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Sony PC/DVR Incorporates 7 Tuners & 1TB HD
GFD writes "TechJapan has an article on the 'Type X' Viao PC/DVR that will have 1TB and 7 tuners - allowing the recording of 7 shows at the same time. It also has a very cool look."
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It looks like a black box with "VAIO" on it.
Damnit man lets give them an award!
Get paid to code OSS
But they're all analog... you can optionally buy a single digital tuner. But, really... why? How is someone ever going to find seven shows they want to watch at once in general, little yet if they're limited to the analog band?
And, obviously, no HD capabilities either.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Isn't this overkill? What consumer would honsestly need this! When have there ever been seven TV programs worth watching on at the same time?
~c
Ok, not complaining, I really just wanted to know how much the thing will cost and when I can get me one... Oh and of course, will it be cheaper than any other 1TB HD device for offline storage.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Now you can record 7 different Star Trek episodes at once!
....I'll buy it in no time flat, even if it costs US$2,200. :-) But we really don't need that many tuners built into the box--maybe three to four at most.
You have to wonder if Sony is using licensed TiVo technology for this box.
Yeah, all for the low price of your arm, leg and first born.
There isn't even enough decent crap to justify 7 tuners. Or more importantly, enough crap for me to want to pay for 7 tuners. And I don't think they make a TB of decent TV a year anyway.
So does that mean I need 7 boxes from my SAT or cable company? Do they offer some kind of bulk discount for that?
That's enough for anyone to record pretty much whatever they want to for enough viewing for a few weeks... or all the fansubbed anime on Animesuki.com for a few days.
Question, though - what manner of hookups are we talking about here? How many RF, A/V, S-video, and optical links must be necessary for this many recorders?
You'd think that the cabling alone would be prohibitive.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Sony held a meeting in Tokyo on the 10th to present their new "VAIO" products. Among them was the "type X," a HD recorder on a PC base.
The device features 7 above ground analog TV tuners, as well as more than 1TB of HD space, and a maximum of 7 channels can be recorded at the same time. one can store about one week's worth of programming from seven different channels, and Sony has said that it is "to keep in touch with past and present programs like a time machine, one can choose their favorite program and watch it."
Sony plans on releasing the machine before the end of 2004, and since it is currently under planning/development, concrete specifications have not yet been finalized.
The device has been placed in the "next generation recorder with a PC base" category, and unifies AV and PC functions. It can also be used as a normal PC with a wireless keyboard/mouse and remote controller. Also, using the D4 output, it can output to flat panel TVs such as the "Wega" series.
Furthermore, Sony also plans on selling an optional terrestrial/BS/110 CS digital tuner. There is currently no PC supporting digital transmissions besides NEC's "VALUESTAR TX/TZ." The VALUESTAR also has limitations such as only being able to output up to 480p, so much attention is being paid to what the type X will support, since the current specifications are not final.
At the announcement event, there was also a demonstration from Sony's IT & Mobile Solutions Network Company NC President, Keiji Kimura, involving the type X and a portable video player currently in development. He introduced the company's next generation AV concept by wirelessly outputting video to a Wega from the video player, whose video data was transferred from the type X.
From May 14th until the 16, there will be reference models of the "type X" on display at Sony's Mediage in Odaiba, in the "Do VAIO World 2004" event.
Recording 7 channels simultaneously for a week solid to a single drive has gotta take one seriously impressive bus. What are the data flow rates going to be for that? Something slightly ridiculous is my bet. And the hard drive write speed? Since it's unlikely to be a single terabyte-sized drive, I wonder how many drives are in this thing. One for each channel? And is it going to cost the earth? Probably...
Wow, that's a lot of storage, is that in one drive?
If it is, then what if the drive fails?
How pissed are you gonna be?
It's one of the reasons I have MULTIPLE harddrives in my pc.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
"allowing the recording of 7 shows at the same time"
Thats great but its hard enough to find one good show on tv, is there really a time that 7 good shows are on?
Wait, hold up. We at /. are complaining about overkill on a cool new tech toy.
And when has it been said you need all that you buy it for. We buy SUVs and only like 1% of people can use them for what they are for. Overkill has bragging rights.
Evolution or ID?
it will look sexy, but will be crippled by some DRM, I'm afraid.
The article is slashdotted already, but what DRM will it have? Sony has too much to protect (Sony Music) to allow people to enjoy their hardware fully.
I've had a Sony MD, you could transfer from your PC to the MD with the USB cable, but what you recorded on the MD (even if recorded with an analog device, you couldn't transfer it back to your PC...)
I hope they haven't done the same kind of mistake: making a great hardware, with functionalities crippled by some DRM.
-- No signature yet.
...by a factor of 7 on some nights.
