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TiVo Plans More Functionality Reductions

TiVo has been in the news recently with a couple of plans to make their service less useful than it could be: first, TiVos will now auto-delete pay-per-view and video-on-demand movies, and second, TiVo is making sure that you can't use a TiVo to view NFL games outside the specified market area. TiVo's lawyer explains.

22 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. Makes me glad. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I chose a replay TV over the Tivo.
    yes, I bought a discontinued product.

    but I dont get the company messing around in my property and I get to archive off shows effortlessly.

    tell me why again why I want a Tivo instead of a replayTV????

  2. Build your own... by Standmic · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.byopvr.com/

    1. Re:Build your own... by Anita+Coney · · Score: 2, Informative

      I agree. My homebuilt PVR does everything I want without any restrictions. And they're cheap to build and require no monthly fees.

      --
      If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
    2. Re:Build your own... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Informative

      you know I hear this mantra every time we have a Tivo article..... and it's not realistic...

      I went down that road, I built a mythbox and a freevo. I fought with them monthly. Then the service provider in the US dries up and forces you to register with them every 3 months with looming promises of having to pay for the right to access it.

      I gave up, sold all the equipment and bought a refurbed ReplayTV for $100.00 and have not looked back cince. I can easily get shows off the replay to a computer for burning to DVD or simply having a media server with lots of content. It always works and is worth the $12.95 a month to keep me from fighting with another change in XMLTV packages or other failure,change or waiting for the listing provider to change their mind again.

      for 99% of the people out there making your own PVR is not an option. hell for most techno-geeks
      it still is not an option.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  3. Re:Glad I have myth by conteXXt · · Score: 2, Informative

    dvb-t (digital cable support) or dvb-s (satellite)
    should do the trick :-)

    (myth supports both)

    --
    The truth about Led Zep should never be told on /. (Karma suicide ensues)
  4. Re:accelerating their own death by jgordon7 · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a recent owner of one of those Cable DVRs and being a previous tivo owner.

    I hope that is not the case. Since my experience with the cable service DVR is extremely poor. Even though the Cable one can record HD channels and has Dual Tuners, its user interface is down right awful to the point of being almost unuseable. It is slow to react, trying to FF through commericals is almost more painful than watching the commercials. Its conflict management is just plain dumb. If one episode of a show you have as a favorite conflicts with a movie you want to watch you tell it to record the movie and not the favorite show, well it stops recording ALL future shows of that favorite TOO.

    If you start watching a recorded show that is not done recording it starts you at LIVE time, not the beginning of the show. If you rewind to the beginning which is what you have to do, and the show finishes recording before you finish watching the show it JUMPS you forward to LIVE TV. And it does not remember where you were in the show when you go back to watch it.

    Trying to find something to record is damn near impossible. The only search ability is by Title FIRST LETTER, so for say Simpson you have to weed through all of the shows that begin with "S". It has Genre search but is equally useless.

    And for recorded duplicate shows, even if you tell only get first runs, it records every airing of a show. This also make the poor conflict management even worse since it wants to records shows that have repeat showings in a week too.

    I will be dropping this POS, as soon as I get my money together to build a HTPC.

    Its only saving grace is price. However that is big for alot of people and means we will soon see more crappy PVRs in the future.

  5. Re:daily updates by Simulant · · Score: 2, Informative



    Some kind soul pretty regularly posts The Daily Show in alt.binaries.multimedia every week.

    I've lived in Europe for two years and have seen nearly all of them within days of them airing in the US.

    Thank you Mr. Poster!!! Please keep them coming.

    Oh am I going to cry when they finally shut USENET down.

  6. Re:Glad I have myth by enrico_suave · · Score: 5, Informative

    You won't necessarly have a problem when you switch to digital cable... you'd do the same thing a TiVo user does... You'd use an IR blaster (or a serial cable if you have a motrolla 2k dig cable box that hasn't been crippled by your cable company)

    The IR blaster will be controlled by your mythbox... the ir blaster will simulate your digital cable boxes remote control presses to change teh channel at the appropriate times to record the shows you want... you just pipe the output via svideo or composite into your capture/tuner card =)

    e.

    --
    Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
  7. Re:Glad I have myth by Darth+Maul · · Score: 5, Informative

    Amen. MythTV is a great solution for anyone considering a PVR solution. A few points to consider:

    1) Back- and front-end architecture. I have one backend that records, and two front-end lightweight machines that can view content.

    2) Free (not counting computer hardware costs, however).

    3) Can use external channel changer like TiVo (I have a satellite box, so I need an IR transmitter to change channels on it).

    4) More than just TV! I have my entire music collection on there, along with DVDs, games, weather, images...

