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TiVo vs. Windows Media Center Edition
The Importance of writes "Two reviewers make head-to-head comparisons of TiVo and Windows Media Center Edition (here and here). TiVo still comes out ahead, but MCE is improving. Of course, some tout the flexibility of PC-based DVRs, while others question what this flexibility means when you have things like the broadcast flag and the INDUCE Act."
Not to troll in any way, but personally, I will always support Tivo in the Tivo vs. MCE case for the soul reason of giving M$ my business... Just my .02
-- Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Hey...guess what I've never had to reboot so far...my Tivo. I don't intend for that to change anytime soon either.
Computers are a hobby of mine, and *I* don't have the time or patience to set something like this up. $149 for a Tivo gave me dual tuners, snappy interface and recording of the original DirecTV data stream (no quality loss). $6 a month? If $6 a month is even an issue to you, again, take a magnifying lens to your life. Something isn't working correctly.
I want to see a comparison of TiVo vs. MythTV vs. Freevo vs. Media Center. From my experience, MythTV should definitely come up on top. I've got a box running MythTV that acts as my tivo, fileserver, network audio device, and game console. Can tivo do all that?
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
Personally I think hardware companies should encourage this practice. I picked my wireless router because if it's readily available
third party linux-firmware
If Tivo encouraged this practice, they'd have far more than media center very quickly.
Here's a copy of my letter to Direct TV in regards to the Home Media Option
e s.js p for the latest
Subject: Home Media Option
Details: Where is it? This is something I would PAY for. You don't
even have a mention of it on your website, or an option for a DVR in
your 'Topics' above . At least you could be forthcoming about the
reasons you don't offer this service.
I have been a customer of yours for several years (I'm not putting my
customer number in on purpose) and have had DirectTV Tivo for a little
over 4 months.
I purchased this 'service' under the impression that I would be able to
network it, burn my shows to DVD, and stream shows to my PCs and Macs.
DirectTV has disappointed.
Your customer service is great, and I have very few service complaints,
but your refusal to work with your customers on this issue has me
investigating Dish Network and Replay TV and cable offerings in my area
- soon my DSL provider will be providing video on demand.
It is obvious to me that if DirectTV continues treating its customers
unfairly, the customers are going to leave for a provider that
understands fair use.
Thanks for your time.
(Reply follows)
Dear Customer,
Thank you for writing. As you know, the TiVo stand alone may offer the
Home Media Option, but DIRECTV DVR with TiVo does not. However, DIRECTV
DVR with TiVo may focus more on other features, such as video-based
services like Starz on Demand. For information about TiVo stand alone
units and service, please visit the website at: www.tivo.com or you can
call 877-FOR-TIVO, that's 877-367-8486. Available 11AM-11PM ET daily.
Please know that we are always looking for ways to enhance our services.
Your suggestions are valuable and we use them to judge interest in
various programming sources. In fact, we have made changes as a result
of viewer feedback.
We have forwarded your comments to our programming department. Please
continue to visit our web site at DIRECTV.com for the latest news and
information about our services.
Additionally, as you know, DIRECTV makes changes and additions to our
programming line-up from time to time. However, it is a DIRECTV policy
not to discuss upcoming announcements until their official release date,
and at this time we have no official announcement beyond what we have
already communicated to the public. We invite you to visit the News
Releases section of our web site at
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/aboutus/Headlin
announcements
We hope that this information is helpful. Thanks again for writing.
Sincerely,
Ganesh
DIRECTV Customer Service
Is VHS gonna stick around for another while? I know it can be a nightmare to program those things and stuff, but it strikes me as an underrated bit of technology. Are there issues with recording cable? I seem to remember my landlord in England recording digital TV content onto an ancient, top-loading VCR. Sure there are a lot of things that a TiVo can do that a VCR can't, but you pay a high price for this. A bit like an autogyro being a lot cheaper but slightly more limted than a helicopter.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It's been covered a million times here, but MythTV does more than MCE or Tivo.
