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Linux Hackers Offered Early Access to Next-Gen DVR
An anonymous reader writes "Linux hackers are being given the first crack at beta units and early release versions of a new Linux-powered DVR. The new device, available from Neuros Technology, is able to record MPEG-4 video from many media sources including cable, broadcast TV, and DVDs allowing the user to then transfer that video to portable media players or serve the media over a network. From the article: 'Neuros says "hundreds" of open source community members helped finalize the OSD's design. About two dozen purchased an early hardware prototype earlier this year. Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers.'"
I'd love to have a DVR, but unfortunately my local Cable company has a monopoly and will not work with 3rd-party DVRs. And the one they sell costs $748, which is WAY out of my comfort zone.
BTDT, anyone remember Agenda Computing?
Oh, and while it did make it out of beta (officially if not functionally) the PrismIQ wasn't exactly a bundle of joy either.
sdb
This is almost REALLY cool, but is missing a few big things.
1) video inputs and outputs are analog.. lame, this isn't next gen, this is last gen.
2) no display. Even a one line LCD would go a long way... I don't always want my TV on to play music for example.
I love the business model though, and allowing the community to build things is great. Much like the Squeezebox.
12Mbps USB 2.0 interface
SD/MMC/MemoryStick, Pro, Duo socket
CF socket supporting I/O mode
RS-232 serial console port (also used for controlling tuner boxes)
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
Infrared detector for remote control
Infrared blaster for controlling tuner boxes
NTSC/PAL composite or S-Video input
NTSC/PAL composite video output
Neuros seems like a really intriguing company. I haven't (yet) purchased any of their gear, mostly because I'm currently happy with my third-gen iPod and relatively ancient USB EyeTV tuner, but I like the way they seem to be developing products.
The killer is going to be software, though; if they can't get a cohesive user experience down, the best software in the world isn't worth more than a VCR. With all the digital covergence stuff, interoperability and ease of use are the two main pillars that support everything else. By using open standards and free software, I'm confident they'll have interoperability on the technical side, but I wonder about the ease of use and vertical integration with other parts of the "user stack." (That is, the applications that let the users do particular tasks, like pull a recording from the STB and burn it to a DVD; will there be one integrated app to do that? Or will it require an awkward chain of tools?)
But in general, I think they're on the right track, and it's refreshing to see a company produce a product that honestly looks neat. It's been a while since I've seen that.
Now, if only they made one that would record DTV without dropping it to an analog signal first...an ADC is nice, but it seems a little late. TV is going digital, and I'd love to see an unencumbered recording device that worked there, before the FCC gets in there and starts crippling things.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But how will the MPAA like that Linux hackers can go through and do whatever they want with a video stream? I think they will have a fit. But when has that ever stopped anybody from keeping backup copie(s) :)
And more seriously, has anybody gotten their hands on one?
I think most TiVO units have "IR Blasters" which are little dongles that go over the IR port on your cableco's box, and switch the channel and otherwise control it.
So basically, you "watch" the output from the TiVO on your monitor/television, and do all your programming and stuff. When the TiVO wants to get a particular signal from the cable box, either so you can watch it live or so it can record it, it sends a signal via the IR blaster into the cable box, switching the channel.
I don't know how reliable they are, and the whole thing reeks of 'kludge' to me, but I know some friends that swear by this setup.
Personally, I think it's too bad that nobody thought to mandate some sort of standardized control interface for cable and TV tuners; a serial port on the back of those DTV boxes would make all the IR stuff unnecessary.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This box is an asymmetric multiprocessor with one ARM and one TI DSP, so code has to be partitioned properly to run fast enough. The TI DSP has no free development tools (AFAIK), so most hackers will not be able to work on codecs or anything else in the "data path". Also AFAIK the codecs are not open source anyway. But I can imagine lots of cool uses for this if the complexity can be managed.
What good is a DVR with out a hard drive?
Sure you can USB it @ 12 MBPS I am sure that will work but that is another part to add. What about the CF/MMC card, have you seen the size of a movie in MPEG4 @ 800x600 D1 quality? it is in the range of 2gig an hour.
Include an IDE or SATA drive bay and ill buy one.
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product ... except that it's analog only.