In a non-home setting, this device could work really well as a video surveilance setup. I mean B&W vid @ low res, you could channel 7-sources into it, and keep a great deal of informatio stored. Now I am sure thats not the purpose of this, but that is the only thing I can think of, for seven tuners at one time. Unless you really want to watch every station's take on a presidential message, im sure the slight camera angles make all the difference in the world ;)
je suis parce que j'aime
.. but maybe 7 tuners is a little bit over the top.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I recently got Time Warner's DVR service because its the only way I can record a show while watching another. I could get another cable box, but thats not practical. With cable, its seems many of us are stuck with their equipment.
Okay so lets say you collect a terra Byte of TV when are you going to have time to watch it all ? I hope this has a really easy way of managing the recorded media
I cant think of seven channels worth watching, let along seven that would have something on simultaneously that I wouldnt want to miss.
Keep in mind cable channels repeat the same two 4 hour blocks 3 times a day each.
A TB of drive space? I'd rather have a DVDR for stuff thats worth keeping.
Though if you told me this thing can send multiple video streams over a LAN, in an accessible method (ie MPEG2 or something) to cheaper set-top devices and PCs, I'd be more interested.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Now you can record 7 different porns at once!
Evolution or ID?
Just in case you want to record 7 channels at the same time for a week, Sony has just the product. Well it's a PC too so I guess it's not a complete ripoff. Ripoff? Sony hasn't even presented the price yet. I'll take a guess though, and say...$9000? Just a guess.
Sony held a meeting in Tokyo on the 10th to present their new "VAIO" products. Among them was the "type X," a HD recorder on a PC base.
The device features 7 above ground analog TV tuners, as well as more than 1TB of HD space, and a maximum of 7 channels can be recorded at the same time. one can store about one week's worth of programming from seven different channels, and Sony has said that it is "to keep in touch with past and present programs like a time machine, one can choose their favorite program and watch it."
Sony plans on releasing the machine before the end of 2004, and since it is currently under planning/development, concrete specifications have not yet been finalized.
The device has been placed in the "next generation recorder with a PC base" category, and unifies AV and PC functions. It can also be used as a normal PC with a wireless keyboard/mouse and remote controller. Also, using the D4 output, it can output to flat panel TVs such as the "Wega" series.
Furthermore, Sony also plans on selling an optional terrestrial/BS/110 CS digital tuner. There is currently no PC supporting digital transmissions besides NEC's "VALUESTAR TX/TZ." The VALUESTAR also has limitations such as only being able to output up to 480p, so much attention is being paid to what the type X will support, since the current specifications are not final.
At the announcement event, there was also a demonstration from Sony's IT & Mobile Solutions Network Company NC President, Keiji Kimura, involving the type X and a portable video player currently in development. He introduced the company's next generation AV concept by wirelessly outputting video to a Wega from the video player, whose video data was transferred from the type X.
From May 14th until the 16, there will be reference models of the "type X" on display at Sony's Mediage in Odaiba, in the "Do VAIO World 2004" event.
Seeing as how I don't even get seven channels, I don't think I'm the target market. It does sound cool though.
Lots of comments already about why 7 tuners. One thing I can think of is the fact that during prime time all tv stations put on their best shows. Think thursday night. Maybe you want to watch what starts at 7:00 on fox, nbc, cbs, abc, discovery, and mtv. You can effectivly watch primetime tv for 7 hours (7pm to 8pm * 7 channels) if you wanted to. Is 7 overkill.... maybe but you need at least 4 and what better way to utilize that 1TB of storage than with 7 streams. -Cho
thanks to gvision.google.com!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
With 1TB disk, would it be most likely to have some kind of high-speed RAID configuration? I mean, what's the peak bitrate for recording one channel? And what will the peak bitrate for 7 channels be?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Could it be I've Fallen in LOVE!?.... um no, not really.
1 TB ain't *that* cheap yet--don't need to spend that much this week
:-)
7 shows at once? A bit much. Again, tuners, while cheap, aren't free. No reason to spend that much on things you'll likely never use.
By the time anyone *needs* this capacity, the box will cost a whole lot less. Well, OK, there may be *some* people who want and can afford this right now, but probably not enough to spool up production for. They can always several four dual-tuner DirecTiVos ($49-149, depending on sales, rebates, etc) and pop bigger disks in them if they need that much recording power. Grow your farm as needed.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
it is the opposite of "off the spoke" clearly
Here's the real source: google
Analog = RIP. And dedicated separate digital tuners/descramblers = teh suck for timeshifting etc.
:(
What I need is a 1TB box with 2-3 *digital* (DVB-C or DVB-T for us euros) tuners, and with a Conax descrambler smartcard support. So I could record at least one channel while watching another (or maybe 2 channels while watching third). In full digital glory. HDTV support would be a bonus, but that is not happening in europe at such a fast rate - I think broadcasters first want to move to digital, and then its easier to reuse the spare frequencies for HDTV signals once analog is dead and buried.
