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?

Re:For DIY'ers

[JDevers]

Well, for starters he is referring to a VERY underpowered Via based CPU on a mini-ITX platform, NOT a dual-PPC970 workstation. Saying one can't do something is different than saying the other can't.

Re:For DIY'ers

[illumin8]

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

Actually, if you combined that with a cable HD set top box with Firewire output, you could capture the MPEG transport stream with very little horsepower to disk, and use the HW decoder to playback. Voila, DIY HDTivo. As of April 1st, all cable companies are required to provide a Firewire port on their set top boxes to any customer that requests it. You get the raw transport stream fed directly from the Firewire, so there is no quality loss like you might have with an MPEG capture card.

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...

[the_2nd_coming]

it is your damn laws. tell your government to get rid of the regulations that keep TIVO out.

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]

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.

That's the status on DirecTV units in Canada.

Standalone TiVo's are perfectly legal to use, however TiVo's data service doesn't dial-in numbers in Canada nor do they bother to cover Canadian TV schedules and lineups. TiVo could offer that in Canada just fine, but they haven't bothered to.

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[TrevorB]

I did a bit of research into this. As far as I can tell, the DirecTV/Canada issue has to do with the reception with sattelite signals, not with PVR's. I just want to hook this thing up to my local cable (preferably my digital cable, if at all possible, which many of us have up here)

On the contrary, Tivo seems quite hostile to the idea of selling Tivos in Canada. Once a national canadian radio station called up Tivo to ask about Tivo in canada, and their PR rep got angry about setting up an interview with Tivo under false pretences.

Does anyone know what Tivo's beef is with 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.

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[topham]

Just buy a regular Tivo and check out tivocanada.com.

I have a Series 2 working quite well (98%). HMO option is the only issue outstanding.

I did pay for the lifetime subscription, I had no intentions of ripping Tivo off, I just wanted a working PVR. They get their money, and I get my PVR. I looks like I may, down the road, have to pay Zap2It for tv listings, but right now atleast they are free.
(And they now support a direct data option, no more webpage scraping).

[note fatal issues: HMO option (which I bought) is nice, but has a timeout if the unit doesn't call home, so far the methods to get the guide, etc, don't deal with that, so I have to have the unit actually call home, or that function stops working.).
Currently there are no 'movies'. The category doesn't work, known bug and will get fixed.]

Re:Waiting for this Slashdot headline...

[topham]

Whatever the over-all reason, the ones you've described aren't them.

A tivo in Canada can generally call a local number to contact Tivo. No hacking of any required for it. There are local numbers in all major cities. I believe they contracted with UUNet, but whatever.

The IR Software works just fine with my Digital cable box. Canada uses pretty much the same electronics as the United States. There may be the odd difference, but it is the exception, not the rule.

I believe Tivo gets their guide data from Tribune, which, in my case is the source for Zap2It.com which is my source for tv listings.

The only technical issue with a Tivo in Canada that I can see is that we do not have zip-codes, instead we have Postal Codes, and this does complicate things a little on configuraing a Tivo, but the changes were made to support Tivo in the UK, so even those software changes are not a big deal.

The only real issue that could be holding Tivo out of the Canadian market is French language issues. Anything else has to be political issues.

HD Porn

[scifience]

Now all we need are the HD porn channels to go with it! Buy it once, watch it again (and again) later!

Re:HD Porn

[evilviper]

That's the last thing you want. With such a high res, you're going to see that the "barely legal teens" are in their 40s, and not all that good looking when you can see every imperfection in high-res, on a 60" display...

4 Tuners!

[unfortunateson]

Ok, there are PC-based units, but will you find one with two DirecTV tuners and two terrestrial HD tuners? I saw this demo'd at CES in January, and it looks very nice.

Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once, but it's certainly a nice package. Like the other DirecTiVos, though, it does not have an MPEG encoder, so no cable or analog antenna inputs -- you're stuck with DirecTV and broadcast digital.

Re:4 Tuners!

[LostCluster]

Even though the unit has four tuners on board, only two can be active at any given moment. Anything more and they'd end up having too much data headed to the standard hard drive at once. Optimized-for-DVRs HDs are in the pipeline, so eventually this limitation will go away in future models.

There's really no content loss in not having an MPEG encoder on board. Nearly every analog channel is now being repeated digitally on their sister digital channel, or in most major markets DirecTV has an MPEG-translated version you can get access to.

This is the early adopter's model. There's going to be better ones in a few years.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually one of the nice features of the DirecTivo units. Since they don't do any local MPEG encoding, the picture quality is great. Actually when compared to my other Directv receiver it was much better (but this could be due to my other receiver being of poor quality).

I have also used standalone tivo's though, and although I have noticed the pictures slightly modified, they seemed to be slightly different (the tivo had smoothing turned on), but again, neither was bad.

