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TiVo to Aim for PC Desktop
Dave writes "Ars Technica has reported on TiVo's fourth quarter earnings call, and I was interested to see that the company is looking at providing some kind of desktop service for computers." The details are pretty sparse, so it'll be intriguing to see what they've got planned.
Dobbs has an article about a Home Media Engine that can be activated in all the Series 2 Tivo's that allow you to build you own applications to run on the Tivo. I, of course, didn't read the article completely yet, but it sounds like they deliver a SDK for you to develop Java applications . You have to buy the mag, but the following is a link to the article.
http://www.ddj.com/articles/2005/0503/
Building on TiVo
Arthur van Hoff, Adam Doppelt
The Home Media Engine lets you build TiVo applications that integrate seamlessly with the familiar TiVo user experience.
The most logical service at this point in terms of what to add, that would be a leapfrog over just about everyone, would definitely be a distribution service based on something TIVO's already mentioned with the outside world.
Share-a-show Technology.
Basically under the concept of 'networking' and community. It's already been established that with Tivo-To-Go, it's expected you'll share shows with your family and friends.
NOW -- Take that a step farther. Suppose I get 50 people who all like Trek. Each person can share a particular trek episode with 6 people. So, you decide how many of the six 'burned' copies of Trek Episode 5 you're going to want to distribute among those 50 people who watch trek. If 9 people out of that 50 want to share, you've got more than enough copies of trek to go around. How do we get our very own copy to view? Well gee, I connect my tivo to the trek community. What do I get back? A list of every single Trek episode I can now download.
This beats HBO on demand when you don't have HBO. Of course it might be restricted by what you're subscribed to via your cable/satellite company but you'd basically be able to download off broadband your favorite shows. Things your single tivo just couldn't get because you could only tape one or two things at a time. Your favorite shows, any show on demand just so long as their Tivo (or computer) was online, was on broadband and had some distribution tokens left.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
"MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer."
:30 hack on TiVo."
Aples and oranges? Clearer...how? There's only so much information which can fit on a TV screen. If you don't like the appearance created by the TiVo, load a custom skin.
"The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict."
Same issue. There's only so much text which will fit on a TV display. Displaying conflicts on a TV very quickly becomes overwhelmingly cumbersome.
If you want to do it via PC, use one of the flavors of DailyMail. DailyMail will let you manually tweak conflict resolution via email. If you want to do mass deletions, reorganize season passes, etc., use TivoWebPlus modules. It would be ludicrous to compare a handheld remote system to a PC interface.
"- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy."
Too slow for what? I have 3 DTiVos, each has 2 160G drives and the only time I see any speed issues are when 2 recordings are being made on a DTiVo, a stream is being extracted across the NIC and I'm trying to do something data9intensive like reorganize season passes. Use TWP to do mass jobs or stream to a PC, no biggie.
"- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the
It takes less than 2 minutes to edit all the ads from a 1-hour recording after extracting to my PC. Any remote control method of skipping around is going to take longer than that.
You know you can push the left or right-facing triangle keys on a TiVo remote more than once, don't you?
"- MCE handles failure better."
Uh...no. MCE runs on Windoze which is far less stable than the Linux running on a TiVo.
" If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot."
Let's unpack that sentence.
The first part describes a TiVo season pass or wishlist for which you've enbled the options to record more than one showing. That's been in TiVo software from the beginning.
The second part of your statement is impossible in linear time. If a show is on once and your recorder fails, be it MCE, Myth, TiVo, DVDR, VCR, whatever, it is impossible to recover the signal which is no longer available.
"- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts."
Did you really think that as you typed? It is impossible for any tuner to record more than one channel at a time. Padding extends the recording of a channel beyond the match in the schedule data. MCE most certainly is NOT capable of somehow recording multiple channels per tuner concurrently, nor can it record linearly temporal broadcasts in a non-linear manner.
"- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus,"
Do you mean video overlay? It's not that difficult to inhibit playback of the looping backgrounds on a TiVo. That's been available for more than a year.
" and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history."
Why would that be useful? At some point, it's more efficient to re-enter from a top-level menu. If you're trying to do something which is inherently awkward with a remote control, use one of the web interfaces.
"Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised."
I might be pleasantly surprised by a few interface aspects but it's not something I'd chose. The more non-critical functionality packed into what is essentially a timed recorder, the greater the chance that recorder will fail its primary function. TiVos run Linux and are stable unless you're using a primitive hack to disable encryption. Mine have been running for more than a year, in one case 3 years, without reboots except when there were power outages. The only thing which I would find to be a major advantage would be if the TiVos suported wireless keyboards so searching by show name could be done quicker.