One day I gave MCE a try and found it to be a dreadfull experience. Sure, some of the widgets and transitions were nice - and the remote was pretty sexy (anyone wanna help me write a driver for Linux?), but it just left me wanting more.
I have most of my media living on a different machine - MCE had a hard time dealing with that. I had to import my mp3s (not oggs - god forbid) into Media Player before MCE would recognize them.
Large movies were a pain too - MCE wanted a nice screen shot of each movie - so a directory with 10-15 divxs was painful to browse.
I have MythTV set up with a PVR-250 and it's the best thing ever. Automatic commercial flagging? check Windows? Not even. So much better.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
It seems to me that there will always be two markets; device and PC-based. Even if MCE is a pre-packaged, Microsoft deal, it still involves a desktop computer which not everyone has, or even, *gulp*, wants!
Some people will always like to be able to control what is going on and configure their own system. Others will want nothing to do with configuration of any kind and will simply want it to work. Until M$ spins the MCE off into a device or integrates it with X-Box or whatever, the PC'ness of it will remain its barrier of entry to the mainstream.
I deal with computers all day long and when I get time to watch TV, the last thing I want to think about are computers.
"I'm a karate man. Karate mans bleed on the inside."
I was reading a magazine article a couple of weeks ago that made the claim that Windows Media Center is the emerging standard for component interconnect and control. IE, in the future you aren't going to have a different remote control for each component in your home theater system, but instead everything is going to be simply controlled through a Windows Media Center PC-like device. The magazine claimed ~250 vendors had already signed on (including many big names).
I found this rather disheartening: Microsoft taking over yet another market. Sigh...
FWIW, I don't remember the name of the magazine, but it was some god-awful Home Theater magazine that is really just an excuse for advertising.
As long as there are cable boxes with svideo or RCA jacks there won't be anything stopping MythTV or MCE from recording the streams.
. . . even if it does pass, is that vendors are going to be very careful when describng a product to only include non-infringing uses in its marketing material. It would be instructional to go look at the old ads for the GoVideo dual deck VCR. They talked about its lawful purposes, while revealing enough that someone with two brain cells would think "Whoa! I could use this to copiez teh movies!"
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
No, not Linux. No, not even ease of use. Picture quality with DirecTV. DirecTV with Tivo is the only solution I've seen that captures the satellite's MPEG stream perfectly, while still providing a usable interface (hear me, Dish Network?)
I'd seriously consider building my own set, but there is no solution out there that doesn't have some analog to digital conversion at some point. And yes, it matters. Particularly if you have a 40" HDTV. Digital cable/satellite compression is pretty visible as it is; adding an analog conversion makes it look hideous.
In my idea world, I'd have a media PC that played DVDs, stored CDs, streamed direct digital television (like my Tivo) and (as a luxury) was wirelessly connected to the internet. All of these features exist as different pieces in other machines, but no one has them all together.
To me, it is nice for a simple PVR but it is sure buggy to me. A few times, I actually had blue screens of death.
I also use ATI's Multimedia Center (MMC) for my gaming box with ATI Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder (AIW) card. The software is nice with features, but also buggy (crashes a lot). There are a lot of features I miss like recording captions other than VCR video file format, being able to pause on demand while using scheduled recording like TV-On-Demand, etc.
TiVo and other hardware PVRs are better since they don't crash like computers due to various settings, setup, hardwares, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
A few years back the major a/v mfgs (like Yamaha, Denon, Pioneer) were supposedly agreeing on a common interface to their components, which could also be controlled by outside (read: PC) components. Has any of this gone forward? I would prefer the sonic advantage of standalone components, but would love to have server access (and use a live web connect as another "component"). Then MythTV (or TiVo) could be just another component enhanced by the home theatre system.
You could include ReplayTV in that comparison as well, but...is it even worth considering anymore? TiVO has become a part of the digital cable and DirecTV hardware offerings now. I don't remember seeing ReplayTV anywhere in the mix.
It's a shame too, since ReplayTV did some things better than the Series 2 TiVO. But -- at the same cost level (for the most part) as the TiVO, is/was it a bad investment? If it ever went completely under?