... SVideo? I mean, hello, 1986 calling. What's the purpose of that, so I can connect it to my SVHS deck? How about my Laserdisc player?
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port. I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
But
As I said in another comment, I find Neuros very intriguing as a company, and I hope that they sell enough of these things to stay afloat and make a better model that will do digital recording, preferably soon, before the media companies and their lackeys at the FCC push through a Broadcast Flag.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The new device, available from Neuros Technology, is able to record MPEG-4 video from many media sources including cable, broadcast TV, and DVDs
Please allow firewire input... my cable boxes both allow raw firewire MPEG2 streams for SD and HD content. Currently I use MythTV with this, but would love the ability to buy cheap standalone boxes for ancillary TVs.
Is it safe to put a penguin on top of your television set?
The OSD is already out, which you can see at their homepage.
So I suppose even if you're not a hacker, you can still buy one...
-=Lothsahn=-
Well I can only guess why it's that way; my thoughts were that perhaps the point of the S-Video on the input and not the output is so you can record at some semblance of quality (although S-Video really isn't that great), and then download the digital file out through the network port, and watch it somewhere else.
Or, maybe they figure that by the time the signal gets compressed and played back, it'll be basically composite-video quality anyway, so that it's not necessary to have S-video output; it would just be wasted. Basically you want to preserve information as far into the compression process as you can, but once it's digitized, then your outputs only need to be good enough to play back the compressed material. (Still, I'd hope the device is capable of better quality encodes than the 300-something lines of baseband composite video. Yech.)
Either way I'm not exactly floored by it. There aren't that many devices that I can think of today, which have S-video outputs and not some kind of better-quality signal (Component, RGB, or some type of digital signal whether uncompressed on DVI or HDMI, or compressed on Firewire). Most video devices today are either going to have a high quality interface, or a low-quality one via composite or RF. There aren't many things around that use the "medium quality" S-Video exclusively; it just seems like a really odd choice today.
I tend to wonder if the ADC chip that they're using is one that can only deal with Y/C as its inputs, rather than Y/Pb/Pr or R/G/B. If that's the case, it might explain why the S-Video input; perhaps it's the highest-quality input their selected chip would work with. Still, this doesn't explain the utter lack of a digital input.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah; unfortunately the digi-cable boxes in my area don't have them. Apparently our local Comcast affiliate's theory is "if you were meant to have it, then the FCC would mandate that you get it."
So we don't get anything that's not required by law, pretty much. I can't even get a HD box with a working FireWire output, and I'm almost certain that there's an FCC regulation which requires them to provide me with one on request.
If I didn't get the cable TV for a very good price along with my internet service, I'd cancel them and just be happy watching NetFlix and grabbing my TV shows from BitTorrent. As it is, I barely watch it anyway; it's more for my roommates and guests to watch.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Who of you really does have a 1080p 64" double wide screen plasma lcd television with HDCP and HDMI functionality? Anyone? No. DVD and analog are doing fine for most mainstream applications. HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are nice as an expensive temporary backup solution and for some nimwits that don't know any better. People just bought into the whole "flat-screen-is-better-hype" replacing their 2-10y old color tv. I think that major expense this and last year ($700-$2000) is going to have to hold up for at least 3-5 years before mothers-and-wifes or just hard-working honest people are going to allow another expense that big because now everything is digital.
This product is aimed (by price ($150)) to the cheap nerd and his family who move their tv around in the house. The living room now has a nice and shiny LCD while the basement (or wherever you Slashdotters live) has the 25" flat-CRT and the bedrooms have the 20" standard CRT in most households.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Note that it says BETA release on the page you just linked... They're offering 200 of the BETA units for sale
/. knows about it, I'll be buying one. If they're
on ThinkGeek- and until it's out of beta, there probably won't be any more of them unless you rate one from
Neuros directly.
Budget permitting, if they still have any left now that
out in the next couple of days, I'll probably still end up with one as I've got a few answers to their
bounty problems already started- intended for other embedded devices that was going to be LGPLed anyhow.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
1) Design and build a PVR
2) Come up with a vaguely futuristic sounding company name
3) Get some suckers on the internet to do your software development for free
4) Profit
Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers
Bzzzt, I'll take "corporate PR lines" for $500, Alex.
