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Nero Unveils LiquidTV, TiVo For Your Computer
bigwophh writes to mention HotHardware is reporting that Nero has decided to try a new step forward for home theater PCs by bringing the TiVo service to your computer. The new LiquidTV / TiVo PC package includes a (USB-based) high definition ATSC digital/analog TV tuner, antenna, remote control, IR blaster, Nero's LiquidTV software, and a 12-month subscription to the TiVo service for around $200. You can cut that in half if you already have a compatible TV tuner. This is the first time that TiVo has licensed their intuitive interface for a PC package. In addition to the TiVo interface, the rest of the LiquidTV software package allows you to burn your TV recordings to DVD or transfer the videos to other computers, iPods, PSP, or "other mobile devices." This service is due to launch next month.
Why not buy it instead of make it yourself http://www.mythtv.org/> instead of buying it.
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
I know what I am going to buy myself for Christmas this year.
Make a European version! I'm tired of EyeTV's lack of intelligence.
I would expect that those of us who like to use our computers for video would already have these capabilities without spending $200/yr on a subscription. I know I do.
Caveat Utilitor
Does it come with Aeon Flux?
Great - exactly what I've been looking for MythTV- except you have to pay for it.
Nero is notorious for installing processes you don't want that run all the time. I bought the DVD writer program (the commercial product, not the free version) and, even though I turned off everything else, it installed an "indexing service" and a "backup service", which started up at boot time. I wouldn't trust a product from them. You don't know that it's doing.
(By the way, what's a reliable Windows non-Vista product for writing DVDs of both data and video formats. I don't need "ripping", but want to transcode some of my old animation .avi files to DVD.)
I have a TivoHD and Series 2, which both work great. What's the advantage in running it on your own PC? Only thing I could think of is the Tivo software should be faster on a decent PC.
But if I was going to go the PC route I would install something like MythTV that would give me complete flexibility. Tivo still has to work with the networks to ensure shows are handled the way the networs want.
I bought a Hauppauge card, Snapstream's beyond TV, and a Firefly RF remote. I see they are running this for about $180 on Snapstream's site. I've been using a cheaper board for several months now and think it's great.
No subscription charges, files are stored so anyone can view them or burn to DVD. It also includes compression and advertisement skipping, an hour of TV is about around 500 to 900MB. They also offer a $30 add-on so you can view from another computer on the network. I share the hard drive instead, but then the advertisement skipping feature can't be used, just standard fast forward.
Snapstream isn't the most intuitive program out there, but you don't have to pay the monthly subscription charge for access to free information once the first 12 month subscription runs out.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
For most people, this is a reasonable solution (alongside other reasonable solutions such as getting the DVR that comes from the cable/telephone company, getting a Windows Media Center box, etc). I would venture to say that a MythTV box takes a couple hours for the average user to set up (barring issues with incompatible hardware/software, which'll undoubtedly add more time). Let's say it takes 4 hours to build a reasonable MythTV box, install and configure it. $200 for this thing. $200/4 hours = $50/hour. For me personally, my time is worth way more per hour than that -- it makes more sense to go the prepackaged route.
I'm not saying it's for everything, but the fact of the matter is most people don't want to mess with their TVs. The same way they don't want to mess with their cars, microwaves, blenders and -- yes -- computers. Most people just want to watch the damn TV.
for sure is not as intuitive or legal as an appleTV
The MPAA will go into severe overdrive.
They won't know whether to poop or go blind,
so they'll end up covering one eye and farting.
--
Oh well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
TiVo interface is over kill for OTA only maybe if this for a cable card based system but the cable had things setup there that likely will not happen any time soon.
From the cnet article: The software is said to support up to four TV tuners.
This is great. Now if only Nero wasn't horrible software.
Personally I use Beyond TV and I like it. It came with a free UHF remote and it all works great on 64-bit Vista.
Try DVDFlick (OSS) or ConvertXtoDVD 3 (VSO Software, makers of the Patin-Couffin engine).
ConvertXtoDVD 3 has one very useful feature in particular: there's an option to "copy original to DVD if possible", which attempts to transcode with slightly lower quality and leave enough free space to copy the original file to the DVD as well (in an \ORIGINAL folder). This can be very handy if you ever have illusions of trying to re-do the transcoding later but still don't want the video file cluttering up a hard drive, and you have a DVD that is at least playable in the meantime.
I would love this kind of solution if IR blasters were 100% reliable. But they occasionally fail to change channels properly, resulting in missed shows. One year, I missed an important playoff game and that was the last time I used an IR blaster setup -- I changed TV providers to one that used integrated TiVo receivers.
Currently hooked on AMP
Nero also phones home every time you launch it.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I don't get this deal. A brand new TivoHD costs about $200 as well (okay, $300 retail, but you can find it for less. woot.com had them for $180 at one point).
And that's a dual tuner box, 180 hours (30 HD hours), fast, easy, no maintenance, works over the internet, gets all of Tivo's features, everything. It does digital cable perfectly with a CableCard from the cable company (and all cable companies offer them now). It just works.
So... what the heck is the point of this package, exactly? It's as expensive as the TivoHD box is, it does less than the box does, it makes you provide your own computer, and MythTV is probably better than it anyway.
Has Nero finally gone completely insane?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the article:
Even XP's Media Center supported QAM and it came "free" on most computers sold. And the Vista Media Center TV pack makes Media Center about perfect. And best of all you don't have to pay a monthly fee as you do with Tivo. (As of yet, it's probably only a matter of time before M$ starts charging!)
