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Sony DVR Useless After Rovi Stops TV Guide OnScreen
New submitter speedlaw writes "Rovi has just announced that they are stopping the TV Guide OnScreen service as of April 13th, 2013. This was announced via the service itself. This is an on-air listing service that provides listings over the air, as part of an OTA TV signal. Many devices, notably the Sony HDD 250 and 500 Digital Video Recorders, will no longer function without the clock-set data this stream provides. When other companies decide to stop supporting something, they don't make older systems useless. Worse, Sony never came out with another DVR in the U.S. market. Why do we have to rent them? How do we get Sony or Rovi to provide at least a software patch to set the clock so the DVR can at least retain 1980s VCR functionality? Sony admits there is no fix. A thread on AVS forums has a bunch of information on TV Guide OnScreen. The TV stations who broadcast the data have been ordered by Rovi to disconnect the data inserters and ship them back. I have a TiVo, and yes, I know all about HTPC, but this data stream was 'lifetime listings' like TiVo has 'lifetime listings' — now that Rovi is looking to cut service, my two DVR units are about to become useless."
Why don't the channels just broadcast the programme data alongside the actual programming? That's how they do it here, in the DVB-T streams. A full week's worth of programming and programme descriptions, transmitted over the air.
Hello...it's Sony. You should be surprised that it worked this long.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
This is why proprietary software is a bad thing and we should avoid products like this.
probably better off anyway, don't you know TV rots your brain?
There should be a mandate that if you want to be a dick and no longer choose to support the software of an obsolete product you sold to maintain core functionality, you should forfeit the source code. At the very least, make it legal to reverse engineer and distribute fixes/functionality without fear of retribution. This is going to become much more common in the future unless someone does something.
This is why you buy COTS hardware instead of embedded solutions, guys. You can always upgrade the software on your own if you have to, but if you can't get to the firmware, then there's no telling if there's some dependancy or requirement to an outside source that you've overlooked. People have been building their own PVRs for years now, and many open source solutions like XMBC have matured to the point where they offer multiple service providers on a wide variety of cheap hardware.
And here's another reason people pirate: I know that I'll always have my video files on my harddrive. They're in a video container format that's been industry standard for years. There are no commercials, no external dependancies, and will play on almost any computer. I can't get that with Netflix -- once, I was halfway through watching a series on 'instant play' when they yanked the entire series. It's no longer available because of some obscure licensing issue that I wasn't informed of until after it was gone. When you rely on "legal" solutions, you're conceding that they have the right and ability to terminate your access at any time. That's also why I don't watch cable TV: It's encrypted and I can't record it. I can't go back and watch it again, and it may never be available again. With pirated content, I know exactly when it'll be available once I have it: Forever.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Cant you just sue them?
Whenever you buy a hardware device that relies on online services to perform vital functions YOU must take into consideration what will happen when those services dissapear. It's childish to assume a company will just provide this kind of services to old customers from whom it collects no payments anymore or towards whom it made no written promises.
its the lifetime of the product
So a lifetime warranty means it's warranted until it breaks down?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Can't dvrs be progrmmed manually, like video cassette recorder owners used to do? Sure, the convienence is gone, but recordings can still be made, can't they?. Buying "Lifetime service" does you no good when companies seem to be able to change it's service at any time. Sometimes, companies lie, and misrepresent their products to get us to buy them. Color me shocked!
Why don't the channels just broadcast the programme data alongside the actual programming?
Well, that's a legitimate question. You could also ask why the hardware doesn't support alternative operating systems. Either way, you're asking either one (or several) large television network(s) to suddenly make a change to the way things are broadcast, or you're asking a large (multinational) company to provide open access to their closed system.
I hope the programming community comes up with an alternative - or modified - firmware. Unfortunately, unlike the android/xda/cyanogenmod community, DVR software isn't easily available, accessible or standardized across players. Maybe it is as simple as making a DVD drive region free - but even then, does the average consumer have access to the (relatively cheap) tools to flip a few 0s and 1s and "update" the hardware? And the likelyhood of it being that simple is pretty low...
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Is this meant to be another bash SONY because they are "evil" "article"?
Before you head down that line, note that:
- Rovi (corporation) used to be called Macrovision.
- This is for a (free?) Over The Air service.
- No link to the Rovi announcement or their reasoning.
- Affects any device and service relying on Rovi and their data.
It seems to me this is just another move to get people onto cable where media companies can exert more control over content (and the people watching) and rake in more money.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Hello...it's Sony. You should be surprised that it worked this long.