This is to:
This is a calculated PR move first and foremost; anything a corporation does is motivated almost exclusively in self-interest (more appropriately, the interests of the shareholders.) Anything about "thanking the community" is a secondary (or lower) concern. If they wanted to thank the community, they'd fold back bug fixes, feature additions, and technical innovation into the open-source software they are (no doubt) using.
Please help metamoderate.
Detailed specifications can be found here http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/Neuros_ OSD
I'm in the market for a High Defintiton media recorder / player. I want to be able to capture an ATSC broadcast stream and record it to hard drive and later to DVD in MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 format and play it back to my high definition monitor.
This product is about 10 years behind the marketplace because it only supports NTSC and PAL.
At ThinkGeek (apparently exclusively)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Is it just me, or is this pretty much what Apple's upcoming iTV will be? The hardware sounds like it's pretty similar.
Useful mostly for streaming low-to-medium resolution video from PC to computer. Neuros adds the ability to record - maybe useful to an attached MP3/video player? (I guess you could NFS-mount a filesystem from elsewhere...?) In practice, I'd bet that's too much of a hassle to be worth the trouble.
Analog outputs ok for old TV's and stereos, I guess.
So, the specs are nice, and the price isn't bad, and I even have an external hard disk I could slap onto it right now.
I'm not buying it because nowhere in any of the material about it does it say it uses program guide information to manage recordings. After years of Tivo and MythTV, I'm used to not having to know when any show is on or what channel it's on. (When my Tivo died of old age, I was just helpless with the TV until I got my MythTV box running.) I'm not going to give up my MythTV box until I know the replacement is going to be able to schedule recordings based on nothing more than the name of the show. That means it has to have a schedule. That means it has to obtain a schedule. That means I have to know where it's going to obtain its schedule from, so I know if I will have to pay for it, and if so how much. (I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount, I didn't switch to MythTV from Tivo because it's free, I switched because it has better features.)
I would like to switch to a device like this from my MythTV box. It would take up less space, it would be quieter, it might even save on my electric bill, and it would free up the computer I dedicated to MythTV for other purposes. (Like playing Spore when that comes out.) However, this device just doesn't seem like it's quite ready to really call itself a "PVR" yet. It sounds like it's just another video recorder that happens to use digital media.
Oh, and while it's fine for me that it doesn't have an internal hard disk, Neuros should at least sell it with the option of coming with one, even if it's external. I know it's silly, but some people won't buy it unless they can know that they can get it with the disk and that the disk they get is manufacturer tested and approved.
If USB at 12 MBPS isn't fast enough for you, how about full-duplex 100bT? Choose your network file system and away you go... if you don't want the traffic on your main switch, spring an extra $10 for another port on the NAS and use a Cat-5 crossover wire.
I would't want drives on a box like the Neuros, personally; I keep my drives in a big ol' RAID array in my nice cool basement instead of pumping out extra heat in my A/V center.
I have two big stacks of "set-top-boxes" and other A/V related equipment, and I would appreciate it when manufacturers, even if they do not want to stick to 17" cabinets, at least put their products into square boxes that allow some stacking.
When everyone starts to use cases like this, space below my TV runs out very quickly...
Too bad you didn't mention them together. They have a model that simply records the raw data feed that most digital cable companies provide.
It's nice to see this initiative, but it's going to be pretty worthless without digital support.
There's the FCC mandate (although the date keeps fluctuating) to replace all over-the-air signals with digital only. I don't know if this covers cable providers as well, but most of them are following suit regardless. Without support for ATSC, the digital format that replaces the analog NTSC here in the US, this device won't receive any signal, encrypted or not, within the next few years. Same thing with DVB support for those of you in Europe and the rest of the world.
That could potentially be fixed with a softmod up the road, though. The big killer is the lack of CableCard support. CableCard is the technology used so that you can plug an encrypted digital broadcast signal via cable into your home media device. Today these mostly just plug directly into CableCard-enabled TV's, but the idea is that you could plug it into a DVR as well. While technically you could receive ATSC transmissions that are unecrypted, do you think any cable provider in their right mind is going to leave their content unencrypted when the possibility exists to scramble it?