But no. Sony is designing an obsolete analog tuner box with a ridiculous pricetag...
It looks like they want $9,000.00 for this thing. It looks like a whole lotta fun in a shiney black box, but I don't think there is enough good stuff on TV to have the need to record 7 different things at one time. BUT... It could allow you to access Cable, Satellite, Over-The-Air Broadcast possibly High-Def and standard, maybe 7 tuners is about right?? I wish the site wasn't so slashdotted, I was barely able to get to the price and then I started getting server errors. I'll have to remember to check back later.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Even so, who wan't to bet on some for of copy protection for things like new releases, and popular series. Sure you can record Kill Bill Volume 10, but I bet you cant transfer the file to your comp and burn a DVD.
So then your stuck with a bunch of video on your DVR, which must be erased in order to add new content. I have a DVR, and really like it, but beyond recording a show or two to watch a couple of hours or days later, that's it. If I had a terabyte of video, by the time I got around to watching it, I would have recorded over or could care less about the majority of it.
Now if I could burn it, thast would be outstanding
I can't see these things taking off in a big way before streaming media gets here.
I've always seen this kind of thing as a stopgap solution until something more integrated (tv, movies, music, phone etc) and genuinely 'on demand' comes along
I wonder how much would it cost ($ and time) to build a similiar system at home...
starting with Asus barebone pvr...
I've been looking at TiVo's and the like for a while now but can't make up my mind whether to buy one or to build one...
Just because I don't care, it doesn't mean I don't understand. Homer J. Simpson
With a name like Viao, is this some kind of special Chinese-market-only product? I think Vaio sounds more likely...=)
:P
iqu
It seems that the server also can only look at 7 things at the same time, or what does "Internal Server Error : Process limit exceeded for uid 11363" mean to you?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
One of the great things about tiVo is how it buffers the show you're watching so you can pause rewind and skip commercials. When you change channels the buffer is gone and you can't rewind the new channel etc.
With this device you could (presumably) set it up to buffer your favorite channels as well as the one you're watching. You could watch one show and then jump over to CNN (or whatever) and rewind to watch the start of the news broadcast, then jump over to ESPN and watch the baseball game etc.
After reading this I was struck by the fact that we spend so much time watching and so little time doing. That is probably why humans are becoming a rather chubby lot. One doesn't see a pride of lions watching another pride of lions on a glass screen doing lion-like things.
It makes me very sad that we have become life voyeurs. Now we have a device that can rivet our buttocks even deeper into our recliners. I think we need to go for a walk, talk to friends, and turn the T.V. off.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Folks, shut off your TVs. There are never going to be 7 shows worth watching at the same time. On top of that, are you ever going to have time to watch all the 7 shows you recorded before you need to record another 7.
Something like this could be very useful in replacing security systems that use analog tape. Having decent frame-rate recordings you can keep for a while without having to maintain a buttload of tapes.
For those of you interested about the user interface:
Here& Here
More picture of "Type X":
Link
Link 2
Thing also seems to have a DVD-burner: Pictured Here
More links (in Japanese)
Watch Impress Japan
Well, while 7 shows at once might initially seem like overkill, what if you're a talk show host or a journalist and you have to do your research on something going on in the news, or perhaps keep track of different sports games, and yeah, I think the Olympics got mentioned here already which is an easy example.
Because you don't have to worry about which shows you record. You set it up to record your favorite channels, let it run constantly, and time-shift everything. You can then watch what you want, when you want. According to the article, it will hold a weeks worth of programming from seven channels.
I think I'm in love! On a serious note though folks, I think 7 tuners is totally overkill. I think 3 or 4 should be the most that almost anyone would need. A TB is probably overkill as well, unless we're talking about recording in high def. Then I guess I can see having it. It would be pretty cool to have that much space on a DVR. You could build up quite a collection of movies.
What good is 7 tuners if I have digital cable or sattelite?
They need to come up with a standardized way to interface tuner cards in TVs or generic set top boxes.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Uh, is anyone else concerned about normal social interaction when our best friends are tv characters.. to socialize with them we record the show?
"No! I heard if Ross married Rachel"
"Have you seen frasure today?"
SUV Sport utility Vehicle.
my jeep had the sport taken right out of it along with it's 4WD, but it stioll does utility well. I get groceries every week in it because ther simply isn't enough cargo capacity on my 50cc motor scooter. so yes, I don't use it as the trail blazing, mud slinging, fold down rear seats for humping in the back machine it was designed to be.
The CB App. What's your 20?
That's a lot of "Soap Network" programming. We have a PRV not that only stores 100 hours of programming. Right now (well as of last night) there were about 45 hours taken up. Most of that (read vast majority) is various soaps. My wife is hooked on soaps in way that I can only weep about. What the hell happens when one of these things finds in way in the living room. It's a sickness, all this TV watching.