My 2 cents.
IronChefMorimoto
Not really. Back in the days when you had to manually enter the start and end time of a programme and set the clock by hand it was common for people to set the video to start 5 minutes before and let it run up to 15 minutes after.
This was to ensure that if your clock was slow, you didn't miss the first minute or so and if it overran, you didn't miss the crucial last scenes.
Even software such as Gemstars Video+ system puts 5 minutes before and 10 minutes after by default.
Of course in this day and age of self correcting clocks, on screen programming and the special tag that tells you when a programme finishes this buffer probably makes less and less sense.
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See, if I had the time and money I'd setup a company here in Canada where we don't have these insane laws limited consumer rights. Yes, it's getting worse up here, but for now I see this as the near-by safe haven for developing PVR type products safe from being sued.
:)
Yes, importing could be restricted, but it's not stopping us from sending you guys cheaper drugs to get around that piece of insanity by your government - catering to all of big business' demands....
So look north, let us develop your PVRs, it'll be good for us, you'll have more freedom, and I can only hope we're sane enough to never let our government pass such outrageous laws.... Move MythTV's code base off-shore or north.... such a great solution.
As someone who built his own MCE 2004 based machine, I have to admit I am VERY impressed with this OS. There is no way I would buy a TIVO now as I can customize this machine with any codecs and plugins I want and do as I please. People who say that the PC doesn't belong in the living room will have to wake up, Microsoft has figured this out a long time ago and are on the right track (there is still lots of room for improvement of course).
My MCE 2004 machine (which runs 24/7) is 100% stable (the OS is based on XP sp1), even when keeping up to date with all the patches out there. I ended up getting rid of my SA8000 DVR from time warner because it is so reliable. There are addons out there such as the plugin which provides a nice interface to the video library (you pick the movie by clicking the 'cover', and it will automatically mount the ISO), or the web based interface. Add the fact that you can listen to FM radio using a PVR250MCE or PVR350 series TV tuner card, and you have a very nice entertainment machine. The only thing which comes close to this setup is MythTV (which I do like), but has some reliability & configuration issues which aren't user friendly.
Since MCE can't be bought legally (you can only download it when you have a MSDN license), I will be 'buying' a second MCE machine once the next release comes out, and network the 2 machines (and other custom PVR machines which can share video data) so I can watch my video/dvd/broadcast anywhere in the house.
You won't miss it- hell if 2% of the people here gave me 6$/month I could retire and make an encrypted anonymous p2p app that didn't suck like freenet does.
...for those of us in the UK, at least as long as there continues to be no new Tivo kit worth buying. There are some decent PVRs apparently, but I'm told they all fall short on various aspects...
Game dev and music blog
With the push to move towards digital-only signaling, the PC is going to get squeezed out.
I'm all for PC-based PVRs, but I have digital cable. The thought of re-encoding an MPEG2 stream that has already been encoded and decoded once really blows (especially when the compression they've used is so freakin' high to start).
At least with TiVo, one can record the original stream un-decoded. Even then, this isn't an option for me as I don't have satellite (it is supposed to be coming "soon" for digital cable boxes).
And I can't imagine that with the security wrapped into those digital receivers any of those companies are going to be hot to support a PC-based digital decoder card.
Hate to say it, but when it comes to quality, I think the "receiver with integrated pvr functionality" is going to win out. 8/
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
TiVo is a Linux based PC. It is hackable enough to do a *lot* of interesting things that you can't on a normal TiVo.
The reason why TiVo corporation doesn't support this "hacking" actively is that they need to be legally insulated from lawsuits.
http://www.tivocommunity.com/
~foooo
Where did you get $6/month from?
Standard tivo fee is at least $12.99/month. That's high for just downloading tv listings and keeping track of everything I watch. It should be free for the privilege of tracking everything I do with it in my opinion.
VHS will probably fade out of use like audio cassette tapes have. CDR is cheap and there are a lot of other ways to record sound media, so you don't really need audio cassettes anymore.
