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Linux Looms Large in DVRs, PVRs
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at LinuxDevices there's a new fanless digital entertainment center reference design based on Linux and the MythTV open source DVR (digital video recorder) software. The 'Royal Linux Media Center' runs ESG's Royal Linux OS on a Transmeta development board based on its Efficeon chip. Linux has been increasingly popular in DVRs and PVRs, with examples including TiVo (of course), HP's recently unveiled Linux media hub, i3's Mood box, Interact-TV's Telly, Siemens' Speedstream, VWB's MediaReady 4000, Amino's AmiNet500, Sharp's Galileo, Dream-Multimedia-Tv's Dreambox,
NEC's AX10, and Sony's CoCoon, to name a few."
That's all well and good, but does it run Linux?
Oh, fuck it!
Linux is well poised for the appliance market... but I have to wonder when DRM and the DMCA will make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide the services on Linux needed to compete in the media space if DRM gets in the way. The simple way, I guess, is to put the DRM enforcement into hardware, but I think that leaves us all worse off in the end.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Play WMV9 ?
Karma: bad (mostly unaffected by funny mods)
IIRC, Dish also uses linux in all of their set top boxes, including their DVR units.
So yeah, linux seems seriously popular in the various DVRs that are available. Is there a source that lists known hacks/mods available for them?
Actually, it took a lot less. The first story posted in the 21st century set that record, even if it has been broken many times since then. It only took 3 or 4 years, plus 11 days, to set the record to 15 links.
As an aside, does anyone know where I can a document on how to connect a MythTV box to a Comcast High-definition cable box?
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
Didn't Microsoft just recently team up with TIVO?
http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/050106/323/f9t5b.html
Anyone have any thoughts on how this will effect TIVOs choice of Linux as their OS?
I heard there's some hacked together thing called Teevough (sp??) that uses it as well? Anyone heard of this Teavoe?
Tey Veaux?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Actually, it took a lot less. The first story posted in the 21st century set that record, even if it has been broken many times since then. It only took 3 or 4 years, plus 11 days, to set the record to 15 links.
Touche'
Grease & Counterbalance
You are right, DRM enforcement in hardware is worse off. Palladium / Trusted Computing, in whatever incarnation, is still being pushed at us, this time as a way of supposedly making a computer more secure. If successful, it would either:
1.) Make Linux buy a license for every version of binary that we use. Licenses would be controlled by Microsoft, so this would be prohibitively expensive, unless we can all settle on a single binary kernel, essentially making Linux proprietary -- as in, individual users can no longer alter it to meet their needs without dropping the DRM support.
2.) Ignore DRM. Hopefully consumers will follow suit, and these devices are critical. If we don't let the industry impose its own standards, we can still watch movies with our own software. How are people going to react when their Terminator 4 doesn't work on their Linux-based DVD player? Especially with the quality of movies so low recently -- I'd sell my soul and buy an Xbox for Halo 2, but no way I'll sell out Linux for Blade: Trinity.
Putting DRM in software at least allows someone to crack it and provide other software. Putting DRM in hardware would make it, to my knowledge, impossible to break without some serious hardware cracking. The difference is that Joe Blow can break CSS by downloading a DeCSS-enabled mplayer, but he can't break Trusted Computing, because he can't "download" a modded Trusted Computer. And a "Trusted Computer" would be harder to mod than, say, an Xbox.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Someone out there make a streamlined tivo-like box (using the reference board above), having the following properties:
1) Slick design. Not a computer in a funny case, something with a home electronics feel. Fanless!
2) Good remote control.
3) Hardware MPEG4 encoding/decoding
4) Open source tivo-like software (not mythtv, something usable).
5) Quality TV output and sound hookups.
6) Open firmware (no DRM, no proprietary files, no restrictions, hardware documentation provided).
7) Ethernet and/or wifi and/or USB.
I'll buy it. I'll buy two, one for my parents. It should work out of the box like a tivo, but be hackable by anyone that desires to do so. Make your money selling the hardware, not subscriptions. The community will take care of improving the software (which will make your hardware even more attractive).
Send me a WMV9 file, and I'll attempt to play it on mplayer. I think most of these can have the Windows DLLs, so, probably.