Hey, I live in America, I can SUE! Look out Sony, you are opening yourself up here.
Stop the madness, save us from ourselves! No more PVR's Please. I'm begging you!
Still not enough to record every episode of Law and Order thats on at any given time...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
How about using the 7 tuners to scan close captions on 7 channel for keywords you might be interested in so it can instantly start recording?
This would be great to monitor all the major 24/7 news channels.
This device is a perfect candidate for modding into a 1TB file server!
D
from http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/
Guides "type X" advanced technology as a personal computer in the base, is the product which is advancing development anew the higher-order origin AV video recording/playback function is actualized as a model "of the next generation AV recorder" concept, this time as information of development.
Maximum of 7 TV tuners, it loaded the hard disk drive which exceeds 1 tera- byte, maximum of videotaped channel 7 simultaneously, it saw without being conscious of the presently past to be, choosing program, it can view. Furthermore, it is the schedule which has high-level AV efficiency e.g., with combination with the terrestrial BS 110 degree CS digital broadcast corresponding unit, it corresponds to also the video recording of digital hi-vision broadcast.
favorite quote from that - "it saw without being conscious of the presently past to be, choosing program, it can view."
i don't even know wtf that's supposed to mean, but it makes me laugh.
.. all I'm getting is an error message from their website.
Here's Sony's X page in Japanese.
multiple TV tuners sound like a good idea for primetime.
Also comes with wireless keyboard, mouse.
Seems like a lot of details are still in the design stages.
I worked at a University PR office after college, and we had a student flunky whose job it was to program 6 VCRs to record a slew of local news programs and then scan the recordings for stories about the University.
I can imagine that there a ton of possible uses similar to this in the low-end commercial side. And then there's hard-core sports fans who want to watch *all* the games, and so on.
Hence the Internet. The beauty being that you have 1TB worth of stuff to watch in the meantime. There must be something decent on for it to record in the weeks it takes to go through it all.
Course, this is where Tivo's autorecord feature comes in, though with a Bayesian discriminator to decide what it should be recording.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It is one of the monoliths from 2001.
Which explains why I have this sudden urge to wield my remote as a weapon...
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Not to disagree with you, but aren't lions (male lions especially) pretty lazy most of the time? Take domestic house cat behaviour and just scale it upwards.
deus does not exist but if he does
Without PS2 they might be dead already.
As an owner of a ReplayTV, I can think of one great use for 7 tuners. Time shifting! Buffer the last seven watched channels or however many tuners available. That way if you switch to a channel and see something you want to go back and watch, it is buffered.
Unfortunately for you I look at where links go to in the status bar. No hit for goat.cx from this workstation today.
I'll even pay extra so I don't have to watch commercials, and I'll be happy to tell the networks which shows I watch, when I watch them, and if I thought they sucked or not.
If you're not watching any commercials, why would they give a shit which shows you watched or what you thought about them?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I have 2 ReplayTV's now and they are nice but I'm really starting to get annoyed by the lack of a DVD player inside them. All these devices are trying to be little components in a vastly complicated mess of an entertainment system. Stop that! Be everything. I want to be able to run my whole system with one remote again (and no, a massively complicated universal remote doesn't count.)
Also, it should be networked with little inexpensive "player" modules that people can hook up to their various TV's.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
If you're not watching any commercials, why would they give a shit which shows you watched or what you thought about them?
A little something called Product Placement
"TV BAD! DOING THINGS GOOD! LOLOL"
/. thread that has anything to do with TV
/me sighs and crawls back into his hole.
There are so many downmods that suit this it's not even funny.
1) Offtopic - this crap has little to do with the actual PVR.
2) Redundant - It's been said on every
3) Troll - The poster is likely just wanting a response from anyone who still likes TV.
4) Overrated - granted this one's subjective, but it seems to fit.
But despite all these perfectly suitable mods, you give this rehashed, regurgitated crap Insightful?
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
To all those people complaining that 7 tuners is too many, I suppose 640K was too much for you too.
Have some forsight. Maybe you only use 2-4 at once now, but one day when there's 3 of your favorite shows, a newscast, 2 movies, and the video feed from your backyard flying home maintenance robot that you want to capture all at once... I bet you'll be pretty pleased.
Yawn. Great, the worlds largest purveyor of electronic slavery now has some new shackles, yay. Damn the technology, its still not gonna give Mr. Couch Potato what he needs to boost the economy ...
(hint: a kick in the ass!)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, (et al) all care about which shows people watch and whether or not people like them. And in exchange for people paying extra, there are no commercials.
The type of programming that the OP was talking about exists today in the premium channel systems.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Total, that's 7 * 160 GB = 1120 GB = 1.12 TB, 7 tuners.