But for cost and ease of use, any tivo is better than a modified linux box. Unless, of course, you want to have your main linux machine near your tv (which I don't really want at all).

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...

Re:MPEG compression

[LostCluster]

HDTV broadcast signals are by definition MPEG compressed at the TV station. Therefore, all the TiVo unit has to do is just record the already digital bitstream without having to decompress/recompess.

MPEG is designed as a processes that's computationally cheap to decode, which means that it's computationally expensive to encode. Basically, TV stations, networks, and signal providers have more expensive MPEG encoders than can ever be included in a consumer device, so they come up with more-bang-for-the-bandwidth. It'll always be better to just save that bitstream to an HD than to decompress and re-encode.

Re:MPEG compression

[evilviper]

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.

Yes, but your non-HD TV signal is analog. For Tivo to store it, it has to convert it to digital, then encode it in real-time (which is never good for quality).

Besides that, Tivos encode to low-bitrate MPEG in order to save space. If you select the highest quality, it should be high enough that you won't notice any difference in quality.

HDTV is broadcast in MPEG2, so the Tivo just has to store it, losslessly, perfectly. So with HDTV, the signal from the TV will be just as good as one that is direct.

Interestingly enough, if you wanted a slightly lower-quality HDTV stream in order to save space, the Tivo should be able to do some MPEG2 tricks, like Requant, which will require practically no CPU power. If the company is smart, a Tivo is going to be a lot more like a TV studio, and less like a VCR.

DirecTivo, HD-TiVo, and problems

[PenguinOpus]

All DirecTiVo (including HD), record the digital bit stream directly from the satellite onto the hard drive, so there is no degradation at all. The HD-TiVo added OTA (over-the-air) tuners for the local digital TV broadcasts and those bits are also sent directly to the hard drive. 19Mbits/sec is the maximum HD rate for OTA, while satellite/cable encodings of HD tend to be 13Mbits/sec or less.

In reading the initial comments about the HD-TiVo, there is one complaint that could be a problem for those who are currently using a DirecTV HD receiver like the DTC-100 and a non-HD DirecTiVo.

Apparently, when the HD-TiVo gets a non-HD signal, it doesn't automatically switch its output to 480i/480p. It also doesn't stretch/zoom the image to fill a 16x9 screen. This means you need to manually switch the output if you want your TV's de-interlacer/scaler to adjust the image. Depending on who you ask, this is a no-op, annoying, or fatal. (I'm probably in the annoying camp)

100 channels of HD

[poptones]

for the last years I've had just a few channels - I cancelled my tivo subscription long ao because I didn't find $70 a month worth of stuff to watch in exchange for the $70 or so a month I was paying. But lately I've been wondering what I might be missing.

The other day I was laying in a hospital bed waiting to go into surgery to get my deviated septum fixed. Decided to flip on the TV and see what I've been missing... flip... flip.. flip...

I turned it off and went to sleep until the nurse came in and gave me a shot of demerol.

It would be great if there were something on to watch. As it is, though, all I ever watch anymore is Survivor and Star Trek and West Wing. If I want to see west wing in HD or Star Trek I just download it from usenet - and it ain't locked down, as I would imagine these gadgets are.

If Hollywood wants me to subscribe to one of these services, they better start showing something worth paying for.

No, scratch that... they better start showing a lot of stuff worth paying for. And without the DRM nonsense.

An ode to my TiVo,

[JRHelgeson]

By: Joel Helgeson

My TiVo box, a loyal pal,
a friend I truly care for.
Because it guarantees I'll see,
the shows I wasn't there for.
Two-thousand shows I've 'taped' so far,
each night I 'tape' a new one.
Who knows, perhaps there'll come a day,
I'll find the time to view one...

Huh?

[-tji]

Dude, that's not even close to a Tivo.

The VIA chipset supports MPEG2 acceleration (offload of iDCT and Motion Compensation) *not* full HD decoding. So, you still need a lot of CPU horsepower to display HD - more than the 1GHz VIA C3 has to offer.

Beyond that, there is no way to hook an HDTV tuner to that board, not to mention the 2 Off The Air tuners the Tivo supports.

Then, you've got the DirecTV input.. The Tivo has 2 DirecTV tuners, while it's impossible to use DirecTV with a PC board.

Then, you've got the software. There are some decent PC PVR packages available. But, nothing up to the Tivo's level.

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].

I got one...

[burnsy]

I received my unit 2 days ago and I must say that I don't love it. It is acceptable, but not anything to fall in love with.

TiVo really dropped the ball by not adding any new features or functionality, not even the HMO features. This is a stright port from the old version of TiVo software to support HDTV.

TiVo had the opportunity (and more than plenty of time) to make this product a huge leap the PVR game, but they seemed to have choose the safe route.

