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TiVo Unveils Series3 HDTV DVR
MegaZone writes "TiVo unveiled their new Series3 unit at CES yesterday. The Series3 is a digital cable ready box, capable of recording two programs simultaneously. It supports cable and antenna input, and it can handle digital or analog cable, digital ATSC, or analog NTSC broadcasts. CableCARD is used for digital cable, and it can utilize a single multi-stream card, or two single-stream cards. The system also sports 2 USB ports, 10/100baseT Ethernet, and an E-SATA port for external storage expansion. Video output is HDMI, component, S-Video, and composite, and audio is optical digital or RCA stereo."
I have a Tivo, and while I know I could build a MythTV I like the "near idiot proof" nature of the little box so I can let my wife use it to tape her shows (American Idol) while I tape my shows (MythBusters) and our shows and then had to hunt for a USB compatible network device, all I could think was "WTF? Why not spend $10 on Ethernet?"
The other thing I'm very pleased about is the inclusion of the Cablecard option - this gives Tivo a chance to complete with cable boxes - though local Cox has let people know that while you can use the cablecard, it won't be able to get movies on demand.
Ah, and I was so hoping to see "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo". Somehow, I think I'll survive. WIth the ability to plug in external drives, this has seriously upset my plans to convert my spare PC into a Tivo replacement once the service on the current box runs out in October.
Of course, there's always the possibility Apple will introduce something - but if they do introduce a PVR/Media device, I'm going to expect it to have the same capabilities down to the cablecard that this new Tivo does before I consider it.
Eh - I'm patient. I have 10 months to wait and see.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
As I recall, Tivo unveiled their first prototype of a cablecard enabled, HDTV capable DVR at CES 2 years ago. I would have been ready to buy such a creature at the time.
Obviously, the current model looks leaps and bounds ahead of what they originally put forth. I love the display on the front that shows what both tuners are recording. (Although no more sneaking recordings of shows my wife doesn't know I watch, and doesn't think I have time for.) However, I can't help but think that they missed out on a significant piece of the market as people have resigned themselves to using cable company provided DVRs for HDTV. It doesn't help that cablecard implementation at most cable companies is still pretty buggy, and not used widely enough to get debugged thoroughly too quickly.
My bet is that this unit will succeed or fail (and the company with it) depending on how much marketing muscle Comcast puts behind it as part of their alliance with Tivo. Of course, I'm still likely to buy one, as the HD-DVR Time Warner provides for me is horribly buggy...
-JMP
Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record You know I always wondered about that too. You don't see me running around telling you what kind of toilet paper I use (Charmin) or anti-perspirant I use (Arid). Maybe there should be a study done on this kind of behavior. But I have a feeling they have no friends and are trying to make some on the net by spouting out shows that seem to be popular with all the other losers.
I just took the plunge to HDTV the other day. In setting all this up, I would like to pass along what I have learned thus far. It has been an interesting trip, to say the least and I have learned that there is a LOT of hype around HDTV that is probably not quite warranted yet.
I subscribe to basic extended analog cable. I get locals plus standard cable content (Comedy central, lifetime, etc). No premium channels. I have this cable feed running through my Series 1 Tivo and from the Tivo, into my A/V receiver - which outputs the picture only to my TV. In this mode, the TV is essentially a monitor.
I also have a PC w/ Meedio hooked up to this. I used to use the S-video to an old analog TV and that worked ok. Once I hooked it up to my HDTV (TV has PC/VGA in), words can not describe how much of an improvement that makes. The PC has a Soundblaster Live! on it and digital optical out to the A/V receiver....more on that piece later.
The 3rd device I have is a DVD player (Philips DVP-642). Audio is coax digital. Video is components. Both Audio and video feed into my A/V receiver. My receiver has components in and out to the HDTV.
Now that you have an idea of the setup I use, let me lay out some issues I have run into that the Tivo3 may simplify.
1. Of all the devices I have hooked up, my PC w/ Meedio looks the best. And so do all of my downloaded movies and shows. Most of the rips I have are in HDTV and that seems to be the standard nowadays. Why is this important? Because the old "downloaded videos sacrifice quality" no longer holds true. It may not be as good as upscaled DVD's but it is MORE than reasonable.
2. My soundcard sucks. The optical out only outputs stereo sound. I think it will pass through Dolby and DTS but who cares -- that's what my DVD is for. THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL IF YOU WANT SURROUND SOUND out of your PC. Get a card that can output 5.1 on the fly. As I understand it, most Creative products ONLY output stereo through the digital out. (note: they may "pass thru" DTS/DD but that is different). I wound up ordering a Turtle Beach Montego. Haven't set it up yet.