Next, home media option, connects all the tivos and you can watch any show recorded on any tivo from any other tivo. Cost, $15 month? something like that.
Total cost: 7 * 400 = $2800. Installation difficulty: minor.
Certainly not worth $9k.
-- Kevin Rice
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
It would be a red letter day in the annals of mankind if I ever encountered a situation where I wanted to record 3 shows at once, much less 7.
Television should be so good.
As usual, this product will end up with a much less impressive feature set, as most Sony products do. Don't get your hopes up too high.
Remember the "PSX" console? Most of its cool features were dropped about a WEEK before its launch.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
I'd love this, as I could keep a week backspool of CNN, CNN/HN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, CSPAN, and a tuner left over for Fox/Cartoon Network/whatever else I feel like watching. With the amount of stories that get quashed after one broadcast, it would be handy to be able to keep things around for a while.
assuming the DRM doesn't cripple it... this is exactly the device i am looking for when i wil hundreds of millions of lottery dollars :) so i can have a house in several different countries, and i can grab the good tv shows while you are living in a different country.... hey, it could happen, you never know...
With seven tuners I can FINALLY keep up with the broadcast schedule for "Who's Line is it anyway?"!!
#DeleteChrome
I just moved to Memphis recently and got digital cable from Time Warner. One of the things I found most interesting was several of the "On Demand" channels are much like you describe. Example: The HBO package includes "HBO On Demand" which has, essentially, a lot of the stuff HBO is showing now, including the last several episodes of their various series. Showtime on Demand had the last 8 episodes of Penn and Teller, for example, which allowed me to catch up on the ones I had missed. There's also Discovery Channel On Demand, Comedy Central On Demand, and several other non-premium cable networks in there.
The functionality is basically to to that On Demand channel, pick your show, hit play, and wait a couple of seconds for it to begin streaming it to you. Only thing I don't like about it is that the FF and RW controls are a bit laggy (since they have to talk to the headend) and only work at one speed. But they do work.
I didn't opt for the PVR built into the cable box, but in these cases, I'm led to understand, it streams the show directly to your hard drive in the PVR and thus you get the show much faster, along with better control over playback. I dislike the Cable Box PVR controls too much to use that though. I'll stick with my Tivo in that case.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Just last week when Microsoft announced at WinHEC that modern computers will very likely have a terabyte of harddrive space... everybody here was saying "WHAT THE F!? Longhorn is going to take a terabyte to install? Are they crazy?"
No... they were talking about things like this box from Sony.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"Seven tuners ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates
I don't watch so much TV that I have any use for 7 tuners recording at once, but one thing that I like about a good TV show is that the people behind it put some thought in before presenting it to me. The idea that they're trying to say something appeals to me. All media have this feature, that is: mediation.
I find in my conversations with people that there isn't very much going on behind the words. Since I don't enjoy people per se, there's really no reason to make small talk. There are some times, but mostly smalltalk omg no. I'm a teacher so I talk to people plenty during the day.
RaviWhen the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Now that may sound like a lot, but what if in addition to the 7 input tuners, it had multiple outputs. If you could tie it into some kind of distribution system for your house, throw in Tivo's ability to predict what your family likes, you have a very cool system. Every member of your family could be watching a different program at one time. $9k is a bit pricey, but the price is bound to come down.
It already covered type X.
Not exactly. The key point to remember is that people watch shows *not* networks/channels. I watch The Sopranos, I don't watch HBO. I watch The West Wing, I don't watch NBC. Etc.
What the grandparent was getting at is that we currently have the technology to completely eliminate channels and simply offer shows. The current setup where shows are offered on channels is technologically obsolete.
We want to change from the model where networks broadcast shows on channels to one where the network-type companies are more like movie production companies. Where they finance the production of new shows and then send them to the distributor (probably the cable/satellite companies) who stores them for purchase by the viewer (then the shows are streamed/downloaded).
Of course, networks are going to fight this all the way. But the continued evolution of tivo-like devices makes it technologically inevitable.
Seven analog tuners? That would be perfect for the public-relations shop that I support -- we need to replace five analog VCRs that record the local news from the five local stations, four times every day. But we're going after five Pioneer DVR-810H-S (80 hour series-two TiVo with stupid-fast DVD-R drive). Recording the shows and archiving them to a cheap media -- EASILY AND QUICKLY -- are our top priorities. If it is quick and easy, any quality better than VHS is better for my folks. If this Sony seven-tuner monster had an internal DVD-R, I'd need this one box instead of five -- and I'd spend end-of-year money on something else instead of those five Pioneers.
Even superheroes once were losers
The other serious flaw with most set-tops and tv channel UIs (Tivo almost gets it right) is not having dynamic filtering and style sheets for the schedule and channels attached to the up/down channel buttons. E.g. there are some channels I absolutely never want: fine I lock them out now. But then there is the gray area which is content dependent: I'm not a big basketball fan so I should be able to make channels disappear completely during the time that basketball is on - if I up-channel through it, it just skips and if I chose it's even gone from the schedule. When other "desired" programming is on those channels re-appear again.