Sometimes it's a good thing when Sony products die. It means they stop spying on you.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Under the terms of the lifetime service agreement all TiVo Guide OnScreen users must now report for termination.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
From what I read, Sony decided to save pennies by not having a rtc, and relying on the ota signals. So no ota clock signals, no clock, no work.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
So a lifetime warranty means it's warranted until it breaks down?
Pretty much, yes.
"Lifetime product warranties" typically cover the 'reasonably expected' lifetime of the product the product in question, not your lifetime.
If anything, 'lifetime warranty' can be a much worse deal than a predefined number of years, since it's so vague. It's often used in sales since it sounds like a great deal to the uninformed buyer, but in reality it's pretty much the ultimate weasel-word.
no, it means its warrantied until they stop making it, and its impossible for them to replace it.
most consumer electronics companies are required to keep parts 3 years.
When I had to deal with it, we had a few irate calls a month cause someone bought a digital piano in 1989 and could not get replacement parts in 2009 when it shat on itself.
Dude, Sony discontinued this product 7 years ago. I'm sure you've gotten your money's worth out of it.
Think about it this way: If it died of hardware failure instead, would you be so upset? Likely not.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
When I had to deal with it, we had a few irate calls a month cause someone bought a digital piano in 1989 and could not get replacement parts in 2009 when it shat on itself.
If it had a lifetime warranty, they were justified in being irate. That's a misleading term if you don't mean it to be for the life of the company or company's name (whichever is longer) which is what it should mean legally.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I bought a Sony DVR/DVD player about four years ago. It booted up with a choice of EPGs - a plain one, and one with additional functionality and adverts. Yes, half the screen was occupied by ads. After getting annoyed with that after about two microseconds I switched to the plain one.
After a couple of years it started misbehaving, as these things do, telling me that the only thing on TV was 'No Channel Information'. So I thought I'd switch back and see how bad the ad-ridden one was. So I found the setting deep in the unexplored regions of the menu system and flipped.
Same old ad-ridden screen, except this time the ads were blank placeholders. I reckon nobody wanted to advertise there, since nobody was using the annoying EPG...
I did an upgrade from a new OS via a DVD from the Sony web site and it fixed most of the EPG blankness, but the thing has been pretty flakey from day one. I think the initial flakeyness is controlled to be just enough that you don't know if its your own fault for not reading the instructions or if it is genuine faults. Products are always released when the cost in fixing the bugs is more than the cost of handling support calls, right?
Anyway, no more Sony for me.
ps Santa Clause is not real either, please get a clue
What?! Don't believe in Santa, huh? I know someone who's getting a lump of coal in their Xmas stocking this year! (Which nowadays with the price of eting your home is a pretty good gift!)
It's a legal term. The Santa Clause permits Santa Claus to legally enter people's houses uninvited.
Google tells me it was also a Tim Allen film.
Your ad here.
Rovi uses patents to make money of stuff like DVRs, EPGs and copy protection. I guess they could be called a 'patent troll'. More DVRs sold equals more money for Rovi.
Rovi was born as Macrovision, the VCR copy protect signal. That was compulsory on video cards. So if you have a computer with composite of S-VHS out you probably paid Rovi half a dollar for that.
Legally, abny vague term such as 'lifetime' is SUPPOSED to be interpreted in favor of the consumer. If the company means "until we say it's not" or 'three years', they better say that.
Of course, the courts have been corporate friendly for a long time.
I have a couple VCRs from the '90s that still work fine, why shouldn't a DVR last at LEAST 10 years (possably w/ a HD replacement)? Apparently Sony=expensive junk.
Considering that a firmware upgrade would at least allow the things to retain useful functionality, it seems like Sony really does owe it to their customers.
We don't have that option here any more. And our local paper is now more of a leaflet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Everyone could always use another paperweight.
Why do you so readily accept electronic end of life as being normal?
My SEGA Mastersystem still works.
My SNES still works (and you can still buy controllers for them too).
My sound system is much older than 10 years.
I still have a working CRT TV, and a working VCR.
Incidentally my grandma has several working pieces of electronic equipment from World War 2.
Why are you so quick to accept that electronics need an end of life, and especially one so short? This is not the death of the medium which the DVR uses like say the move from analogue to digital TV was. This is a piece of gear with a really poor design flaw that for some reason depended on a proprietary 3rd party signal to work. Why would you accept that this 3rd party should decide when you can no longer use your electronics?
Complete bullshit. Just because you expect to have to buy something new every few years does not mean that I do. I do not see 8 years as very old. I understand that manufacturers want you to buy something new to maintain their income stream - but I don't feel obliged to contribute.
