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TiVo, MS, and the War for the Living Room
r-blo writes "Hot off his in-depth comparison of TiVo vs. Microsoft Media Center, Engadget has Thomas Hawk following up with ten things each that TiVo and Microsoft need to do to win the War for the Living Room. It won't be easy (like TiVo offering their OS as software for the PC. Not going to happen.) but I've got a feeling they might be better off listening up. Especially TiVo, since we're all rooting for them anyway."
Hi, have a look at VDR http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr there are many things Tivo and MS did not have implemented jet. CU H9000
Almost everything he talked about is in someform of completion on the http://www.mythtv.org/.
I have been using Windows Media Center for several months now and have been very pleased with it. Its great having your recorded shows available on your home network to watch on any computer in the house whenever you want, not to mention being a huge digital jukebox -- just throw in as many hard drives as you can and you've got true media "center" capabilities, you can't say that for a TiVo.
The biggest advantage the Media Center has is that you can play any AVI files you want as long as you have the codec installed. And the remote control works with every proprietary IR device (ie cable boxes) that I throw at it.
I tried MythTV, and while its a great project, XP MCE has it beat at this point in time by far, but I think that may be mostly due to most hardware drives being written for Windows only.
Although I'm looking forward very much to MCE 2005, in all fairness I haven't tried a TiVO, and the TivO's dual-tuner functionality is something that the MCE misses. However, when you're using a digital cable box, having a second tuner doesn't matter anyway.
Replay TV
Let's not forget about Snapstream with it's web and 10-foot based administration. I've been using it for a long time and it has a larger feature set than both Tivo and Media Center if you include the up and coming Beyond Media. It even does dual tuners now like Myth TV.
4 makes sense as it will always give you the option to at least watch one program in a certain format and record one simultaneously. Having just 3 analog tuners for example wouldn't enable you to watch or record any HD channel.
It might not fit your needs, but that is a different ball game, probably would for me, with all the crap there is on tv.
And certainly against Microsoft. Not hard to root for them against MS. I love my Tivo too, but when the time comes, they are doing things to make me jump to another system like MythTV, Freevo or even commercial systems like BeyondTV etc.
Tivo has:
a) Followed the wishes of hollywood, and made it hard to get video out of the box even though a PC card would have recorded it plainly to disk.
b) Only put in 30 second skip as a hidden feature (that goes away every reboot) and not put in more advanced commercial elimination
c) Put in monitoring technologies that today strip your identity off the data they send up but need not do so forever.
d) Locked up units version 2 and later to make them very difficult to modify or improve.
e) Not provided any software improvements for version 1 owners in quite some time.
f) Designed their new system that does let you move video to a PC to require you to have a dongle! Then it lets you burn it to a DVD where you could read it back, so it's not security, it's just a pain in the ass.
Tivo does a good job but they are on the path to being a lesser citizen. The cable companies are using their monopolies to control what PVR you have with cable in many locations (though cable card holds hope.) The rest of the world may decide to move to open source pvrs.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Your digital cable probably comes to your TV via a leased (cable company-owned) set-top box. The point of the box is to decrypt the premium channels, and there's nothing that Media Center can do about it. Here's how a MCE box normally works. You feed coax cable from the wall to the set-top box. The box decrypts the feed, and you connect another coax cable from the set-top box to a tuner card installed in the MCE PC. At this point the MCE PC is functioning as your TV. You would then use a MCE remote pointed at a small USB receiver to control the MCE interface and change channels. To enable the MCE PC to change channels on the cable box, you connect a small IR emitter from the aforementioned USB IR receiver to your set-top box's front panel, directly in front of its remote sensor. The MCE PC will then "relay" commands to the set-top box as needed.
Tivo is a subscription service, you'll have to pay to use their guide data either monthly or a large lifetime fee. MCE PC's get guide data for free.
MCE 2004 (currently only available purchased with a new machine from the likes of Dell or HP) allows you to watch DVD's, display pictures and slideshows, play and visualize music, listen to radio, and watch and record TV (1 tuner maximum).
MCE 2005 (available later this year from large OEM's and local 'white box' dealers alike) does all of the above, and adds support for dual (that's two ONLY) tuners. You can reportedly watch HDTV but only if your signal is over-the-air. Also, you'll be able to do all your media tasks on other TV's around the house by purchasing MCE extender devices.
I'm not sure about the integrated DVD-burning capabilities of MCE, but perhaps someone else can comment on that. I doubt I'd use it myself; I would use real video editing software to strip commercials and then pack as much content as possible on each DVD.