Unfortunately, you need to be "certified" by CableLabs in order to use CableCard - and recent trends indicate that there's a snowball's chance in hell of anybody running a linux platform getting buyoff from CableLabs.
And in case you felt like getting creative and plugging this into the firewire output of your cable company's receiver, think again - yet another FCC mandate requires them to disable these ports after July 2007.
Upshot: Without some major tweaking, the only thing this will be good for in a couple years is possibly getting over-the-air signals, and even then only if they provide decoding for ATSC. If not, it's a doorstop.
Dude, stop looking at the trees — you're in the wrong forest. This device not only lacks an internal hard disk, its resolution choices are way below what you'd need to capture HD streams. Component outputs would be like tailfins on a Honda.
Judging from their web site, Neuros is mainly interested in creating devices that use portable devices for playback. Hence the emphasis on flash memory for storage. When this product goes GA, I'll certainly consider buying one to use with my TV — but my TV is not only analog, it has maybe a 10-inch screen. This DVR is aimed at people like me, with shallow pockets and modest requirements, not high-end video lovers like you.
Both Svartalf (2997) and markwalling (863035) mention it, but, to re-iterate, this product is being offered exclusively through Thinkgeek.
It seems slightly disingenuous to post a story from another website, http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4532837874.html , about the Neuros OSD DVR without mentioning that Thinkgeek and Slashdot are owned by the same company and that Thinkgeek is the sole distributor for now.
A quick disclaimer would be probably be appropriate in the future.
What's the hardware for encoding analogue HDTV? About six posters to this note expressed interest in that, not so much in the SD-only product under discussion.
My commercial, (DRM-loving-and-obeying) Pioneer DVR meets about 90% of my needs, I can't be bothered making a MythTV box just to copy DVDs or video tapes (yes, it obeys even the old "ARM" on tapes).
Nor do I want to "steal" HDTV content, by any reasonable definition, just do with it what I've been doing with VCR tapes for 20 years and my DVR (which can burn DVD-R's) for 2 years: time-shift TV, mostly for a few days, sometimes for several years. Yes, I might sometimes watch it twice, a very few three times, over a decade or so; but I just consider that protected "personal home use", fair use if you will, and I think most courts would agree unless the DRM proponents take away existing rights with a broadcast flag enshrined in law.
Bottom line, I think a card that can digitize analogue HDTV from component jacks is (so far) legal as a Sony Betamax, with at least one non-infringing use. So there OUGHT to be some decent ones for sale by now, since digitizing analogue SD has been possible, real-time, for years.
I've been considering getting a HD-DVR through a satellite company as a package, but it won't, of course, burn any kind of file, so the time-shifting is limited to days - only so much space on the disc. But with MPEG4 files, you should be able to put a typical 42-minute TV episode on a DVD-R and save it a few years.
Digitizing HD would make me buy some technology, nothing short of it will; I've got a DVR. I'm certain no HD DVR's will be offered for sale except as (closed) packages from satellite & cable providers. This is Linux's chance to shine.
But where's the HDTV digitizer cards? Nothing visible at any Calgary parts vendor, a few of which have a lot of variety...
Only NTSC/PAL composite output? This is now, not 5 years ago!
-=[ place
No HD, no DVI = already obsolete.
I have one of the first Neuros Audio MP3 players and was promised a USB 2.0 upgrade as soon as the spec was finished and access to the loading software and the firmware as open source code.
As far as the USB 2.0, I was supposed to know that when they offered an ALPHA version (not BETA, ALPHA) of the USB 2.0 dock online that I was supposed to jump on it. No e-mails, no notification, I was just supposed to know somehow that the ALPHA version was my free upgrade. As soon as the USB 2.0 dock was finalized, I called them up and asked for one, since I bought it during the appropriate time period. They responded that I missed my window to upgrade for free. I responded that when I bought the player, they didn't say they were going to give me an ALPHA USB 2.0 dock, the implication was that I would get a fully-tested one. Eventually, they agreed to ship me one for a very reduced price. It never worked. I was finally refunded minus 2-way shipping (over $50 on a $250 player).