I am ninja@slaphack.com and I fear no spam.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I am curious, has anyone here ever seen, used, bought a Telly from Interact-TV? If so, what was your experience? Good - Bad - Ugly?
The GPL doesn't say legally that modifications to the software can only be made for machines which allow one to modify software.
BUT.
GPL also says that users can redistribute under later versions. And RMS has already hinted at cleaning it up to avoid just this kind of thing.
AND.
The Spirit of the GPL is to provide software that people can modify and use however they want, without letting others take the software and make it proprietary. But by making it impossible to run custom software on the target hardware, the use of Open Source becomes a marketing ploy and essentially a leeching strategy for development.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Dang. I was on the brink of either getting a Telly or building my own MythTV using a Shuttle box with Intel. Now I see that there are six other products besides the Telly, and more coming.
My plans are starting to look like "early adopter impatience"...yes, yes, there's always a better system coming out, ut's never the perfect time to buy in, yada yada. But! I don't want to buy JUST before the cost/benefit curve goes through an elbow.
I'm getting a feeling that 2005 is the Year of the Elbow for DVRs.
Over the last 5 years Microsoft and their cronies have been crowing about who's going to "own the livingroom". The idea has been to get away from the PC and onto the TV.
I'm sure Linux making such deep inroads isn't going to sit well with Gates and Ballmer. I'm also sure they will attack Linux with all their legal and marketing muscle. Expect to see a bloodbath over this one.
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Yep, as I look at the full page ad by HP in this PC magazine that says "Windows XP is the best choice for your home media needs" I really don't think HP is your friend. It's one thing to whole heartedly support open source (IBM), it's another to support it as a sideline.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A potentially interesting example not mentioned is Street Fire Sound which has an open source hardware offering.
I have a problem with #3.
I can understand the philosophical reasons for #4 and #6, and I can understand the practicalities of everything else.
But why not, say, hardware Theora encoding/decoding?
Why not software encoding/decoding, if it was just as fast?
Let me add a couple more things I want:
8) Upgradable. (buy upgrades from newegg.com and download them through bittorrent)
I don't care how big the hard drive, I want to be able to add a bigger one later. I care much more about whether I can upgrade the software on it than how good the software already is that it comes with.
No firmware except for boot. In fact, go ahead, knock yourself out, use a Linux-based BIOS, but after you figure out how big my new Linux hard drive is, boot off that. I want my 2.6 kernel.
DVD drive, ability to boot off of said DVD drive. Maybe I want to install a brand new Gentoo Linux with Reiser4, without having to bootstrap through some fruity Flash-based Spawn of Hell menu. Let me.
9) No reliance on proprietary/Windows stuff.
A receiver my father bought came with some sort of Internet Radio feature. It allowed to play exclusively mp3's from exclusively Windows computers. I want to be able to use all of the features of the unmodified box, even though you know I'll modify it later, without having to reboot.
And btw, how do you get the content of subscriptions, without the subscription?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
.. which mythtv doesn't then have? because that's what you're implying by the way you're puffing them.
looking at the features, mythtv looks like it does more, a LOT more.
including stuff like picture in picture, multi card support - and get this, transparent multi machine support: "Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.", rss, mpeg4, mpeg2 decoders/encoders and a whole lot of other stuff.
maybe mythtv gets mentioned more often because it does more and is prettier? anyhow, if you say that one thing is better why not back it up with features the other doesn't have
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well I hope with all these companies using open source applications that they give back to the community. Either by funding some of the developers or donating to project.
It would be unfortunate to see companies taking the results and making a profit, but not giving back to those that put the time in to make the product.
I have a Dreambox and let's just say that it has some *ahem* special capabilities when it comes to satellite television. And of course, it runs Linux (currently an unpatched 2.6.9-rc1 ppc kernel). Good stuff. :)
It's DVR capabilities are also improving daily, thanks to an active CVS repository where Enigma, (which is like MythTV) is being developed by people all over the world.