So for your $900 you get a TiVo that supports HDTV, but not much else.

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?

Re:I got one...

[MBCook]

TiVo did NOT drop the ball.

DirecTV won't allow HMO for some reason (there is a petition out there somewhere). NO DirecTiVo has HMO. It's not TiVo's fault, DirecTV is the one you've got a beef with. DirecTV is in total controll about what version of software it runs (verison 3.1.x probably) and many other things.

As for "adding any new features or functionality", like what? I've got a second generation DirecTiVo (Phillips DSR-7000) and other than HMO, I can't think of anything that I'd like it to have. The only thing that I wish it had was more memory and a faster processor, which I assume that the new box has.

They added HDTV and you can still record two programs at once (even two HDTV programs at once). What big stuff could you want other than that?

As for the $900, for that you get a TiVo that can hold 200 hours of SD ($99 dollar TiVo plus about $250 for upgrade from 9thTee), a HDTV reciever DirecTV reciever ($300 for a Samsung from BestBuy). That's $650. But you can record TWO things at once, so throw in a second HDTV reciever to make things fair (another $300) and now we're up to $1050. Of course all this stuff is in one nice little box so you don't need nearly as many cables. The box could be considered a $150 SAVINGS over the equivelent other equiptment only it's all in one and does things that the above stuff can't (like TiVo HDTV content).

They love it?

[boarder]

I'm wondering if the poster or the editor even RTFA. I'm reading the forums, and most DO NOT love it. Most people are annoyed by it. They say it looks great, sure, but they say it is annoying to use in practice.

The big problem they are having is it doesn't switch native resolutions. Every time you change the channel or watch a new show that has been recorded, you have to change the output resolution. How many wives want to hit 10 buttons just to change the channel? Others are saying it isn't recording all of their season pass shows correctly.

They are optimistic, though, because the chips used in the TiVo should easily be able to fix the native res problem by a software update.

I want one!

[uncoveror]

Dear Hughes: Send me a fre HDTV Tivo, and I promise to write a glowing review of it at uncoveror.com!

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:Boooooo Hisssss

[numbski]

BTW, I own an HDTV that I specifically made sure had none of this BS on board. Same goes for my HD Direc TV receiver.

The fact that this is being supported now sickens me.

Regular DVI inputs could potentially get a downrezzed or blank picture depending on content providers.

THAT had best be FUD, otherwise I would be seriously PO'D. I don't pay for 'content protection'.

Re:Well, you have to assume they're not stupid

[-tji]

There are some HDTV tuner cards available, which rely on DxVA acceleration for MPEG2 decoding. With a Radeon card, the bare minimum CPU is an 800MHz P3. With an Nvidia GeForce4 MX or FX Series (the other Nvidia cards don't do MPEG2 accel) it takes a 1.6GHz P4. Assuming the VIA chip's capabilities are somewhere between the Radeon & Nvidia chips, let's say it takes a 1GHz P3. From my experience with the Via C3, the preformance is around 1/2 of the performance of a P3 at the same clock speed. So, the C3 is not gonna cut HD decoding.

I use one of the FusionHDTV cards, with a 1.4GHz Celeron(Tualatin). It mostly works.. it will decode the HD pretty well, but have little hiccups a couple times per minute. Much too annoying for my tastes. I switched to a "MyHD" card, which has a hardware MPEG decoder instead. It could run with a 200MHz Pentium, as almost all of the processing is done on card.

DirecTV - That's the whole point of the Tivo mentioned in the article. It's sold as a DirecTV receiver, which also supports OTA reception. Without a valid DirecTV subscription, the OTA will not work.

As for seperating the cards in different boxes. That's fine, it will work. But, the net effect will be even less like a real Tivo. You have a problem of distributed recording/scheduling, and problems playing live tv when the card is in another system, file locking issues, etc.. (Yes, I have tried this with HD cards.) There may be some capability to do this with the various SD cards out there, but the HDTV equipment is not as flexible. At this point, there is only one HDTV card that is even operational in MythTV (pchdtv.com). It has beta level drivers, and alpha level integration into MythTV. Using it today is not just a DIY project, it's a software development project.

Any way you cut it, you currently can't make an HDTV PVR that compares to the Tivo. I've been trying to for the last 2 years, and while I've got a decent system for recording Off The Air HDTV, it doesn't come close to a Tivo. I will gladly toss my homebrew PVR in the closet and replace it with the Tivo.

Re:Somebody want to post where to get it?

[aenea]

You're a little late to the party to get one soon. Pre-order lists started a few months ago, and as far as anyone knows fewer than 200 shipped this week for the first time. It will probably be mid to late May before they start showing up on store shelves.

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.

So far, they do love it

[Bryan Ischo]

There is now a poll in response to this Slashdot article. See:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/poll.php?s=&a ction=showresults&pollid=2255

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.