DVD recording is getting to be pretty cheap and you have VCR alternatives, like Tivo, that will probably become more and more common(like cable companies implementing the technology), so eventually VHS will just become pointless.
The MCE box is a general-purpose WIndows XP machine, so you can use it as a web browser, email terminal, and game machine. ... Of course, the downside of this is that you have to keep your MCE up to date on patches and fixes-- something that might be an unwanted hassle for people who don't live patch management every day.
So as long as you keep it disconnected from the internet, you are better off until MS figures out how to deliver TCP/IP safety to the masses. The MCE is feature rich and aimed towards providing a full entertainment control center for audio components (AF/FM CD/TAPE/Record Player/Digital jukebox) as well as video components (PVR/Tuner/DVD Player/Digital jukebox). The internet connectivity or broadband cable/satellite are going to be part of the experience too. So Microsoft is going to have to address the security problems to make this fully marketable. It is not going to do well if it has a big sticker that says "Warning: do not connect to the Internet".
Have you Meta Moderated t
you're welcome
I wonder when we are going to see Dish Networks (EchoStar) DVR offerings in these kind of comparisions. They have been advertising them a TON and now you can actually get a DVR from them for free (lease, not own). I have a Dish DVR 522 and there was no hardware costs to me at all. I don't own my dish, I don't own my receiver. But I do have a 120GB DVR with dual tuners that can feed to two tv's (each watching a different stream). While some might complain about the interface (maybe they are talking about older 5XX models), I find the 522 very easy to use. They have also announced that they will be adding support for loading pictures, mp3s and the like to it via the USB input soon.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
The Wife Acceptance Factor may not play a big role for Slashdot readers.
More like: Get I get pr0n delivered to the video screen through a command line keyboard interface? Preferably a command that uses keys only on one side of the keyboard...
The idea was to use the TiVo's to record several hours of several stations' election coverage. We went with TiVo vs. ReplayTV because we could easily move video to a TiVo with a DVD burner to archive content.
With Replays WITH ethernet starting at $79, 6 of those with a patch panel and a stand-alone DVD burner would have been a better buy.
I've noticed over the past six months in Web content and corporate e-mail a fascinating increase in verb contractions. What used to be a two-word verb form, "set up", has contracted to a single word, "setup", which hitherto had been used only as a noun (e.g., "hey, look at my cool computer setup here").
This is a meme that's spreading quickly. I'm curious how far it will go. Do those people who write "setup" as a verb also write "throwup" as one yet?
Yes, I know about the comparable German verb forms.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
"I dont have to worry about my tivo getting hacked because I did visit windows update on a regular basis."
Thank goodness Windows update supports TIVO.
Seriously, if your TIVO were on the Internet, it could be rooted. MS has to figure out how to keep Windows XP from being a security nightmare before it allows the Media Center Edition to be an internet appliance.
Nothing but shit to record.
--- What?
http://javahmo.sourceforge.net/
as for spending your free time playing emulated games, that's up to you. I'd highly recommend the big blue box instead.
This is really quite a silly review, IMHO
Perhaps comparing a Tivo to a Pioneer DVR or the one that DirecTV is offering would have been a better topic! (-;
Windows Media Center, would be better compared against MythTV (or one of the other OS like / software PVR's).
Personally I think my MythTV box with 121 days of uptime blows both Tivo and Windows Media Center out of the water, but that niether here nor there.
CCTV Video Cameras
Gamblers Forum
I dunno about you...but the parent poster is using a DirecTiVo.
:) (please, someone point me to some hardware)
I haven't seen any particular hardware that advertises that it can pull down a signal off the DBS dishes that are so popular. This might work for people who use analog/digital cable or OTA, but I will not give Comcast so much as a dime.
If you can point me to some hardware that I can plug my dish into, then you can win me over. Until then, I'll pay my monthly Tivo fee.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
www.mythtv.org
My wife loves Tivo, it is simple to use, records shows she likes to watch, and I don't have to spend ANY TIME showing her how to use it.. I seriously doubt that ANY computer based DVR would be capable of this.