Now combine that kind of "editing/filtering" to 50 tuners with PVR and PiP: now you have television usability!!
A serious, serious bone-head UI gaffe on the DirecTV Tivo: you ascend channels up-screen with the channel up/down buttons but the program guide the channels ascend down-screen! Who was the moron...?! Oh yeah, Huge Air Crash idiots own DirecTV.
Does anyone know what the most tuners people have placed in computers running the open source PVR projects (such as MythTv or Freevo)?
I've heard of people running three tuners and I guess that theoretically you could run as many as you have PCI ports.
I have a Tivo, which is great and all with 2 tuners. However, all that time that I am doing other things while the Tivo is working cuts into my time that I start watching the tube. Then I have a lot of 'whatever' to watch. I think that 7 shows at once is a little too much...and my 100g drive that came in my Tivo is plenty. (Atleast for me)
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
But does this support Ogg?
...
Far more interesting is the Vaio Pocket music player. It got a nifty "G-Sense" interface that I think can rival iPod's.
t 2. htmlo cket-i nterface-movie-and-atrac-weirdness-016088.php
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/VGF-AP1/fea
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/sony-vaio-p
FYI PVR blog has more coverage of the monster PVR... linking to Engadget coverage
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Go build a Myth TV device and stick as many PVR cards in as it can handle. If you're missing any features, crack your nuckles, break out the keyboard and get coding....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
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There's a standard, called OpenCable, but the cable industry hates it. There's a huge battle going on right now, involving the "broadcast flag", the FCC's rules on opening up the cable box market, the consumer TV industry, and the content people.
The cable industry certified to the FCC that they were in compliance with the OpenCable standard as of January 1, 2000. Ask your cable provider for the supposedly-available "digital POD" (a smart-card like device that handles the encryption) and see how far you get.
I'd love to have a system where the cabel companies feed stuff to us from their PVR dump, and then we store it on our harddrives with full control. Then I wouldn't have to wait for a certain time for a show to come on, and I can watch the news whenever I feel like it instead of only when a show isn't recording...
:)
I know I know, buy the two tuner version
Parent post's author and those who replied seem to be informed on the UK digital cable issues....
Could you please expand and/or provide links to technical sites?
I've been forced a couple of years ago to 'upgrade' from analogue to digital when C&W got taken over by NTL, with promises of interactive services and broadband.
Now, I'm paying more, get an awful service,and have neither of the above.
The onscreen menu is slow and clunky and often titles are not displayed while updating.
The volume on their remote does not work: comes up with a full screen message that it will be available soon, and I have to use 2 remotes, the TV's just for volume.
At a previous home, the (analogue) box would even spit out the main channels on the normal broadcast frequencies, so that you could feed it around the house and tune your TV directly.
I fail to see how this is an improvement.
The picture is crispier and noise free, but you can still see compression artefacts in the colour and fast motion can get jerky...
NTL stinks, that's for sure.
but will it have any kind of drm? of course it will. Or if it doesn't, then it'll just be a whole lot more expensive then it has to be.
My Gawd WTF...
You need seven tuners because the average household has more than 1 person watching TV in it. Unless you have roommates of a similar demographic, you might need to record two shows simultaneously that are uniquely desireable to each person in the house. Four person family, Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, all want to watch two shows... oh, oh, already one tuner short. Hopefully you can stream shows to other rooms so that you can actually watch a terebyte's worth of shows!
I know somebody who has 14 kids. Assuming she, her husband, and each kid get to use the TV for a measly half hour each day (for a total of 8 hours), the odds are nil that the show each wants to watch will actually be aired during their alloted viewing time. With one of these, each kid would be able to watch the show they like without having to argue about trading time slots!
aQazaQa
I work for a company that builds PVRs ... we took home a 4-tuner proto a while ago for a 'friendly home trial' ... it took 2 weeks before we started running out of tuners - which implies that we need at least 5 .... it was sort of a sunday night family collision thing - Sopranos/Sex-in-the-city/Simpsons/Law-and-order/et c you personally may never need 7 tuners but if you, your wife and both the kids are recording stuff sometimes you will ....
Sure, I might gladly pay $.50/show that I know is worthwhile... but that would never be an option. Consider that people have somehow accepted $.99/song as reasonable - so much that the record companies want to increase it.
And how would you find out what is worth paying for without some free viewing?
Well, at least give an option for the user to decide - I'll take the better UI that aligns with *my* intuition over what's conventional but dissonant any day.
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Why has anyone pointed out how useful this would be for recording multi-angled pr0n simulcasts?