Clearly, the term "lifetime" should be abandoned. As you say, it's too vague to be of use, and frankly, I ignore that, it's not a selling point for that reason. Along similar lines, in practice, I generally find that a lifetime warranty to be of less value than a warranty of specifically defined duration.
Under no circumstances is it realistic to assign a lifetime warranty of an electronic device to the life of the owner. It's clearly a hyperbolic stretch, but I'd almost be concerned that it would give a perverse incentive to rig the device to kill the owner in the case of failure.
The data is available, and broadcast, alongside ATSC signals via the PSIP system. But this particular box chose to use the proprietary system instead; I believe it provided data much farther out than the PSIP data.
You used a cheap Chinese tablet? No wonder you didn't get your spelling right! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
About ten minutes ago: QI.
Yet another reason on a very long list of reasons to not buy Sony products.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
You bought Sony. Even if you are new here you would done a search for "Sony" before investing in any of their products. They are really, really bad news for anyone favoring openness.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You are confusing capitalism with the novel "Brave New World".
There's simply no good reason to be wasteful. It's economically ineffcient and negatively impacts the environment as well as one's ability to be self-sufficient and plan ahead.
In any market that resembles the ideal models of capitalism, Sony should have been run out of town on a rail.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But I don't watch much of TV. All I record is Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, and interesting marahtons on Discovery or History. Pretty soon I am going to ditch the whole damned cable tv and switch purely to net and streaming.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I understand that the OP already purchased the devices, but it seems to me the simpler and more reliable solution is to simply rent the devices where possible from your cable or satellite provider. When the device goes bad, they swap it out for a new one. If they decide to stop supporting a device, you don't pay for it any longer. No headaches and at around $10 - $15 per month per DVR it seems to be the better option.
There's simply no good reason to be wasteful. It's economically ineffcient and negatively impacts the environment as well as one's ability to be self-sufficient and plan ahead.
Yes, but that 6 month old cell phone isn't as shiny. Never underestimate the power of marketing on the weak-minded. It doesn't have #INSERT_FEATURE_01, therefore it's pure crap and needs to be replaced. It doesn't matter that you would never use that feature, or that it has 6 other features that do the same thing, it doesn't have that one feature, and you need that one feature, so you need to spend money to replace it.
That, unfortunately, is the ideal model of capitalism: it's not about making a good product, it's about making money. If you can make a better margin selling a shitty product, then that's what you will do. Sony is just doing what everybody else is doing. A handful of consumers will luck out and make smart buys, but most won't, or won't realize they've made a smart buy and replace a good piece of kit with something that's worse. *Some* brands will maintain their integrity, and their sub-1% market share, but most consumers simply don't know enough about what they're buying to care.
In the realm of AV equipment, Sony hasn't made a good product in 20 years. Possibly longer. But when people are convinced that a $1500 home theatre is "high end", because that's the most expensive they see at Best Buy, there's no point in explaining that a *real* high end system will cost more than a luxury car.
Under no circumstances is it realistic to assign a lifetime warranty of an electronic device to the life of the owner.
Why not? There's no reason electronics can't be made to last, they just aren't.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I had one of those HDD500 DVRs for recording HD OTA for quite some time and finally sold it (for almost as much as I paid for it) about 4-5 years ago after building my MythTV system.
While it generally was a pretty good recorder, and pretty much the only retail unit of it's kind, I grew to HATE that TV Guide OnScreen. That TV Guide system had essentially it's own firmware within the recorders firmware that was self updating...that is it would automatically update itself totally beyond your control from the OTA signal...and this didn't always go well. When the guide didn't work, the unit was essentially a paper weight for the very reason described in TFA...the assholes decided to give you NO way at all to manually set the fucking clock....a feature available in every fucking VCR made since the 80s, in a unit that retailed for over $1000...seriously??
Good riddance...gotta love MythTV and Schedules Direct!!
... obsolescence....... at the flick of a switch in the hands of another..... Guess you'll just have to buy the next generation of built in obsolescence.
Yeah, for Capitalism at its extreme....
The solution is to never buy a Sony product. I stopped buying Sony products after the rootkit fiasco and my live has been better ever since :)
Why do we have to rent them?
Not sure about other jurisdictions, but here in British Columbia you can most certainly buy a PVR - Here's the IP TV PVR that sits in my entertainment centre:
http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/telus-telus-optik-tv-500gb-hd-pvr-receiver-cis430-500-available-in-bc-ab-only-cis430-500/10193848.aspx
The Chicago Tribune dropped the Sunday paper TV guide. You can now buy is separately.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
So has anyone looked into the potential of reverse engineering the service/protocol and then using any of the standard man-in-the-middle attacks to direct the box to a replacement feed?
