a TiVo. MythTV has a DVD player (and ripper) modules, MythMusic for playing mp3, ogg, flac, etc. as well as ripping CDs to ogg, mp3, or flac format, MythWeather gets weather channel maps for your area and displays the weather forecast, MythGame interfaces to MAME under Linux to play games, MythVideo provides a nice interface for playing DivX or other movie files and ties into IMDB to download cover art for movies it can recognize by title (i.e. if you have a waterboy divx file it'll search for it on IMDB and prompt you if what it found is correct, then from then on it'll associate cover art with that file and a summary and synopsis. It's quite nice. Oh yea, and remote real-time scheduling and control over your recordings (delete, browse, etc.) via mythweb. Don't take my word for it, just go to www.mythtv.org and check it out. It is by far the best open source PVR at the moment and is very mature.
Buyer beware.
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The TiVo intergrated with DirecTV receivers cannot be used in a HMO confguration. I didn't find this out until after I signed a contract.
Fucking USB port isn't even powered.
I'm not up on the current situation, but isn't the whole point of HD being undercut by broadcasters taking advantage of digital broadcasting to cramm 6 channels into the space of one, thus delivering a very inferior image
...) standard. It has 18 different modes, ranging from 480i (480 lines of vertical resolution, interlaced) to 720p and 1080i (p = progressive/non-interlaced; which is better depends on what you need. The 1080i has a higher resolution, but 720p is better for fast moving action). The maximum broadcast rate is 21 Mbps, which you can use for one program or multiple programs. The bitstream is MPEG2 encoded with Dolby Digital (aka AC3 or DD) audio. Note that DD is a requirement -- no other sound encodings are allowed by the spec. For reference, DVDs are MPEG2 encoded video with a variety of audio options (dolby digital is required, but DTS is on many disks as well; DTS is usually recorded at a higher bitrate, so some people prefer it).
Aiieeee!
No, you're quite thoroughly confused. But that's because the ATSC standard is confusing.
ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) replaces the current NTSC (National
All of that said, how much they can fit into a single "channel" depends on how much compression is used. Thus far nobody has really tried the multiple channels on one station gambit, although it is allowed. Even if it is done, odds are that you'll have a much better picture than what you get off cable (digital or analog) or either of the sat systems (although DirecTV is allegedly going to change this -- with their new sats going up later this year they'll have tons of bandwidth, and there are rumors that they'll bump picture quality back up to mid-90s levels). Realistically, both cable and sat systems broadcast their SD (standard def) programs at sub VCR quality nowadays -- roughly 240i. Yes, it really is that piss poor. On small sets you generally don't notice. On big ones you do. The digital broadcasts are cleaner (less static, no ghosting, etc) than the analog ones, but are prone to macro blocking if the bitrate is too low.
Broadcasting in 480i or 480p is generally considered "DTV" (digital TV). Broadcasting in 720p or 1080i is considered HDTV (High Def TV). True HDTV is considerably more detailed and clear than anything you'll get out of current generation DVD players (the next generation HD DVD will be another story of course).
So, when they say HD-PVR, what kind of compression are we talking about?
Whatever the broadcaster has done. The HD DirecTiVo will do no compression of its own -- it simply writes the bitstreams directly to disk.
DirecTV Tivos don't have to worry about any of this stuff. Currently, they're a major version behind in software, don't support HMO, and have their USB ports (which is where you'd plug a network adapter) disabled.
DirecTV is PARANOID that opening up their tivos like all the rest of them is going to result in rampant digital copying, and networks packing up and leaving.
So you're not missing out on anything-- DirecTV won't have it anyway. Just the standalone tivos.