*narf!*
Are we not Win? T-I-V-O!
Of course, some tout the flexibility of PC-based DVRs
To my understanding all the TiVO _is_ is a stand alone PC running some strain of Linux (which can be networked with a bit of effort). Later models than mine (or so I have it) already have networking built in.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
The broadcast flag and the INDUCE act are infringing on consumer's rights. That is a lot worse than the legal attacks on P2P software. They must be stopped.
Mathematics is not a crime.
I think the right to bare arms also applies to DRM in a round-about way. 'Arms' isnt actually defined as "guns, knives and other physical weapons" so technically it could be interpreted to mean general weapons, or even more generally it could mean "things that could easily be used to break the law but that are required for maintaining the security of the free state" - thats what the right to bare arms is all about right? Tools which may be used to break DRM or copyright can also be used to maintain security where security means the freedom of the people.
On a side note, school kids should be reciting the bill of rights and other important laws each day instead of some brainwashing sentimental crap, if the entire population knows what a law is all about, its harder for politicians to trample on it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Where do these two products compare on DRM. If I remember correctly, the EULA of Windows Media says MS has the right to add DRM (some of which is there already) and pretty much do whatever they want to your computer to do it. So as the original submitter suggests they could easily implement the broadcast flag, or implement DRM so that only media from trusted sources could be played. I suppose TIVO could do this too, I don't know, but I'd like to.
needs to learn from linux. why pay for something that will crash and buggy(you know as well as i do it will be buggy when it first comes out)when you can get it for free. Linux has great pvr or dvr what ever you may call it. it has only support for some t.v. cards. Myth is a pain to install sometimes but runs like a champ after words. so far has a 4 month uptime. Microsofts won't be like that for a while with all the Window updates you will endure. To me Tivo and Linux dvc are better then what ms will ever come out with.
Some software money can't buy. For everything else there's Micros~1
SnapStream has a software that allows any PC to cheaply record Tivo style. Isn't that the most affordable solution assuming you have enough hard drive space?
suprnova + tv.milfclan.com = way better than a pvr.
Here is how to GET internet connectivity on your box using an ISA adapter
telnet + listening connection = root
I too used ATI's MMC because it came with my ATI TV Tuner, but the software was horrid. I was going to return the tuner and buy a TiVo but I came across Intervideo WinDVR. It still has some quirks, but it definitely made the PC DVR option at least tolerable. I can't speak for MCE, but if there isn't a significantly more stable piece of software out there I'll be going for a TiVo next time around.
a tv tuner card on pc can do much better than tivo, not to mention you have the ability to burn them on CDR, or burn them to DVDR, even DVD( on DVDR) and archive them. :D
You can't record and playback dolby digital 5.1 content on any TV tuner card.
DirecTivo units do this. They also do not re-encode the satellite signal, so the playback data stream is identical to the satellite stream. That is true time-shifting.
I heartily agree that the TiVo beats the competition hands down.
I built an HTPC a while back. It was a fun project. But ultimately I abandoned it.
When I want to crash on the couch after a long day I do *NOT* want to deal with device driver problems, or Windows Update due to latest security problem, or someone has installed a new game on the DoEverythingDevice and borked it.
I just wanna watch TV man. At it's specific task the TiVo kicks ass. Anyone who tries to lay a whole bunch of extra features on it has now added a whole host of new ways it can go kaboom. A TiVo can be had as little as $99 now, and is well worth it IMHO.
The right to bare arms is the right to roll up your sleeves. This is different than the right to bear arms, which is the right to cut the arms off bears.
I used XMLTV for a year and finally gave up on it. It constantly needs to be updated to continue to pull the listings correctly. I hate having to keep up with XMLTV just so that my listings are correct. That is the why I think a BeyondTV based solution is better for an HTPC. They(I) pay for their guide data (price included with one-time software purchase) and it is more accurate and vastly more reliable than XMLTV based solutions like Myth. (might be different outside the US) Although Digiguide was pretty awesome till they pulled out of the US market.
Give me Myth when I can rely on the TV listings. Until then it's not worth much.
