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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."
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
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.
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".