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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."
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.