Isn't it $12.95/month?
http://www.tivo.com/1.12.asp
John Kerry is a Joke!
Here. I used it briefly, and it was nice. However, it was lacking some important features that MMC had for me. I didn't like WinDVR for some reason.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't especially like the monthly fee, but it does stuff I didn't even dream of in a PVR. Like MOVING the recording of a first-run show (the Dead Zone) from Sunday night to tonight in order to accomodate something else I asked it to record. All without needing to bother me with the details. I doubt MythTV does that.
I am mighty impressed with the folks writing the software at TiVo - it's all pretty slick, and JUST WORKS. No glitches, no gotchas, no excuses. That's what you need with the wife and kids using it.
no one has hacked on the wikki page
The comparison we want to make is between the total costs of ownership over the medium term. It'd be ridiculous to compare costs over "the rest of your life" for any technology like this. What we're after is three or five years, and above that is a real outlier. (And yeah, "lifetime memberships" be damned.)
I don't buy your estimate of the total cost of a MythTV box. You're claiming it's $72 or $144 ("One or two years") or "at worst" $216 for three years. Sorry, that's not flying. And if, on the other hand, a not-made-of-duct-tape MythTV PC is anywhere near the $366-for-three-years price of the Tivo and its service, I'm losing all sorts of convenience in favor of flexibility. Maybe for those who enjoy self-building the machine that's going to seem like fun, but if you're comparing the costs, it's going to be hard to sell that to anyone else.
(As an economic argument, "I hate being nickel and dimed by recurring payments" is neither here nor there. Talk to someone who's bought a camcorder lately in one of those "no interest till" sales. Rather do that than buy a $1000 item with cash up front?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Just to convert that old PC you've got lying around into a dedicated Linux PVR running Freevo.
Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Pay nothing for the software, use up your junk hardware and end up with a super-Tivo++ that doesn't have a monthly fee. No filthy Windows software lock-in or MS-tax either.
I just can't figure out why all the articles don't advocate this.
As an example, "News You Can Use From TiVo" is the only company newsletter I actually read. It's funny, fun, and has some cool statistics in it once in a while.
When WMC starts developing a community, or when TiVo runs out of funding, that's when WMC will get on my radar (my guess is that it'll be the latter :-\.
So instead of supporting the evil empire of Bill Gates, you're supporting the evil empire of Mike Ramsey... interesting. Just because Bill's is bigger, doesn't mean that Mike is any less evil in his business practices.
A PC with a capture card (I don't care what the hardware is) will never match DirecTIVO for quality. Reason is that the DirecTIVO is recording (and playing back) the exact same digital stream that it's receiving from the dish.
To recording ANYTHING off of the dish (DirecTV or Dish Network) with a PC is going to require: A) the satellite receiver decompressing the video, B) converting to an analog signal, then C) capturing the analog video back to a digital format and D) recompressing the captured video.
Even with S-Video connecting your receiver to your PC, you still are going to be recompressing a digital version of an analog source that came from an already compressed digital video.
For that matter as soon as I can get my hands on an HD DirecTIVO, I'll be set. The interface is great, there are plenty of great "add-ins" (i.e. hacks) for TIVO (including the ability to transfer the recorded video from the TIVO straight to your PC hard drive, then convert to MPEG2 directly. Must better solution......
GoldChain
I had no idea.
I thought that level of hacking died with series 1.
You just have to configure it properly. AND, it doesn't require a hack or mod. Just RTM.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
DVB PCI cards offer the best of both worlds. As they capture the stream from the satellite and offer the flexibility of a HTPC.
is a Kiss DP-1500, playing DVD/DivX/XviD and whatever, with network, hooked up to a huge Linux media server far far away from the living room using a network cable. The one thing I can not do is record, but I've found there is very little on TV I'd like to record anyway... most shows here are ages behind the US.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
there's very little quality loss for tv capture card, yes, there's quality loss, but if you use the right software, it's not visible. :D
actually the cheap ati tv tuner card works pretty well with some 3rd party software, also you can make it record realtime into VCD format(some hack is neede) or just DVD mpeg2 stream. it's real time, so no further transformation is needed.
well, it's analog, so it's not "perfect", but it's good enough, I made some of my own, not top quality since I didnot tweak it well enough but still very good quality, my friend is really into it, he actually captures stuff from his TIVO into computer, so that he can back things up.