The people who actually run the company (president, CEO, CFO, etc.) are required to act in the best interests of the owners.
Please provide a citation for this. I keep hearing this over and over. How are they "required"? Is there a law that says they must act this way or is is simply how the stockholders expect the C*Os to behave?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
no it didnt, but it illustrates the point, where the fuck are you going to get electronics that ceased to be in production 20 + years ago?
wow, what fantasy land do you live in?
It's not a obscure law sitting somewhere... it's *the* law for corporations in the USA. Please Google a bit and find the requirements to incorporate and run a corporation. And yes... that law is inadequate according to game theory: the best strategy would be that corporations act in the best interest of their stock holders *and* their community/country/planet. Otherwise, there are scenarios were everybody lose. E.g., sending all the manufacturing and operations to another country: when most of the corporations do that, surprise! Nobody has a job, so nobody can buy the stuff the corporations made abroad!
no it didnt
No it didnt[sic] what?
where the fuck are you going to get electronics that ceased to be in production 20 + years ago?
IMO the legal standard should be that if you stop providing repairs, you have to provide blueprints and specifications. You clearly no longer have a commercial interest, so you should make it possible for the customer to seek repairs for the product. Mind you, I believe this only in the case of a "lifetime warranty" which implies to the customer that they will receive service for their entire life. That's what it means when I buy a Craftsman or Snap-On or Mac or Matco or many other brands of hand tool. If I find both halves of a Craftsman ratchet that broke in 1973 and bring it in to my local Sears store, they will replace it.
The simple answer is, don't offer a lifetime warranty if you can't honor it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
no it didnt
No it didnt[sic] what?
really? are you really incapable of tying my post to your post without acting like a third party who just walked in?
My LG TV has a built in DVR that uses this service. It now displays the message from ROVI saying the service is going away. What can I do? The TV is less than 10 years old.
My condolences on the demise of your LG. Make an aquarium out of it. And I only wish I was joking.
The one where I have a basement full of 30 year old electronics in working order.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The simple answer is, don't offer a lifetime warranty if you can't honor it.
But if the current CEO or product manager or marking manager or whoever doesn't plan on being in the company more than 5 years, what's their incentive? "I can offer a life time warranty because I won't be around to honor it"
This was 8 years ago. Sony wasn't as bad as they are now. They had a good track record in the 80's and 90's. The rootkit fiasco wasn't until 2005 The PS3 wasn't released yet.
These poor people bought their DVR's in 2004, before the rootkit fiasco.
I heard these DVR's ran Linux. Can't someone just sue for GPL infringement and get the source code that way?
are you really incapable of tying my post to your post without acting like a third party who just walked in?
No, I'm just not willing to waste that much time trying to figure out what someone so incoherent is on about. Why don't you use the quote feature so that I don't have to try to do conversational forensics to figure out what you're trying to say?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
if the current CEO or product manager or marking manager or whoever doesn't plan on being in the company more than 5 years, what's their incentive?
As usual, I gotta say, "there oughta be a law". Not a whole law, though. It should have been part of warranty law long since.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is there any danger of this happening with MythTV? If Schedules Direct shut down, or if their provider (I believe it's Zap2It) ended the service, what would MythTV users do?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
sorry you are so incompetent to read one post above, and since you cant be bothered to keep up with this conversation, I think we are done
good day
Investigating compromising emanations such as from keyboards, mice, screens, etc. most certainly is a hacking technique, just as calling and pretending to be the telephone repairman who needs the numbers printed on the bottom of the router is a hacking technique.
Imagine the old Mercedes-Benz. Then it turns into the "new Chrysler". That is how I feel.
If the listing service was truly marketed by Sony as lifetime, then there is a solution that can be described in three simple words- Class Action Lawsuit. Why not? Everyone else does it, and it's not like owners of these devices have anything to lose by giving this approach a try. And there is certainly no shortage of lawyers willing to go after big corporations for their share of the 'take'
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
There's a timecode embedded in the broadcast from PBS, why not just get that?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Go Google "fiduciary responsibility"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'm not even trying to be a ahole this time, but this is exactly what you get for buying Sony products. They are the most consumer unfriendly, greedy fucks on the planet. Other companys will screw you over sometimes as well, but Sony plans on it as a business practice.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So just use tivo or any of the other DVR systems that get guide data from an internet connection. It's not as if there were a shortage of such systems. Sux for the people who bought this device but other than that group, I don't see what the big deal is.
Comment removed based on user account deletion