The latest to go was Comedy Central. I've enjoyed The Daily Show over the Internet for the past few years, but that came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks ago when all of the newer streams were in MS Media Player format only. I asked if this was temporary, and mentioned that the link to "change player preferences" didn't work in FireFox, and their indirect reply was to change the media player pop-up window to no longer give a choice of media formats. It's Microsoft or nothing.
I've tried VLC (get audio, no video) and MPlayer, but neither work. Unless the /. crowd can somehow campaign for the return of Real streams, especially now that it's been Opened, I'm afraid that it's time to remove Comedy Central from my daily opened tab group.
BBC do something like this already. Their "Listen Again" service lets you listen to any BBC Radio show broadcast in the last week. You can't (easily) save the content, but anyone who just wants to catch a show they missed the previous day or whatever (which I do all the time), can do.
I guess you could find a work-around to save the content, even if it's just to run an audio recorder... Audacity is OSS and popular I here.
Has already happened, to an extent: (UK, big chunks of far east, europe, australia). Use a VCR-like DAB radio to save mp2 onto an SDCard (pure digital's theBug is the only one at the moment I think). Quality is pretty good, no DRM. Getting fancy TiVo-like functionality is "just a matter of software".
If you want Car Talk to go, try Audible.com. I get The News from Lake Wobegon there every week.
Phil
IIRC, MCE is only being distributed as a bundle with approved hardware. It sounds like you loaded MCE on a non-approved system. No wonder it didn't work for you.
I can't argue the benefits of Myth, 'cause I haven't used it (tho it seems to have a TiVo-like following).
I wouldn't be suprised if MCE wasn't perfect, but neither is TiVo or Myth. It just so happens that MCE has the features the GP likes, and Myth has features you like (like the fact that it runs on your hardware). I like my TiVo 'cause I never have to mess with it, and the wife can use it without my help, and without blaming me if there's a glitch. That last one is a must-have feature I haven't seen in a PC solution yet.
Yea, you are correct, ReplayTV did do it right, but with a stress on "did".
DNNA, the new owners of ReplayTV have stated that they will be selling off all current ReplayTV inventory and focusing on a higher end ($2000+) multi-media server system (Do a search on the ReplayTV section of the AVS Forums for details.) While the end result may, in fact, be a killer system, the fact remains that "consumer-level" PVR's are still "TiVo-dominated".
The upside for ReplayTV owners is that DNNA also said that they are persuing several hardware companies and software licensees, so we MAY see other ReplayTV-based products from third-party companies. For existing ReplayTV owners, the other good news is that DNNA said that will continue to provide ReplayTV's EPG (Electronic Program Guide) service and would like to expand its availability to other companies.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE proponent of ReplayTV products. I have owned three ReplayTV boxes over the past 4 years, and I have posted several "tips" on my Jim's Tips Web site. ReplayTV has survived several buyouts and company changes, and still holds promise. It's just not necessarily clear as to what the future will be...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
They're also planning a broader media blitz, which is something new for them, evidently to roll out just before or in conjunction with the TivoToGo service. If it's part of a bigger strategy to increase market share, it would go hand-in-glove with the almost-giving-away prices on some boxes.
That said, TiVo has to walk a fine line between being user-friendly, functional to consumers, while still paying lip-service to its corporate masters and brodcasters. In the past, these compromises have lead to the software and box being locked up and encrypted up the wazoo.
TiVo must have recognized that if they truly satisfied the geeks, made the box accessable and programming easy to extract, they could be the next MythTV, or worse, the first on the INDUCE Act chopping block.
Although TiVo has a strained relationship with the broadcasters, media giants, etc., it lacks the market penetration to be a real threat to them. So, while the 30-second skip is an irritant, there is probably an overall negligable impact in terms of actual eyes that no longer see the commercials.
If TiVo could gain a reasonable market share (not impossible, but with the arena becoming more crowed, certainly more difficult) and did become more of a media gorilla, then it would be a real battle to see if the PVR's time-shifting (a non-infringing use, at least for the moment) would be enough to bootstrap its other functions (burn-to-DVD, stream to other TV, for example) into the "fair use" category.
TiVoToGo might be the first step in this direction. Big Media may not have any choice but to attempt to stop its deployment, maybe with a temporary injunction, lest the camel's nose get under their tent.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Try Knoppmyth from http://my.settopbox.tv/ Howski