    5) Need more recording space? Just stick in another hard drive (I know you can do this with TiVO, but your warranty is then void). I currently can record up to 160 hours on my box.

    6) Different themes available.

    7) Auto commercial detection.

    8) Can edit and cut out parts of a video recording so you can burn to DVD without commercials, etc.

    The list goes on... I've used it for well over a year and just love it. The WAF is also quite high (skipping commercials is huge).

    --
    --- witty signature
  8. Re:Stupid. by enrico_suave · · Score: 2, Informative

    besides the pvr350 part of your setup (which has it's own quirks), did you consider checking out knoppmyth to potentially cut down on the build/install time?

    *shrug* FWIW there are other "off the shelf" commercial (and free) 3rd party PVR/htpc software solutions out there... although they are on the *gasp* windows platform *ducks*... I liked SageTV... BeyondTV has been getting good reviews... and GBPVR is very full featured, FREE as in beer (not source), and is pretty cool overall. There's a lesser known HTPC solution that's open source for windoze Media Portal... I've got a growing list of PVR/HTPC links here

    Also there are other linux based OSS pvr solutions besides myth/knoppmyth... like freevo, dave and dina multimedia project, and a few others I can't recall...

    *shrug*

    e.

    --
    Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
  9. Re:Glad I have myth by Greyfox · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, I have a tivo right now and am increasingly bumping up against its limitations. I plan to build a MythTV PVR sometime next year, and outfit it with an unholy amount of hard drive space (~1-1.5TB.) That'd also let me run other services off the system, such as nfs/samba file storage for the apartment network. Streaming video to the other systems in the apartment would be a lot easier too.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  10. Nope by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Informative

    DVB-T is DVB for TERRESTRIAL. It's Europe's equivalent of ATSC digital broadcasting in the US.

    DVB-C is for cable, and is Europe-only. US cable uses QAM modulation also, but the coding scheme and other minor details about the signal differ, so DVB-C cards do not work with U.S. cable.

    There ARE QAM-capable tuner cards for US cable on the market now, but since almost all U.S. cable channels are encrypted, they're not very useful.

    PC-based DVB-S receivers won't work in the U.S. except for getting Dish Network's preview channel, as Dish's encryption scheme is modified enough from standard Nagravision that the Nagra access cards compatible with PC-based DVB-S receivers won't work with Dish.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  11. Amen! by Blitzenn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Amen! Big Ta Do over nothing in my book too. I don't copy payper view stuff anyway. Craps too expensive to begin with. I just want to be able to watch Big Brother, or such at a time most convienient to me. That's how I use my Tivo and love it because of that. I can watch the 6 O'clock news when I want now. I can pause it so I can argue the point being made with the poor sap sitting next to me, (sorry wife), and not miss what is being said next. That's what Tivo is about and anyone who has one knows it.

    This is a nothing story by someone who doesn't have a Tivo, is envious of it and wants to make it seem less valuable to others. Bunch of Phewy!

  12. Re:Glad I have Snapstream by LilMikey · · Score: 2, Informative

    Myth + Fedora is really a 3 step process.

    1. install fedora 2. install atrpms apt 3. apt-get install mythtv-suite.

    I guess for the Debian smart-asses it's only 2 :)

    Myth has been doing multiple tuners for quite a while now. If you do want to upgrade to Myth but the install and set up seems daunting first check out the website called "Fedora Mythology". If you still need help, feel free to contact me personally and I'll give any assistance I can.

    --
    LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
  13. Re:Hmmm... by Baseclass · · Score: 2, Informative
    As of May 2004 North American MythTv users have been able to legally download schedules from zap2it.com provided we fill out a 5 question survey every 3 months.

    Downloading listings is way faster now too. There is no way I would ever subscribe to Tivo or any other commercial PVR service. Long live open source.

    --
    ^^vv<><>BA
  14. Re:Glad I have myth by andrew_j_w · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...such as this one . /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 outputs the raw 18Mb/s stream contain all the TV channels (on that band) which can then be split into the raw MPEG2 using the dvbstream program.

  15. Re:Too Many KneeJerk Responses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    That's amazing that Chagers ticket sales are down even when they're so much better than in recent years. It's all part of the NFL and the networks spending billions of dollars to produce an amazing product and then bending over backwards to make sure people can't see it.

    The biggest part of this is allowing DirctTV to pay $400 million to get exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket. I understand why both sides did the deal, but the result is a vast majority of football fans, who have the $200 in hand, who can't watch good football on Sundays.

    They don't show any games opposite the home team game, so when that game is 30-6 at halftime, you're stuck watching a snoozer of a second half while three other games go down to the last drive.