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
For people that might be considering this, because they have no other way to capture QAM encoded video, wait a couple months. The Hauppauge HD PVR records component video as x264, and MythTV is working on support for it. That'll be your analog hole to the bs surrounding QAM and HDCP, so don't settle for this proprietary afterthought.
You're already repellent.
Wow, sounds good IF they make it bug free. Of course, that's not likely. This smells like pending bugware to me.
All the corporate overlord-ship and patent trolling of Tivo with all the reliability and efficiency of a Windows desktop! Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
I think the HDHomeRun does this, and over ethernet too. Also, you can hit the thing from whichever platform has network-based MPEG decoding, if I am not mistaken -- and two tuners too. MythTV friggin' rocks.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I can recommend Miro for Internet TV (I disable the auto-download though). Thanks to TED Talks, Google TechTalks, NASA, Linux.com, and others, there's a lot of interesting content to watch.
MythTV? Pain in the arse. And I'm a Linux sysadmin.
GBPVR - download one program, install. Run the config. Done.
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
Do all the Limeys have to pay telly tax AND TiVo tax?
Everybody that is asking "why would tivo do this?" is looking at this from the wrong perspective. It's not Tivo that is doing this, but Nero. Look at it this way and it makes much more sense:
Nero had this idea to make their DVR software into a standalone product, but it's already somewhat crowded with pay and free solutions (as everybody has already pointed out SageTV, BeyondTV, Windows MCE, MythTV, GBPVR, etc.) so how can they differentiate their product? Latch onto the most recognized PVR solution, Tivo! Since many have pointed out that this product doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense strategically for Tivo, but that also means that it doesn't hurt them to license their user interface and guide service to Nero for use in a PC DVR product. They get some subscription revenue and maybe some customers for their hardware products if people get annoyed with the maintenance required on a PC. They are already running the servers anyway so a few more data users wouldn't hurt. Nero gets to promote this a Tivo for PC, remove the responsibility of running high-uptime servers for guide data, web scheduling, etc. Clearly this strategy has worked because they are getting a lot of publicity that they wouldn't have gotten for just another PC DVR product.
What remains to be seen is how deep the Tivo software goes. Did Nero just restyle their menus with Tivo's lame left-right hierarchical menus or did they actually port the entire code base so that multiple season-pass recordings will prioritize the same way, cut off show overlaps the same, etc. I'm guessing the former, surface level only. For example, nothing is mentioned about interoperability with Tivo hardware like streaming between units.
I also wonder if they took the lamest parts of the Tivo software and interface, for example:
- crazy annoying menus that won't even let you wrap around from the top to the bottom and vice versa
- forcing everything into this hierarchy that forces way too many keystrokes to get to other places in the menu structure, or even to just delete a show.
- pause buffer limited to 30 minutes
- no scheduled recording markers in the program guide
- no ability to look into the recent past of the program guide (was there a new episode of Fringe tonight? dunno, you can't go back an hour or two in the guide to see if there was)
- must copy the show from unit to unit rather than streaming it (actually, since Nero's sw makes no mention of interoperability from pc to pc or pc to standalone unit, this won't be an issue)
GBPVR does a good and basic job but there's no way I'm going to expose a Windows XP service to the Internet unless I really have to.
MythTV is a pain to configure but if you're a Linux sysadmin (like me) then you should be well versed in reading manuals and web pages to get the information you need - plus MythTV configuration has got a lot more automated recently and most people find Mythbuntu does a good job as well.
I'm building a MythTV box currently based on Gentoo (my preferred distro) but I'm also building in a lot of additional features with scripts to get over the fact that, being in the UK and a BBC viewer, I can't get to BBC programs when I'm out of the country. So to program MythTV via its web server and have it dump recordings to a storage location on the Internet somewhere overnight, instead of trying to directly upload or stream from my MythTV box to wherever I am via a slow ADSL uplink, is the kind of stuff that I'm looking at.
Yes, there's ways of doing this in Windows also, I guess, but a good shell or Perl script in Linux can usually get most things done.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I don't disagree. I ran MythTV 0.17 for a rock-solid 1.5 years before switching to GBPVR. And I am sometimes frustrated by what GBPVR does *not* offer.
At the moment, the MythTV dealbreaker is that the GBPVR community released a Netflix Watch Now plugin, a highly ironic indictment of DRM's influence on this Linux advocate's PVR choices. (The spouse really digs this feature.)
MythMusic was also a dealbreaker for me - what a complete and total PITA to use! Surely there's been improvements to this awful interface over the last 2 years. GBPVR does this much better.
I might go back to MythTV if someone can crack Netflix's DRM...
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
I don't know the proper place to respond to your .sigline, so I'll just do it here and hope someone notices. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM LANDMARK.
http://skepdic.com/landmark.html
These people will not leave me alone since I made the mistake of accidentally acting interested in their bullshit.
Essentially, if anyone asks you to pay money and sign a non disclosure agreement, agree to full day classes (forcing you to skip work) and out-of-class "mentoring" (creepy people telling you what to do, subtly cutting off ties with friends and family), be wary. If you do go through with the first class and they try a hard sell for another, stop. Think. Wait. If the classes are worth it, you can afford the extra $100-$1000 they say it will cost to sign up later (if they say it's now or never, run for the nearest exit). It's a used-car salesman tactic, and should bring up alarm bells. These "classes" fall under more names than Landmark. I had a friend go $3,000 into debt to be allowed to "volunteer" (be a slave) for one of these scams.