Visit my forum Open Dreambox North America for specific info for usage in the states and canada
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Some of VIA's CPUs have built-in compression and encryption hardware that would seem perfect for a DVR.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Seriously. I bought a Sony HDTV LCD projection TV for Christmas, and was surprised to see that it came with a GPL. It's running one of the real-time embedded Linux platforms (I forget which one).
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
MythTV currently relies on libavcodec on the backend to do video compression/decompression. The libavcodec library implements the various MPEG compression algorithms, which are *very* vigerously protected by the LA MPEG patent pool group.
Any commercial implementation of a DVR using MythTV would be at extreme risk of prosecution by the LA MPEG group for unauthorized usage of the MPEG patents.
It would be very nice to see MythTV transitioned to use the Theora (www.theora.org) video codec, as this is a patent-free video compression / decompression library.
As a long time user of myth, I kind of resent a company coming in and slapping some hardware together and selling it for the small fact that a lot of people have spent a lot of time making sure Myth works for a wide variety of hardware (hauppage pci, pvr 250/350, matrox g200, etc.). Although we do need a fanless option. Tivo is not even fanless. The project's soul tends to be a very good frontend to video frames coming off a v4l/2 hardware card.
The one problem I have had \w PVRs is getting the digital channels to work correctly. My old tivo wouldnt do this (maybe series 2 does?).
Anyways, I recently joined the beta program for the Comcast PVR. It is actually running a stripped-down version of windows media center. Now, I hate comcast, but I have to admit this device solves all the problems I had \w my Tivo. 1) the digital channels work 2) the recommendations are less silly 3) it only cost 4 dollars a month extra. I would *much* rather give my money to tivo, but comcast will have them beat once this device goes public.
Wht do manufacturers keep coming up with special names and looks for their PVR/DVRs? Why not take the approach that made VCRs ubiqutous and have a general design that everyone knows and will not be afraid to buy. If everytime someone walks into a store and sees 10 different versions of what are essentially the same device, they're going to inevitably get confused. Its already tough enough getting folks to shed their VCRs for a digital replacement so why compound the issue? In my opinion commodidty and simplicity is what will drive the DVR/PVR market to the levels of market penetration (or saturation if you will) that VCRs have already achieved. Whenever something whiz-bang enters the market this always seems to happen and is eventually later "fixed" by the companies that make it simple enough for Joe Sixpack to own and operate, which is a point I hope we're quickly approaching. Until then the standalone DVR/PVRs will be a fractured market fighting to stay alive. Don't get me wrong, I love the ability to space & time-shift my stuff in a digial format, but too many options/features can lead to a divergence in the selling points that may end up killing any advanced funtionality they offer (assuming costs don't do the trick beforehand).
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
have intellectual properly laws always been so far behind technology?
Your beef is with ATI. I have an All-In-Wonder 3D Pro AGP 8mb card. This is from when AGP was first introduced. Pentium II era. There is STILL no decent TV input support that I could even find under Linux. It was a ton of hacking and messing around with beta/cvs drivers the last time I looked (a few months ago). If ATI would make the drivers so you could use your card, things would be fine. They make bianary closed source drivers so you can use 3D, why can't they do it for TV input too? Ask 'em, I'd like to know the answer. They also refuse to tell people what they need to know to make the apropriate video capture drivers, let alone 3D and such.
The solution? Buy video capture stuff from Hauppage, or anyone else who supports Linux. Buy 3D stuff from nVidia (who at least gives great 3D support for all their cards) or someone else who supports their cards well under Linux (Matrox has good Linux drivers, don't they?).
In short: DON'T BUY ATI FOR LINUX USE. It's that simple.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Couple thoughts
1) if you have a beefy enough computer, hardware encoding is not really necessary, especially if you just want to "try out some of the linux solutions". Buy any number of the BT878-based TV cards and try with that. I know the TV Wonder VE used to go for about $30. Granted, it's mono, but I'm sure there's other stuff, cheaper. I remember Isaac mentioning that a 1700mhz machine was almost enough to record two streams and play one simultaneously.
2) The idea for your "ppc-based" box makes a lot of sense, too, and I'm curious to see what people will do with it, PVR-wise.