    Local stations have this concept of "regional interest" where they're carry a game between two losing teams that happen to be in your home team's division while a great matchup of top teams is going on somewhere far away.

    The next step is allowing ESPN and ABC to pick the Sunday night and monday games a few weeks prior, rather than before the season starts. I have watched so many late season MNF games between two teams that were predicted to have big years, but currently suck, while the good games that decide the division titles are played at 1pm on Sunday.

    I just searched for when the exclusive Sunday Ticket contract expires. There is hope! The contract expires after next season and Comcast may have the inside track to get it.

    http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA452428.htm l? display=Breaking+News&referral=SUPP/

    -B

  16. Re:That seals the deal for me..... by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Informative
    "I've been looking into purchasing a Tivo for about a month now, but I definitely won't bother now. Anyone got any URL's so I could see how to build one using Linux?"

    MythTv

    PVR Hardware Database

    RedHat install guide

    Gentoo Install Guide(I went this route)

    Knoppix Myth

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  17. Re:daily updates by Simulant · · Score: 2, Informative

    Let me clarify. And I hope I'm wrong but.... ...isn't access to the vast majority of popular binary groups carrying material of provable illegality provided by relatively few "newgroup companies"? They behave as 'central servers'. USENET is distributed yes, but access to the binaries seems fairly concentrated.

    They just seem like an easy target and I'm sure it would be easy to prove that 99% of their traffic is stolen IP. There are free speech issues involved, of course, but but I'll media companies will work their way around them.

    I don't think USENET will really be completely shut down but I do think that things will inevitably occur to make the mass trading of IP via nntp difficult and impractical.

  18. Re:Too Many KneeJerk Responses by yetanothermike · · Score: 2, Informative

    It was clear from your post that you don't own the product whose demise you predict BEFORE you you added the disclaimer. The beauty of the TiVo is it's simplicity and the convienence it gives to it's customer base. TiVo is not catering to the hard core geeks that may build their own rigs, but they are also not alienating them by not legislating the hacks out of existence. The future expansion of TiVo will continue until it is as prevalent as the cable box. Companies such as DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, etc... are subsidizing the cost of them to keep customers. You really think that the cable/sat companies are going to halt this practice anytime soon? People want it, people pay for it and provide an additional revenue stream for big business. Keeping people from streaming NFL games to different geographic regions and making PPVs go away after they have been watched once (just like the very popular VOD offering) won't hurt anything. So you rent the DVD and shrink it and you build a PC using software that lets you stream from elsewhere. The geeks and hackers will still be able to do it. The general public won't care. The TiVo is STILL doing what they want. We're talking about TV watchers here. The market to expand to is the couch potato. The geeks already have the functionality. The ONLY problem I see here is that there is the impression that TiVo is buckling under to big corps and legal pressure. I don't see it that way, but I understand those who do. When the hacks start getting supressed then I will be ticked. Also, for the record, DirecTV has disabled some of the features that could make providers mad, like the 30 second skip. The NetFlix/TiVo deal is another example that TiVo isn't dying off at all. They're continuing to innovate while dealing with the legal issues that will be around for quite some time.

    --

    [insert sig file here]

  19. Re:PPV by Kjella · · Score: 3, Informative

    Timeshifting was approved because shows would air at a fixed date. The non-infringing use they based their decision on was to view the show only once, but at a different time. They did not, despite it being a result, give you a right to create a permanent copy that you could view many times (albeit watching it once over several sessions, or starting over due to interruption would go under fair use).

    Since then, there are a number of factors that have improved to ours, the consumers, advantage. No quality loss (digital copies), easy commercial skips but the base non-infringing use has been the same - time-shifting.

    If you take away the time-shifting argument by making content available at any time (on-demand) or close to (say, every hour), that argument is withering. You may argue that you want the movie to start at exactly 19.43, but it would be a much weaker argument.

    Should the specific case of a tool only capable of time-shifting PPV content ever reach the Supreme court, don't be too surprised if the verdict is against you. As for a common TiVo box, the non-infringing use would be all the standard fixed broadcasts, the PPV use merely collateral.

    That being said, there is a much more important case being brought before the Supreme court now, that of P2P applications and their liability for copyright infringement. It is far more fundamental than the Betamax case, because it will shape the future of all digital devices and software, as a sequence of 0s and 1s can be copyrighted. Digital PVRs would be just one small subset of devices whose fate depend on that outcome.

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  20. Re:PPV by Suidae · · Score: 2, Informative

    even if you rent an apartment, your landlord still cannot just come into your place even though they "own" it.

    In the U.S. they can, as long as they give a minimum 24 hour notice.