HDTV TiVo Now Shipping

davco9200 writes "After over a year of waiting, the HDTV TiVo from Hughes (HR10-2350) is finally shipping. People have been receiving their first unit and you can read their first impressions. Suffice to say: they love it."

Comments

For DIY'ers

[Space cowboy]

The Nano-ITX cpu/chipset from VIA also does HD mpeg decoding in hardware. Getting technical docs out of VIA is a blood/stone issue, but the existing community peeps have managed to get the SD HW mpeg decoder working, and you'd expect it to be substantially similar.... You'll need an HD MPEG capture card though because the chip's nowhere near fast enough to do it in software

(The Hoojum [see above link] box also looks very very nice, at least IMHO :-)

Simon

Re:For DIY'ers

[Tribbin]

What about other codecs?

Is it like a 'co-processor' that does certain calculations used for MPEG faster? That might make it useful for other codecs too.

Or am I totally wrong?

Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[TrevorB]

I'm waiting for this Slashdot headline:

TiVo available in Canada

It's about time we had this by now, dammit...

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[Quasar1999]

Tivo is available in Canada. It's just not allowed to be used. I purchased a Tivo, paid the duty, and then was told a month later that subscribing to DirecTv as a Canadian citizen was illegal. When I asked for my Duty to be refunded, they made it expressly clear that owning the tivo was legal... using it was not.

So, go ahead and buy a tivo, you won't be allowed to use it, but it is technically available in canada...

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[LostCluster]

Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with Canada?

Simply it's a market that they haven't chosen to enter.

The PR rep had a right to get angry, he was being ambushed with a question he didn't have a good answer to. There's really no technical or legal barrier standing in the way, but it's just a matter that TiVo hasn't seen fit to contract with Canadian dial-up network, program the IR software to work with Canadian cable and DBS companies, and create the channel lineups for Canadian cable systems.

For that matter, there's no TiVo in Mexico either. TiVo's only non-USA market is the UK.

MPEG compression

[horatio]

Why doesn't the MPEG video compression negate the HD advantages? Because of the MPEG compression, there is a noticable quality difference between my (non-HD) TV on the TiVo and bypassing the TiVo to watch TV directly.

Re:MPEG compression

[Gilesx]

Here's how to access a "hidden" Tivo mode, which gives you a much improved picture. Perhaps this is enabled for HDTV (although the resolution would *still* be too low)

http://www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/tivo_fpga.html

Re:MPEG compression

[Anonymous Coward]

Because HD (even over-the-air) is *already* MPEG compressed. The TiVo just captures/buffers that stream. Quality is the same either way...

They love it?

[ltwally]

" read their first impressions. Suffice to say: they love it."

So I'm reading the first 3 (out of 4) pages from that link of early-impressions... seems like there are various problems -- including: cleaning out the menu signals (which are currently bleeding into the actual video feed), slow(er) menu response time, difficulties properly identifying and/or configuring which resolution to output to, and low quality when using the tivo unit to scale the video (instead of letting the TV do it).

Now some of these problems can be fixed easily (more or less) with a firmware update... others might be a sign that the hardware isn't up to snuff. Either way, I don't seem to be reading in rave reviews of the new TiVo... certainly nothing wild enough to dare claim anyone "loves it."

Personally, I think I'll hold on to my money for a while yet until a few of these kinks are worked out.

For those of us in the UK..

[Stopmotioncleaverman]

...unfortunately, HDTV seems to still be a pipe dream. We receive a massive amount of digital content, but mostly due to technical inadequacy, the stations don't transmit in high definition.

I, for one, would love to be able to get HDTV here in the UK. I suppose the good side to this is that by the time we finally DO get HDTV, I might be able to afford a Tivo to record it with. Although, having said that, based on our past success at getting new technologies rolled out, we'll be in the year 2030 with holographic tv, or intra-brain chips that just beam the information straight to our visual cortex.

Wait a minute. That'd be pretty cool. Although, for those of us in the UK, HoloTV will be implemented by the time we're actually partaking in television. And by the time.... [iterate].

Re:I got one...

[The Only Druid]

I'm curious, what features would you have them add? HMO is already not going to happen for the simple reason that their networks have demanded it, so what would you add?

Boooooo Hisssss

[numbski]

DirecTV HD TiVos come with a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). A cable is included for TVs with HDCP-compliant DVI inputs. Regular DVI inputs could potentially get a downrezzed or blank picture depending on content providers.


Get thee behind me, Satan!

Re:HDTV TiVo? It must have gigantic HD and CPU!

[ZxCv]

It sounds like a great platform for a distributed high traffic relational database, does it not?

No.

Re:Boooooo Hisssss

[evilviper]

This is a free-market. If you don't like their DRM, I would strongly encourage you not to buy the product...

If you need HDTV time-shifting, a HDTV PCI card is under $200, and a Geforce4 (which has on-board MPEG1/2-decoding) is very cheap (~$40).

Throw them in an old slow PC (with a huge hard drive of course) and you've got all you really need. It will take a beginner a day or two to setup all the software, but it's no big hardship, and you'll get a lot more features than you'd ever have in a Tivo.