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.

Comments

Build your own...

[Standmic]

http://www.byopvr.com/

Re:Build your own...

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:accelerating their own death

[jgordon7]

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.

Re:Glad I have myth

[enrico_suave]

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.

Re:Glad I have myth

[Darth Maul]

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).

Nope

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Glad I have myth

[andrew_j_w]

...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.

Re:That seals the deal for me.....

[cayenne8]

"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

Re:PPV

[Kjella]

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