They NEVER provided the firmware as open-source code even though that was prominently displayed when I bought it. Their excuse? "It takes a $50,000 piece of hardware to compile it and nobody will be able to do anything with it." Several of us responded that there are some REALLY smart people in the world that make emulators and stuff and you might be amazed. Just put it out there. Still waiting.
They finally did release the C#.NET source code of the loading program, but that thing was so slow it would take 14-16 hours to load up a 20GB player. It would lock up for about 6-7 hours with no status just when you dropped your MP3 folder on the window, but it would eventually finish. After that, it would take about 8-10 hours to load up the player over USB 1.1.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that they did add several nice features to the player including an equalizer, all in firmware updates. So they did support it some, but not in a way that was usable for me (or promised to me).
Bottom line: beware of this vendor and their promises.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
http://pchdtv.com/
But does it run...
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product ... except that it's analog only.
Erm, outputing analog video source over DVI is completely pointless. Cudos to the company for not making it twice as expensive to give people an ILLUSION of quality while actually making it look worse.
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port.
Exactly. Except it also has a low power CPU capable of running its own code. Pretty much we are looking at AV equivalent of a linksys wi-fi router. Only unlike cisco they are encouraging people to write their own code.
I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
The roots of this device is in capturing analog video into MPEG-4 for viewing on portable devices... you know, like the ones that READ flash media. The card slots ARE EXACTLY for storage for the machine.
Given the cost of this device ($230) what they packed in there is pretty impressive.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Bwhaha, ANALOG DVR that records from 'any analog source'? Hello, this IS 2006 is it?
Why is this news and especially news for NERDS?
Nobody would buy an analog DVR in 2006, most people have HD/digital cable by now, and you can rent cable company's DVRs for like 5 bucks a month and never worry about what OS it runs. Who the hell needs this, especially for $250 (you can buy a hardware mpeg2 encoder card for your PC for $50 and have same functionality as this PVR if you're inclined to record analog for some reason).
This thing runs on a TI DM320 SOC. Which means, you can't get a processor data sheet. You can't know how the DSP peripherals work. You can't change the codecs etc. TI is like the Microsoft of the hardware world - they want to keep the marketplace "monetized" so everything is based on NDAs, licensing, and secrets. It's odd, because if TI were to be more open with their product documentation, it would ultimately lead to more sales of their chips etc - although it would spell the end for "IP companies" like Ingenient who supply the closed-source codecs for this product. Why bother? I think it's kind of inappropriate to even put GNU/Linux on this thing, when the interesting bits are all locked down.
From the article - "Neuros's open source obsession.." ... would that be open source neurosis? :p
My cable box lets me record 2 channels simultaneously, or watch 1 channel and record another. It didn't cost me anything to buy, just $8 a month extra to have the service. Compare this to MythTV, which I tried by building my own box. In order to get decent results, it cost me quite a bit of money and the thing would break all the time. I don't want to come home and start messing with a computer to watch television. And Tivo is worse! I would have to shell out $19.99 a month for Tivo, another $5 for another cable box and then run IR blasters between Tivo and two cable boxes to get what I already have. "Interface is great" doesn't cut it for that much money and hassle. Finally, I am also able to hook up an external hard drive to my cable box to instantly get more space. Sorry, but cable has already won here.
It's designed to serve small media devices. Say you want to record shows for your PSP or your GP2x or whatever you want. This is what it's designed for.
So you can pull information directly from a DVD or TV show or whatever you want... Think of it like a sort of VCR were your flash-based devices uses VCR tapes instead of external memory cards.
It's not going to do HD TV because the output is designed for 320x240 displays (or whatever)
Oh, and as far as IR blaster stuff goes.. Those things do work out well.
As soon as 4GByte SD-Cards become available, videos on SD-Cards will be possible. So it's just a matter of time until SD-Card players will appear on the market, players which are able to drive ordinary TVs. So it's foreseeable that people soon will buy these players instead of Blu-ray or HD-DVD players. The video business is well advised to immediately start building and selling SD-Rom-Cards, else they were soon confronted with a unsolvable copying problem.