There is no real high tech here. If it comes out at $9K, then its obviously aimed at raping the professional market that doesn't know any better. Tivo actually does its work with a 50MHz processor. You wouldn't likely need much more here because the encoding will likely be all hardware. A case, 7-160MB drives, a CPU, and a few special boards with tuners and encoders should be
Heck, without looking for boards that I know exist and would allow it to be done more easily and less expensively, here is a brute force solution you could do yourself far cheaper. Buy 7 Tivos ($300x7=$2100), crack them, network them ($140 for USB ethernet adapters and $100 for network cabling/routers to utilize both of the MOBO's ethernet ports), add 7 160 MB Western Digital IDE drives ($80x7=$560) to a full size tower ($120 with really good supply), an ASUS motherboard that supports 7 drives + AMD64 CPU + 1G RAM and a few IDESATA converters so that the cheap drives will work on the SATA interface = $650 (just purchased that combo myself a couple of months ago). Throw a high end video card into the soup (not that you need it, you have all of the Tivos to replay with) at $300 or so, and you get a full 7 channel system for around $3870. And that's taking a really crude approach that, regardless, would be very highly functional (though you might have to throw in a few hundred more for a window air conditioner and ductwork to cool the beast :o). A couple of hours of research on encoding cards would likely bring the cost down to half that level.
Your point about lead-in show affecting ratings is true, but only to a point. And not far enough to overcome my "people watch shows, not networks".
First, only to a point because while lead-in can help a bit, it's not all that effective (as compared to the quality of the show itself). It can only help the ratings of a show a little bit (the prime example: NBC's inability to get any show to work after Friends; if lead-in were a really big factor, then that 8:30 slot would be trivially easy to fill).
Second, only to a point because, again, the viewer doesn't care about the network, only the shows. A good lead-in can cause people to be lazy, but nobody turns on their TV and says "I'm going to watch CBS, no matter what they're showing."
So, through programming tricks, like careful choice of lead-in, network programming executives can make small bumps in ratings. But I think that the vast majority of viewers would prefer to give the finger to the network programming executive and do their own programming using an a-la-carte show selection technology (if it were easy enough to use).
As an aside, the TV show production companies in my brave new world could still use the lead-in factor a bit. For example, they could offer bundles of shows that take advantage of popular shows to push sales of less popular shows.
Not exactly. Most people don't watch networks, they watch whatever is on after the last thing they watched, unless they know something particularly good is on somewhere else at the same time.
This is mostly because networks jam the start and ends of shows together and why we get the first part of the show before the title sequence.
No break, more viewers, more ad money.
But with PVRs, people won't be watching ads as much, nor will they watch 'live' as often. So why bother with networks anymore? Broad/multicast/cache popular shows to save bandwidth and dump commercials for paid content (and make fewer commercials for free content).
This is why I suggested that content providers could provide programming lineups similar to current TV, but more customized for location and viewer.
Shows would never have to compete, good shows would get watched, and crappy shows would get dumped. Niche shows could adapt to their viewers so that they can charge higher rates.
Not to mention that the strength of a Japanese NTSC signal is less than that of a USA NTSC signal.
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They have this some places, TW Digital cable here in SE Wisconsin has a feature called on demand, it costs a little bit extra per "channel", and the movies are an independant charge, but its well worth it. Basically you get acess to the entire season, and sometimes past seasons, of any show on HBO or showtime and some others, i dont have it personally, but a firend of mine was telling me they have Monty Python and stuff... Anywho, you select what you want, wait less than a minute for it to download. There it is, no commercials, what you want, when you want. I think more and more programming is heading towards this, which would be great IMHO, seing as how i ussually dont watch much TV, but just download the entire season of a show i like and watch it on here.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
[concern] We must have let one slip through!
Please return to your television for further instruction!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I have something like 400 channels on the digital cable system. With 7 decoders I could surf 4 channels at a time while recording up to three other channels.
Of course that would require that it decode digital cable.
Looks like a Sony rep got ahold of some mod points...
Can someone please explain the value of shelling out big bucks...ok....ANY money for an HD recorder when the only thing the networks are going to allow (via the broadcast flag rule) those rotten, good-for-nothing consumers to record is the advertisements? I can see it now. "Wow...look at this crisp view of the Frosted Flakes box...let's watch that again..."
you're a moron. shut the fuck up. no one cares about your "suggestions." no one listens to you. you are below average and insignificant. don't post here again, jackass.
Some have questioned whether there is any use for receiving 7 channels simultaneously; there are actually quite a few uses for 7 or even 100 channels.
There have been times in the past when such a device would have been quite useful for government or media oversight purposes. Recording 7 channels at a time for a week would have been useful at times such as 9/11, waco, the anthrax in the mail incidents, dessert storm, iraq, afganistan, etc.
