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Viiv 1.5 May End Traditional Media PCs
An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au makes an interesting case for why the next revision of Viiv will kill off living room PCs as we know them. Instead, we'll be streaming content to digital media adapters from a PC in our home office. From the article: 'The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.'"
Hauppauge's MediaMVP.
I use three of them as my Mythtv frontends using http://mvpmc.sourceforge.net/. Low energy consumption, boots Linux over the LAN from my Mythtv server and supports slimserver's protocol for listening to music.
I dont want a "Media Centre PC". I dont want to have a PC with GB's of movies and TV shows. I want to be someone else to sort, manage them and back them up. I don't want a set top box that connects to my PC so I can watch this massive collection.
I want video on demand. I want my local video store or cable company or telco to manage all the GB's of TV shows and movies. But when I want to watch a movie, be it the latest flick staring Angelina Jolie, some old movie a friend recommended or a movie I've watch 50 times, I just want to select it from a list, pay my 50c (or maybe 4.95 for a new release?) and watch it (pause it, rewind it and maybe see some "making of" style doco).
It already has caught on in a big way for some. I use XBMC to stream audio and video from a media server, and there are other devices out there built to do the same, like MediaMVP, Avel LinkPlayer, D-link DSM-520, and many others. Heck, there's even an entire forum dedicated to such devices over at avsforum.
I sell HP Media systems. Most computer users that come in have no idea that something like a Linksys Media Extender even exists, and the price shocks some of them (and others the idea of moving the plasma *anywhere* in their living room is a delightful one).
I love to do PK (product knowledge) and in my search for info about Viiv... I didn't find anything that would make it stand out above and beyond any other HP Media system.
To summarize -- cool things can now happen in your living room. Users that come in talking about Viiv -- I always remind them that it's a catagory, not an actual product, feature or specific technology -- to me it's more of a brand standard.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The household PC is in the kitchen for general use with an XBox 360 in the living room streaming live TV and recorded media to the TV over my wireless network. Win MCE 2005 and Extenders have allowed this for a while now without Viiv.
I can see the benefit of this sort of setup to a degree. I run something similar, with streaming media devices in various rooms, all streaming from a centralized machines. It is quite nice to have your entire media library available from any location.
A friend of mine discovered a cheap, low tech solution for pushing audio as well, using playlists and a small FM transmitter. Basically, you run your own custom radio station. No remote control, but available throughout the house and yard, and no streaming devices required.
XBMC. The Xbox may be a PC a heart, but everything about it, from the (fairly inconspicous) case to the interface, remote control support, instant-on, low noise and 5-minute setup tell a different story. The best part is that it plays fair with protocols and standards, so you can stream from Mac/Win/Linux over Samba pretty much any format of video or audio you care to choose. Only downside is having to softmod the Xbox in the first place.
KnoppMyth is perfect for this. Just pick hardware that is known compatible if you aren't familiar with compiling kernels and such to get them working.
I'm doing this already I guess.
The DboxII will connect to your PC (Suse 10 in my case), show your pics, play your movies via VLC, record with commercial skipping, play your mp3 files, check your email, receive news feeds, check the weather......blah blah blah
Oh yeah, it also receives Cable or Sat TV too!
look, if not for the complete and total lack of ability to easily creat a digital library on a basement media server which handles your tivo-esque timeshifting, storage of dvd movies and cd quality audio, channel tuning, etc., we'd all be doing it.
The cable companies won't let a decent PC card cable tuner onto the market which can handle all the channels to which you subscribe. The music people work to prevent reasonable in-home music storage and access for the desperate fear that *GASP* you could share music across a network. The dvd people work to prevent any reasonable disk based storage and access of quality video.
What's really needed is a different paradigm altogether. Ideally, a pass through set top box on one tv in each room, which uses IP to connect to a base unit in the basement or media closet. The base unit is a PC. The set top box provides user friendly tv based menus to the device. The device itself controlls one or more cable company tuners -- the cheapest ones they have that will give you your content descrambled. For additional concurrent non-scrambled channels, regular PC tuner cards could be used. The device would be responsible for which tuner is being used by which tv or whatever.
The total number of tuners would then reflect the number of LIVE concurrently different channels of content you could capture or watch. Once captured, the limit is bandwidth in the house. If two tv's were looking at the same content, it would require only a single tuner. Suppose you mostly watch network TV but also like HBO. You now would need one cable company tuner which you'd use for capturing the HBO content, while you could have several tuner cards (or external USB versions of same) to capture unscrampbled video. Each tuner could supply one or many tv set tops within your house provided they were on the same live channel. Content could be captured to disk just as it is with most dvr's now, so that each set top box could still have pause/rewind/fast forward capability independant of each other.
Additional menus on the set top box could easily stream back to the main box from a dvd player or whatever, effectively making the act of watching a dvd tantamount to capturing that content and adding it to your library. You could get fancy and automatically record new feature movies as your subscribed channels show them, and add them to your home library. The same could easily be done with a sat. radio subscription assuming your can read the track data while capturing the audio.
Hell, we can already be our own phone company with Asterisk. Its time to think about being our own media companies.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Sure, my HTPC is used for media, but it's also used to run emulated games. With two wireless gamepads (logitech knockoffs of the PS2 pad), whenever my buddies come over, it becomes the center of attention, above any other activity planned for the night. Oh, I forgot, we're not supposed to interact socially, just vegitate and absorb what the content providers feed us.
So far, it has a 300G disc, DVD+/-R/RW/RAM, 2xDVB-T cards, 1xAnalogue NICAM PAL TV/FM Radio/Composite/SVideo card, DVD-Rom, RGB SCART output at full PAL resolution and 5.1 sound output (discrete, or via co-ax). It also has an infrared remote control and full-size keyboard/mousepad. Via mplayer, it plays media encoded using most popular codecs.
And, of course, if I decide to add BluRay/HDVD at some point in the future (i.e. when the market has decided which - if either - deserves to survive), I'll be able to do so for probably £30 or less.