Live is so beautiful and there's always a solution if a problem becomes unbearable.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Wow, ScuttleMonkey, I just loved the disclaimer that you added saying this device is solely marketed by ThinkGeek which is affiliated with OSTG/Slashdot. Great editing standards!
</sarcasm>
Ok, so there's a new linux-powered DVR out (available at ThinkGeek, of course...) but how does it compare to the very-available and very-stable Topfield?
It runs Linux, and they have released an API for creating plugin modules (called TAPS). Check out the forum at toppy.org.uk for more info.
I think this product could use wireless support...that way you could move it from tv to tv without having to worry about having a hardwired internet connection next to every tv.
"As soon as?" I bought two 4GB SD cards for $90 with a $30 rebote at Fry's about a month ago.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I built mine out of old junk. I use linux soft raid and an Adaptec U160 card (which I actually had to purchase, along with the cable modem, but you can get SCSI cards on eBay pretty cheap). Very fast and reliable with RAID5 on everything but the boot partition, which is mirrored, and the swap volume, which is not RAIDed at all.
You probably may as well stop reading, since the rest is unlikely to be useful, but anyway:
It's in a 1950s era Honeywell DPS6 enclosed half-rack (with lovely solid tires) I found in a dumpster, with a gigantic APC SmartUPS 3000 RM3u in the top slot powering an RCA cable modem, a 100bT switch, the core server and a dedicated firewall as well as an extension cord running up two floors to an old Intel wireless pro 5000 802.11A/B access point (I use 802.11a, but guests use the b generally). The UPS I got from a dentist's office when the batteries went bad, and I got new batteries for free due to a complicated mistake another small business made that ended up with them having two sets. The AP was a demo unit that the local Intel sales office threw out. The 3com switch is from the county recycling bin. The core server is in a rack-mount 4U case my employers got rid of when they switched to 1Us, with a fairly generic dual-processor motherboard (overkill for NAS). It serves netatalk to the macs, samba to the PCs, apache to the outside world, and handles DHCP, DNS, and NTP inside. The RAID array is seven SCSI disks (an ISP that went out of business gave me a case of 16 U160 disks still in the wrappers) screwed to that expanded metal mesh stuff you use to keep your dog from jumping through the screen door, along with a couple of fans and an old cabinet handle. I had to do something with a paperclip to a small PC powersupply to get it to run the disks without a motherboard attached, but I don't remember offhand which pins I had to bridge. The firewall is running the free version of smoothwall with the AP on the orange interface and the cable modem on the red, with crossover cables as needed to avoid having an extra hub. I've got cat5 where I need it (I don't let the kids use wireless, so that they have to be in public areas of the house to use the Internet) and I've been running the rig for about eight years, I guess.
Total cost of the system between $300 and $700, mostly for the SCSI card and a fancy cable. But lots and lots of hours dumpster-diving to get the bits, I have to admit. And I already had linux OS experience before I started, and I'm reasonably competent with metalworking.
I hear the linksys NSLU2 is a bit slow but cheap and easy to set up and use.
I think your points are all correct; however when I was lamenting its lack of a DVI port, I meant as an input, not an output. Many HD sources have either a DVI port, or an HDMI port that can be converted to DVI (it's not using HDCP, in other words), so it would make a logical input on a device made to record HD content. The other logical digital input would be FireWire, since many HD STB's have a compressed output on that. Between those two inputs you would probably have all digital TV source devices covered, either compressed or uncompressed.
You're completely correct that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put a DVI output on a device that records from an S-Video (meaning 480i) input, and which probably only has the capability of playing back SD content. (Actually, if it doesn't need the HD capability, it's better that it not use a DVI output, since most HD sets only have one DVI input, meaning that if you wanted to use the monitor with anything else, you'd need a switchbox: and DVI switches cost a heck of a lot more than composite, S-Video, or even analog-component ones do.) I should have been more clear that I was talking inputs and not outputs.
Anyway, like I said in the other comment, I hope that this is successful enough that they'll go on to produce more-advanced models for recording digital television. My impatience for that capability is driven more by the gut fear that we won't be able to hold off the broadcast lobby and Broadcast Legislation for many more years, and I think it could really shape the debate if there were significant numbers of non-flag-compliant DTV recorders in American homes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
losing your touch, hitroll
The best you can do?