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Current Crop Of HDTV Recorders Compared
rbrander links to this "nice review of all the HDTV Recorders from the Washington Post: DirecTV's based on the TiVo wins for best interface, but Dish Network's gets a few nods. There's also a nice swipe ('...spectacularly stupid decision') at JVC's for allowing only (copy-protected) Firewire input to the one HDTV tape recorder on the market."
FireWire wasn't a stupid decision...it was 5C-protected (copy-protected) FireWire that was a stupid decision.
:-(
FireWire was probably the best promise of device interconnectivity to ever exist in recent years. But it has been crippled by several things:
1. Content providers/TV/movie/Hollywood's deathly fear of being able to easily interconnect all devices, including computing equipment, via one perfect, digital connection.
2. A bit due to Apple's early ridiculous licensing and logo requirements to use the "FireWire" name. FireWire is the name that would have taken IEEE-1394 the furthest, but thanks to the early bungling, we're now stuck with "FireWire", "DV", "i.Link", "IEEE-1394", "1394"...what's that sir? Oh, yes, they're all really the same thing.
Imagine having ALL of your entertainment equipment, including your computer, connected digitally via one, simple FireWire cable each, all daisy-chained off one another. All able to control one another when necessary, sending meta-data and device control commands, as well as audio, video, and other data over the wire. No ridiculous bundles of cabling. Everything plug and play. Everything "just works". Even Wireless FireWire (yes, there's a spec). (And yes, FireWire has the bandwidth necessary to handle all this and more.)
That was the promise of FireWire. Instead, we're stuck with final output formats like DVI, and HDCP-protected HDMI, 5C FireWire that virtually nothing supports, and the coming Broadcast Flag.
Oh well.
HDTV capture cards have a slight advantage over typical TV capture cards because they don't have to digitize anything from analog, they just have to remember the bitstream they were fed from the channel.
Their disadvantage is that HDTV can be quite the high-bandwidth application, and that means the limitations of the PCI bus, and even the AGP connection can sometimes cause quality loss. PCI Express seems to be the solution to that in the pipeline, and that's most likely what the mainstream vendors are waiting for. An HD card on the market today has to be labeled as an "early adopter" model.
On the other hand, maybe this is a technology that you want to be an early adopter of to avoid cards that end up getting crippled by "broadcast flag" laws.
I have a Motorola DCT-6208, the model I think they are referring to in this article that Comcast offers.
:)
Even though the hard drive is only 80GB, and the interface sucks, the thing is virtually free and I don't have to worry about it breaking, hard drive failing, or the eventual obsolescence in less than a year. Anyone shelling out $1000 for the satellite models is a sucker IMO.
I used to be a DirecTV customer and bought a RCA DTC-100 HD tuner on Ebay for $400. I was able to turn around and resell it on Ebay for $350 2 years later, but only because I sold it before the crop of DVRs came out, and because it was a high-demand model. Now, if you are stuck with an obsolete HD Tivo in a year or two, you are pretty much screwed because the new models will be so much better no one will want an older model. Maybe you can sell it to your grandmother though for $100.
With cable though, I can keep getting a better box for virtually nothing. The new Motorola DCT-6412 with two tuners and 120GB hard drive is right around the corner, and I will just have to call and setup an appointment to have the tech come in and swap it out.
A codebase split seems to have happened when the DirecTiVo units officially took on the name of "DirecTV DVR with TiVo service" and the monthly subscription price got halved from $9.95 to $4.95. Near that time, the fees for standalone TiVos moved upwards from $9.95 to $12.95...
And at that point the DirecTV code froze, while development for the standalone TiVos continued. Apparently, DirecTV now must pay for any new features they want added to the DirecTV DVRs, meanwhile TiVo continued to push its latest stuff out for free to their direct subscribers. All of the things that a standard Series 2 TiVo can do that a Series 2 DirecTV DVR cannot were added after that point in time.
Oh and don't forget that current HDTV capture cards will be illegal on 2005.7.1. Buy 'em now while you can. Future models will have to support DRM via a broadcast flag. :-(
http://www.1394ta.org/About/products/consumer_prod ucts.html
Additionally, the FCC is mandating that as of July 1, 2005, all digital cable set top boxes MUST include a functional FireWire port, and as of April 1, 2004, must provide a set top box with a working FireWire port on customer request. Of course, this doesn't help if content providers choose to encrypt the content.
Here's hoping we can fight the Broadcast Flag. Unfortunately, I can see a future where our kids think that the only way they can watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch it, and on the device they wish to watch it on, is by illegally downloading it from a P2P network, instead of being able to legally record it and move it around THEMSELVES with equipment THEY BOUGHT from a service THEY PAY FOR in their OWN HOMES.