3) MediaMVP - you might want to look at the PrismIQ. I know the GUI is a lot better, and I think it has some features the MVP doesn't. Unfortunately, I believe both require some software running on another computer. (And neither supports MPEG4 natively, the prismiq uses the server computer to transcode). Oh, and the big annoyance on both - NO PCM AUDIO. Means that iMovie-based DVDs can't be ripped and played - you need to convert them to something else. Not a huge deal, but a deal nonetheless.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I think the most appropriate comment from television and satellite companies to Microsoft would be "Your reputation precedes you."
any commercial implementation would be in violation of international patent law.
Unless, of course, the commercial company simply paid for a license for the patents!
You forgot the Prismiq media player, and the soon to be launched Prismiq media center. http://www.prismiq.com/ http://www.prismiq.org/
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Or they come from a part of the world where these alleged patents have no validity (and they don't do any business in any such part of the world). So who thinks they can make one in the EU and who doesn't :-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
The problem with most of these devices is their interface - too complex for grandma. It's like the blinking VCR clock to the n'th degree. People don't quite understand what it is these expensive boxes do in the first place, and the frequently cruddy interfaces are just one more hurdle to overcome.
Until someone comes along who can successfully explain what these DVR gadgets do to John Q. Public and slap an easy to use interface on them the average NASCAR fan can navigate, they're going nowhere fast in the marketplace.
Maybe Apple will convert the new Mac mini into a home media server at some point down the road. The form factor is certainly right. Slap in better video abilities (maybe some dedicated MPEG encoding and decoding hardware), a larger hard drive and even built in wireless and you'd have a killer home media center capable of accessing not only video, but also a ripped CD collection or iTunes purchases and streams. Throw in an iPod-like remote and they could market this device as an iPod for your home theater. Consumers might actually get that angle, and Apple has already proven they can design user interfaces that just work.
Those of you who'd rather watch satellite programming, don't forget to check out VDR. Add a cheap PCI card to your PC and you can be time-shifting satellite programming in no time.
Linux at home
I'm also using a Hauppage card for my MythTV box (PVR-250). Great piece of hardware.
[MPEG-4 is] the video equivalent of mp3
And it's just as patented as MP3.
A hardware encoder gives you the opportunity to use a much lower power (ie, no fans needed, lower power consumption) general purpose processor.
So does a software encoder running on a Pentium M Dothan processor.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Wht do manufacturers keep coming up with special names and looks for their PVR/DVRs?
To work around design patents. All this will sort itself out after DVRs have been around for twenty years.
The developers of KnoppMyth, a knoppix distro combined with MythTV, will be demoing their easy to use PVR distro at SCALE 3x Free exhibit hall passes are available with the promo code "free".
All I want is a silent MythTV frontend that can do HDTV decode.
I have been looking and looking and looking without much luck.
The threat from DRM and DMCA (and Europe's equivalent) will likely come via the HD DVD or Blu-ray formats. While much hype is being made about claims that two different formats are competing, these claims are unfounded. The codecs for both are the same: MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and VC-1. The last one, VC-1 is the real bite as it is none other than WMP's own, controlled by Redmond. The anti-trust trial in Europe should have taken that one down, but didn't.
The solution now is to either drop VC-1 and go with MPEG only, drop VC-1 in favor of Dirac, or open VC-1 up including the DRM.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
> looking at the features, mythtv looks like it
> does more, a LOT more.
> including stuff like picture in picture, multi
> card support - and get this, transparent multi
> machine support: "Distributed architecture
> allowing multiple recording machines and
> multiple playback machines on the same
> network, completely transparent to the
> user.", rss, mpeg4, mpeg2
> decoders/encoders and a whole lot of other
> stuff.
Uhm, there are vdr plugins for all those buzzwords
(except for "rss" maybe, but I don't know what
that means in this context). (Multicard support
is of course supported by default).
It's been a while since I've looked at mythtv, but
vdr is much much more mature.
And the best thing about vdr; vdradmin with its autotimers:
http://linvdr.org/projects/vdradmin/
Thanks to vdradmin I seldom watch TV realtime
anymore, and I almost never program vdr to record
individual programs, I just feed vdradmin patterns
or regexps!