3. There is very limited HDTV content available. Over-the-Air (antennas), I can pick up all the major networks. Another alternative is to go w/ DirecTV -- but if you subscribe to them, you only get about 2-3 extra channels (I don't count preview channels, etc) more than an antenna. For Dish, its a little bit better -- you get about 4-5 extra channels. Same with Cable. The Point: Each of the above costs an extra $10-$15/mo. And for that, you get at most, 4-5 extra "real" channels that you couldn't get by just sticking an antenna behind your TV.
4. I just ordered a CableCard from my provider (Cox). This allows me to keep my standard "analog" cable that feeds my Tivo while at the same time, allowing me to view the 5-8 HDTV channels that are available. If I had a Tivo3, I could just slap that card into my Tivo3 instead of using my Tivo 1 (for analog) + HDTV tuner on TV set. The Tivo 3 will record whatever you throw at it (HDTV, standard digital, analog, etc) in one nice, neat, little box.
I hope this is helpful to people. There is a lot to think about on how to set things up and these are the major issues that I ran into. I think the biggest disappointment I see is the lack of HDTV content. Just go look at the HD offerings from Dish or DirecTV and you will see that it is very minimal. Perhaps that will change with time but I definitely have that "pay more for less" feeling with respect to my cable/sat bill.
So, if you want to record HDTV, you have the following options:
a) Build a PC w/ HDTV card and use an antenna (unless your HDTV capture card supports CableCard)
b) Build a PC w/ HDTV capture card and use the cable company's Cable box to tune. Note: consider the remote control implications if you choose this. Changing channels = change channels on Cable box.
c) Use the cable companies HDTV DVR (@ $15/mo from Cox. YMMV)
d) USE A TIVO3 w/ CableCard (simplest, easiest, hopefully cheapest)
Hope this helps others who decide to take the plunge.
t's nice that it has Ethernet, but can you do anything useful with it or will it be heavily DRM'ed?
With current S2 TiVos you can do quite a bit with the ethernet -- play MP3s, slideshows, get weather/traffic/movie times and tickets/etc (the interface is open and extensible), transfer recordings to a PC and back (PC includes Windows, Mac, and Linux; although for the latter two you probably need to run Galleon), transfer MPEG2 video to the TiVo (and maybe MPEG4/H.264 w/ the Series3? It's not clear yet), and various other stuff.
As far as the video that's exported goes -- it's in a ".tivo" format which is a loosely containered MPEG2 video. It's completely trivial to strip off the outer layer and get to the real data beneath it. And it looks like the new TiVo Desktop software will even offer transcoding to a number of alternate (DRM'd) formats as well. But really, it's a joke to take off the TiVo DRM, or to just play it from a standard MPEG2 capable video player (it's designed to allow you to do that). Yes, you can play it in mplayer.
What about the data on the USB disk--is it encrypted or is it readable and usable MPEG files?
It's SATA, not USB, but that's a minor nit. The data is not in straight MPEG files -- it's on TiVo's proprietary FS. That was figured out long ago. But if you can simply download the stream to your PC, there's little reason to futz around with the drive -- especially since you cannot be assured that the entire video is stored on the external drive (it may be, but it may also cross drives; the article states this).
This thread proves once again that Slashdot needs a (-1, Cheapskate that won't ever buy anything their mommies don't give them the money for, but will whine endlessly for it to be free anyway) rating.
Ahem. I bought a Series 1 TiVo box in June 2000, later upgraded it myself to 200GB (the absolute most space available at the time), and happily bought a lifetime subscription. (The sort of idiots here who whine and complain about the horrible, awful TiVo subscription fee has always been around and always will; please ignore them.) However, five years later my box sits in the closet. In part it's because a drive died, but it's mostly because, yes, I built a MythTV box.
I *didn't* built a MythTV box because of:
* The subscription fee. See above. I always felt I got way more than my money's worth from TiVo; heck, were I to sell my box on eBay it'd still be worth a few hundred dollars due to the lifetime subscription.
* A desire to export TiVo recordings to elsewhere. I never quite understood the fascination people had and have with decrypting TiVo's file system and exporting programs to elsewhere. If anything I wanted my TiVo to act as the portal through which I could view my video library.
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:
* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in.
* Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously.
* Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues, Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.
That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.
> I bought the ethernet card and plugged it in. No problems.
I have the same setup, but enough of the "no problems" already. For your average non-techie consumer wanting Ethernet there ARE problems galore with the SA1: willingness to void warranty by opening the unit, obtaining the right size Torx screw driver (which not exactly a common household item like a Philips driver), cutting the right-sized hole into the back of the unit to snap in an RJ45 socket and obtaining said socket and wiring it to a patch cable stub (or just drilling a hole into the back and running a patch cable straight from the card to the outside and having it all look like shite and be prone to having the cable pulled too hard and unplugged or unseating the card), obtaining and installing the necessary Linux software to serve up shows from the box, editing the init script to start it all up, and hoping that after all this the box still works right.
Yeah, no problems at all for your average Best Buy customer.