I know some (read most) people will think I am crazy but I recently purchased the DirecTV HD Tivo. I have had the unit for just over a week now and absolutely love it.
:) I know I know I know.. justify myself all the way to hell.
The price: 999.00 (ouch, don't tell my wife)
I have had DirecTV HDTV for about 6 months and really hated not being able to record the shows I like to watch. I found myself using my hacked/upgraded tivo (series 1 non-hd) to watch shows that also are aired in HD simply because I like skipping commercials.
The quality of recorded shows are simply amazing. Especially Disovery HD and movies on HBO-HD. Very nice sound as it keeps the DD 5.1 soundtrack.
Was it worth the 1000.00 I paid for it? Well, I priced out building a similar HTPC (Home theater PC) with 2 HD tuners and 2 OTA tuners and it was more expensive to roll my own. Also, mythTV does not worth well with direct (from what I have read). So I do believe it was worth the 1000.00 considering it does come with a 250gb hard drive (150.00).
What the article does not tell you is that the decision to include anything OTHER than a firewire input to the D-VHS VCR would have also required a REALTIME HDTV MPEG2 encoder in the VCR. By "the most popular 3 hdtv interconnects" they are probably talking about Component YUV, Component RGB, and DVI-D -- while these are indeed the most popular interconnects, they transport the already uncompressed video stream. To record them in DVHS format you'd have to recompress the video back to MPEG2, and remux the audio (and ensure sync). This alone would have sent the price of the unit skyrocketing. In addition the decision was not stupid, because as of April 1, 2004, cable companies are required to have the firewire transports on their devices, meaning that the decision for a firewire-only vcr would be fairly standards compliant as well as inexpensive.
The nice thing about firewire transporting this is that the video arrives preencoded in a nice transport stream in full quality. The not-nice thing about it is that the FCC is also allowing the firewire to be C5 encrypted. I really really hope someone is working on breaking this one.
Both cards work admirably at tuning ATSC signals, capturing the bitstream, and saving them to disk.
For playback, the MyHD card includes an MPEG decoder and component, VGA, and DVI output (as an option), so your PC can plug right into your HDTV. It can playback to a PC monitor, too. The driver and application are pretty well polished and easy to use. It comes with an I/R remote and a remote sensor that plugs into a serial port so you can keep your PC and keyboard hidden away and control card functions from the remote. It will also playback DVDs as well as DVD content ripped to hard disk.
The The pcHDTV card relies on software applications (Xine) to decode and playback. The driver is enormously stable in my experience. Playing back content relies on correct configuration of Xine, the mpeg decoder, the program stream demultiplexor, and so forth. Not too hard for more experienced users.
In my setup there's a Linux box that's responsible for recording only and a Windows box for playback only.
I have been a long time DirecTV customer but i just cancelled last week.
/mo for television and it seems like there's honestly nothing that enriching to watch. Seems like a better way to spend $60 a month is to use half of it to take your significant other out to some cheap resturant, and then donate the rest to a local organization.
I have a Hughes HDVR2 Series2 DirecTivo. It was cool and all, but what I really wanted was a way to get content off of it and watch it on a computer. No home media option for DirecTivo users though. Nice.
The real reason we axed DirecTV (and have not replaced it, nor do we plan to) is that the content just isn't there compared with the price you pay for it.
My big interests are F1 racing and World Rally. Speedchannel's coverage of same amounts to under 10 hours a month, tops. Sure, there is other stuff i _can_ watch (cartoon network, for instance) but i could take or leave it. One issue i find with a tivo is that i have all this stuff in there that i feel obligated to watch because its there and i enjoy watching it...
My wife on the other hand is a minnesota twins fanatic. Yet there wer eless than 5 games available to us, even though we live within 3 hrs of minneapolis and have the local tv pack. The MLB extra innings deal is like $70 or $80 or something silly, and you cant ever get a straight answer on what will or wont be shown because of the ridiculous blackout and regional rights issues related to TV.
So I was basically paying for a few races a month and then some time sucking.
My wife was getting no twins games, but a whole boatload of junk off of TLC that managed to suck her day away. It would start innocently enough - "oh, i'll just watch an episode of blah while i do this chore" and then shes managed to waste the whole afternoon watching crap that isn't even all that interesting.
So $45/mo for a bit of racing and a whole bunch of time wasting didn't seem like a good deal to us anymore.
HD seems like an even worse deal. Where's the HD content ? The devices for doing HD PVR are "cool" (although i think any directivo solution will still have the lack of home-media i cited above) but you're talking like $60+
IMO, alot of whats coming right now is technology for technologies sake. I admit that i am captivated by the appeal of a distributed mythTV setup with FEs all over the house, but really, i shouldn't be watching enough tv to justify that.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.