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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?
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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
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.
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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.
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.
...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...
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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.
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".
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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.
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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.
Nothing but shit to record.
--- What?
It's not my idea of a fun time to manually look at the TV schedule, figure out what shows I want to see, decide if I've seen that episode already or not, then program the VCR.
I find it easier to tell the PVR to always record a show, then it always gets done for me. Never have to think about it again.
And you don't have to worry about replacing the tapes, rewinding them, making sure everything is set.
And can a VCR pause live TV, then resume? Does it provide a EPG (electronic programming guide)?
These are why PVR's exist. Using a VCR for the same purpose is not a valid option.
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!*
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.
DirecTiVo is a fantastic product, and unfortunately, I'm suffering major withdrawal right now. We sold our house and have moved into an apartment while we built a new home, but during the interim we're hooked up to cable instead of the dish.
Between the crappy picture quality and clumsy interface of digital cable, it makes me appreciate the seamless quality of DirecTiVo all the more. I can't wait until we move into the new place in September...
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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.
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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.
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.
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 :-\.
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
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
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