I dont know if there's any hack to get stuff out of the tivo into a pc, I think there might be, otherwise, it's best just to use tv tuner card.
and I dont really record stuff through tivo, if you want to watch a show, some one already record it off his own digital network and you can get it through P2P.
that's the best part!
Sorry, whatever they touch, whether created in-house, or purchased in a takeover, always turns out bad, security-wise. It does so not because they're evil, but because marketing rules that company, and security will always be last-kid-picked at the playground.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
One thing I can think of off the top of my head to make a real advantage- MythTV can be altered not to respect DRM and broadcast flags. That's worth the conveniance to me.
And I hate being nickle and dimed is a valid argument. There's a reason a lot of subscrition models fail. See micropayments, many gamers refusing to play MMOs, etc. Most people I know refuse to get a Tivo or work alike, they already have a VCR and don't want a recurring fee.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Since the subject was brought up, I am compelled to comment. If you're reading this and you watch ANY amount of television, even an hour a week or two, you owe it to yourself to get a Tivo unit.
I was aware of what these things could do but never took much of an interest in them, but when I dumped cable for satellite, I decided to get one, and it really has had a dramatic effect on my life. I'm not a big TV watcher, but the power of the Tivo to automatically grab what you like and allow you to skip commercials completely alters the experience, and opens up new realms where you can program the Tivo to seek out things that interest you that you might otherwise not know about, or not be able to see.
You wonder if this device is that good why isn't it more popular? The reason for this is because it fundamentally changes the way you view television. Networks and cable companies make their money off advertising and profit from people "channel surfing" and trying to dig out content from a sea of crap and advertisements. Tivo negates all that, and it's the scariest thing the cable and networks can imagine. Some networks like NBC have even taken to altering the broadcast times of popular shows to annoy people using DVRs, but Tivo has been very diligent about catching this - I doubt any other DVR is as capable.
I have seen some of the other DVRs and they just aren't as solid and robust as the Tivo. First it's a dedicated Linux-based PC that performs quite well and I would argue that people don't need some combo computer/DVR. The Tivo works for the same reason the iPod works: it's elegant and well designed and excels at one main objective, but is so powerful people find other uses for it.
Trust me. Get yourself a Tivo. I know most everything on TV is crap, but it doesn't have to be when you have a device like this that can siphon the good 0.0001%.
I doubt your Tivo was running for 3 years without a reboot.
Tivo reboots after it updates itself. I'm not sure how frequently the reboot occurs, since it was always invisible to me (it's during the night).
Also I did have some occasional freezes, but nothing too bad.
I'm running MCE2004 in my dorm room. I must say, the nice thing about it is that it's built on winXP, so filesharing is easy to set up. lots of people on campus watch my recorded programs through microsoft sharing, and lots of my friends put in requests for various shows. that way, even people without TiVo/Tivo knockoffs can enjoy the benefits of having a personal video recorder.
i'm sure that mythTV can be made to emulate microsoft sharing, but i'm equally sure that it'd be a big pain in the arse.
Neither Tivo nor MCE offer tv listings for most countries, is there a solution to this? I know Tvguide.com offers listings for most countries but is there a software that uses those listings as a source for the PVR?
Any time you recompress video there will be generational problems. Artifacts build on top of artifacts.
DirecTV's modified-MPEG1 compression (at least they use that for regular channels) has a lot of artifacts to start with, so the likelihood of artifacting is high.
Theoretically if you use a high-quality codec and set the quality settings to maximum, few artifacts will be introduced by the 2nd encoding pass. However, the files will be huge, and you're stuck with them in that form, as compressing them a 3rd time into VCD, etc. will induce problems based on the previous 2 passes.