The fact that it is PC based opens the opportunity to archive important clips and search the stored
data (using closed captioning) to locate all relevent news stories (and prune out the duplicate stories). Chastising the media for incompetent reporting is a major function of some activist organizations.
Of course, sony may use some sort of copy protection on the recordings or have other limitations that render an otherwise useful device as an expensive paperweight. And they don't say what operating system it runs. 7 tuners all displaying the blue screen of death?
Political activist groups could use such a device to record the major news broadcasts continuously and search via closed captioning for stories that pertain to their mission. The system could expire shows after a short time that did not get closed captioning keyword matches (with bayesian filtering).
For ordinary users, this could open up a nice form of channel surfing. Set your unit to record your favorite networks continuously and when you channle surf and see something you like, you can rewind to the beginning of the program. Also, using bayesian keyword matching on the closed captioning, the system could automatically locate shows that are likely to be of interest that might not otherwise be recorded or watched. Maybe someone is interested in time travel, science news, alternative sexuality, celebrity interviews, or owns stock in certain companies. Private citizens could set the system up to automatically record things pertaining to their political candidates. One could collect information that helps prove or debunk a particular consipiracy theory.
Of course, one can put together a comparable unit today for about half the price suggested by the article using standard hardware and open source
but that is beyond the skills of many potential users. 2 quad PCI USB 2.0 host adapters (minimizes bus sharing issues by having 8 separate buses), 7 external USB MPEG encoders with tuner ($200 each), one USB MPEG to video out adapter, and a RAID array. If one is willing to pay the price suggested in the article, there is a lower tech and more scalable solution though a bit bulky: buy 7 cheap PCs with MPEG encoder cards, one MPEG decoder with video output and a KVM switch and use VNC to route the video playback to the PC with the video output. Or buy a monitor/mouse/keyboard for each machine and you have a PC for every room or a bunch of workstations for your non-profit
organization. Already have a bunch of workstations? Then just add mpeg encoder cards
and maybe some extra disk to your existing machines and let them work in the background.
A non-profit with a low budget could even rely on the home workstations with broadband internet (to transmit relevent clips) of its members to create
a distributed network (which also allows monitoring the local affiliate stations).
Sort of like an ECHELLON for the people.
Of course, a unit that works with digital cable/satelite receivers would be more useful but the copy-protection on such systems would interfere. So, one might need 7 cable boxes
and use the analog solutions.
Even without 7 channels, the amount of disk space present could make it possible to record every episode of your favorite shows and keep them all.
I like how his page lists CABLE TV in the biggest font as one of the cottage's features...
"My God...it's full of stars"
Not if all they're recording is Infomercials and the Paramount Network...
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for all x, P(x) is true.
My statement is the following: there exists an x, such that ~P(x) is true.
Thus, your statement is false. Thanks for playing and come again. Oh wait, no - don't come again. You're a moron.
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One that chimes in with "Why don't we just turn off the {TV|computer} and go outside for a change, huh, huh?? Lazy-asses!", that is.
How come no one ever says you should stop reading and go outside? Or stop knitting? Or stop listening to music?
Answer: because those things are warm and fuzzy and old-fashioned. TVs and comptuers are techy and shiny and new-fangled. Therefore, they are evil and empty and fit only for the -- ugh -- ovine commoners.
I don't know about you, but I don't turn my brain off just because I'm watching TV -- why should I? In fact, the extra stimulation (data rate, if you will) gives it more to chew on: Could such a thing ever happen?...Was that scene stupid?...What ulterior motives might the producers have for what I just saw?...How much did Pepsi have to pay to get that soda can in the scene?
In conclusion, click on this obligatory link (which no longer works because The Onion has sold out).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
but the new version Microsoft MediaCenter PC will do just what you're asking, on demand purchases of video content on your TV. I know this because I am awaiting the beta sdk for providing DRM services for this system at work.
Microsoft is saying the units will run between $300-500, but I'm not going to vouch for that... the cheapest I've seen is $1200. I know they will be working toward a lower price point because the product will flop at current prices.
I don't own a TV.. slashdot is enough to take up all my time.. ::)
"There are too many people listening to our radio station, they're using up all the signal!"
I'm also curious where you got the information about Japanese NTSC... for all intents and purposes it's identical, though in broadcasts, they make a bit more use of secondary audio...
Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
You really justify your nick well, Acidic_Diarrhea.
Pilot: "The core defense is too intense. Our grid is maxed, I don't think we can last another run!" ."
Cortana: "Admiral, tell your men to hold their positions. Reinforcements are on the spoke."
Admiral: "The entire fleet is engaged, Cortana. With respect, what the hell sort of reinforcement have you got?"
Tech: "It's passing below your position ma'am. proximity zero
http://nikon.bungie.org/misc/halo2trailertra nscript.html
Nautical. To hail and communicate with (another vessel) at sea.