*** My only concern is how the DRM will impact this when the FCC's broadcast biut kicks in this summer. ***
2 0&tid=129&tid=137&tid=1
Check out pchdtv.com
They're advertising an over-the-air broadcasted HD card that ignores the broadcast flag. Slashdot reviewed the card awhile back in November. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/07/22322
Is the idea of Google buying Apple just something someone on crack came up with? Or is their some form of genius (and insanity) in the synergies that would be created? I want see if we debate the pros and cons of the idea.
Hi. I would be very interested if someone could suggest or reccommend software that functions like MythTV or any of the products mentioned in the summary above, but which does not have TV functionality and instead focusses on music.
I have a miniITX board that I would like to use as a music server. Audio out would go through to my HiFi. Video out would be to my TV. control would be through remote control.
any thoughts?
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Or a DVB card. Then the encoding is done by the TV station and/or the producers of the material.
You could quite legally sell it in countries such as the UK or the Netherlands, where software patents are not legally enforceable. And even if there is a country in the EU where software patents are legally enforceable, there would be no way to stop anyone importing the unit there from some EU member nation with sane patent laws. That would be a breach of trading laws.
Now -- thanks to Poland actually having some balls -- it now looks likely that software patents will remain forever unenforceable across the whole of the EU. Which is of course A Good Thing, because misuse of IP law only ever hampers innovation and creativity; so any country with enforceable software patents will eventually end up with a sorry excuse for a Tech industry and lawyers calling all the shots.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
TiVo Basic service is free but is not available to stand alone TiVo Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), which are not intended for use without a subscription to the TiVo service. You can upgrade to TiVo Plus or to Product Lifetime service. For more information on the TiVo Product Lifetime service, go to What Is 'Product Lifetime Service'?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Ummm yeah sure it is. Want to compare feature sets and user bases?
The Hauppage drivers were written by reverse engineering the Windows drivers with no support from Hauppage.
AIW isn't supported by ATI because 1) ATIs drivers suck. 2) AIW uses some ugly hacks involving copying to video RAM so standard cpature methods don't work and 3) The AIW cards are pretty much the WORST capture cards on the market.
so it's your chosen package, but without even taking a look at mythtv you trump it as more mature?
disclaimer: i don't use neither one of them.
but mythtv seems more complete, less geeky(easier), prettier and with a more solid feature list(vdr doesn't have plugins for 'all those buzzwords' as you put mpeg4 encoding to be).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Where does the guide info come from? That seems like the most important part. And the part that you pay $12/mo. for w/Tivo.
I would love to use a TIVO as the hardware platform for MythTV or Freevo.
Is this possible with a version 2 or 2.5 TIVO? Has anyone done this?
> so it's your chosen package, but without
> even taking a look at mythtv you trump it
> as more mature?
IIRC MythTV got DVB support a little over a year ago,
about the time I got my first DVB card. Support for
full featured cards (cards with decoder) may have
come even later.
vdr on the other hand has had DVB support for
about 4 years.
So a year ago MythTV was very bleeding edge (at
least regarding DVB support), whereas vdr just
worked, and had been working for several years.
> (vdr doesn't have plugins for 'all those
> buzzwords' as you put mpeg4 encoding to be)
The vdrrip plugin which I use uses mencoder.
So it's a breeze to mpeg4 encode recordings.
Easy to use three new versions and upgrades availble for old versions. Hardware bugs have been eliminated after 2 years and I feel the OS and the hardware are easy to use. Trackball remote is excellent and the ease of use is a plus. 1250 model is with out paralell and 1.2 terrabytes of storage equals 1000 hours of movies. The Telly records in two modes so the user that found bugs may have had an old model or used the grainy version. Was he using a wireless or wired connection makes a big difference. All the same Turner Broadcast Systems bought units for a beta test and the ultraquiet Seagate drives make this a winner in my book. The original harddrives IBM and Hitachi have been replaced by quiet Seagate drives and the new low end units will have an external power supply to reduce heat. All the functions of a TIVO plus a Server that links all the house hold digital media with one remote can't be beat. 1.2 terrabytes and a great menu and ease of use can't be beat for the price. A winner Clovus I am also an investor and own ITVI stock.
It has all the features you mentioned above and more. Clovus http://www.interact-tv.com