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Digital VCRs end Tape Tyranny
Rick writes
"Several companies now market digital VCR-like devices
ReplayTV and TiVo).
Articles on such were featured in this weeks
Newsweek
and the
Wall Street Journal.
These offer 10-14 hours of archivial TV,
computer recording setup,
random access playback, and easy commercial skipping.
These free you from fumbling with tapes or arranging your evening
around a TV schedule. A bit pricey now- $699/$499-
but as with all new technology, should decline. "
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I guess we have to wait for the next generation of cheap huge drives to come out. Of course, now with non-PC consumer devices to use them, the pressure will be on to provide for it, and perhaps the next generation will be out in six months (as opposed to the usual 12). OK, I guess I'm still excited, but I certainly won't be first on the gadget bus for this particular product.
Wow, that ReplayTV box has a jack for a phone line so the box can interface with their network.. I wonder what kinds of viewing-habit tidbits are getting sent back to them.
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
Read an article about this in some 'zine. There will be a thirty second skip button, and with 99.9% of all comercials being 30 seconds... well, the articles example was that if you have your vcr start "taping" ER, and you start watching it 17 minutes into it, you will be able to skip all the comercials and finish watching it within a minute of people who sat down for the whole hour. Still cool, but I'd rather have a dvd-recorder. And a T1. Heck, I'd settle for a voodoo2 so I can play quake. And as a side note, for those who can't play quake, check out interactive fiction, and the fifth year contest, at www.textfire.com
You are absolutely correct. The more I use the net, the less I can tolerate commercial, of any form. Every ad looks like spam to me. It's to the stage that I simply can't watch live show anymore because I can't even watch 240 seconds of ads. Besides, I have dejanews, I don't need TV to tell me what should I buy.
CY
My friend works at TivO, I got a demo of it at a New Year's Eve party last year (Dec 31 '98), it was super cool.
And it's a Linux box. No kidding. I hope I am not giving away trade secrets or anything but it is essentially a Linux box (PPC architecture, I believe) with a big honking SCSI drive for storing the feed and proprietary video encoding and decoding libraries. Plus UI, scheduling, etc etc.
My friend worked on the filesystem (it uses a custom filesystem that is compressed and formatted in such a way to make streaming digital video feeds very fast); they chose Linux partly because the available source made hacking your own filesystem possible. And no, there are no GPL violations because the filesystem is a self-contained kernel module.
Or are DVD standards still not pinned down so it's easier to do something totally diffrent.
So these new uses for hd's need lots of space cheep and don't really care for acces times. How about making very large(physically) discs. Since the amount of data on the drive is proportional to the square of the radius a 10" disc could hold more than eight times the amount of a 3.5" one, at the same data density. Correct me if I'm wrong but the mechanics of the drive is the expensive part right? So once new fabrication facilitys have been built, the price for a 10" drive wouldn't be much higher than for a 3.5" but it could hold 8 times more!
Quantum used to make a line of 5.25" drives a couple of years ago, when all other hd makers made 3.5" ones. They could hold more data at a comparable price than the 3.5 drives but had slower access times because the heads had to be moved longer. But with these new applications access time isn't that important. So how about it, 60 gig drives for 200$. Such drives could hold about 100 uncompressed CD's or a 1000 hours of mp3! And with gmr heads you could probably start having your entire video collection on hd's.
I see a future where every house or apartment have a central storage box connected to output terminals like TV's, Speakers and computers through a LAN. No more need for CD's, DVD's or video cassets.
Torbjörn
Can you say "Mega-marketable Linux niche?" One of these days, an OEM will get off its butt and start shipping Linux-based information appliances for a few hundred bucks. If I had a few hundred spare bucks, I'd be building one for myself right now. Why buy a separate receiver, TV, DVD player, MP3 player, and VCR when you could have them all in one nifty little box for so much less money?
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Two words: random access
Two more words: no rewinding
No more cleaning heads that get clogged with magnetic scum or a broken head, no more broken and jammed tapes, complicated loading mechanisms, no worry about magnets...
Life will be good.
how long till the tv industry lashes out against
this stuff, having taken a cue from riaa?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I asked the Reply guys about the firewire port and if they would let us access it to pull stuff off. They said that all the hardware was there, but there was nothing in the software to use it yet. ie you'd have to download new software to use it. They're planning on using it for an add on drive to give you more space.
Looking at the specs I'd say Reply over Tivo, even with the cost. The real question is, can you find an MPEG2 encoder for cheaper. They thought the Matrix on the net was a problem, wait till people are swaping episodes of the X-files and Seinfield. Somebody's going to prevent them from letting that export option out. Someone's going to have to leak/hack the update software.
Read an article about this in some 'zine. There will be a thirty second skip button, and with 99.9% of all comercials being 30 seconds... well, the articles example was that if you have your vcr start "taping" ER, and you start watching it 17 minutes into it, you will be able to skip all the comercials and finish watching it within a minute of people who sat down for the whole hour. Still cool, but I'd rather have a dvd-recorder. And a T1. Heck, I'd settle for a voodoo2 so I can play quake. And as a side note, for those who can't play quake, check out interactive fiction, and the fifth year contest, at www.textfire.com
Remember infocom?
when Push Comes to Shove
The ATI all-in-wonder 128 has a digital vcr feature. After Linux drivers are available, then that would probably be the best way to go.
But you can't get the priace down much, unless you already have some of the hardware. The video card costs $200, plus a Celeron, motherboard, case, memory and big hard drive.
The costs would easily push you up to the $500-$700 range, and you still wouldn't have the convience of a set-top box. No remote control, etc.
Maybe if you combined it with an mp3 player, it would be cost effective enough, but from what I've heard the all-in-wonder takes over the machine while you are using it.
Mike
This new web site ( www.tele-portal.com) has got lots of news and reviews of ReplayTV, TiVo and other digital devices that will help users control when they watch their programs. It's pretty comprehensive.
http://www.replaytv.com/aboutreplaytv.ht ml
Plus both pass macrovision along; they don't create it themselves. So they're not adding to copy protection; just maintaining the status quo. (No judgments here about whether the status quo is bad or good.)
I went through both of their web sites because
I thought this product was an incredible idea.
After reading through both web sites I'll be
going with Replay. Why? I'm not crazy about the
TiVO box being connected to a phone line and
TiVO collecting information on my watching habits.
More disturbing is the last answer in their FAQ
where TiVO will work with "some of the nation's largest advertisers" (presumably with the
information they've gathered) "to better target ads so that you are exposed to advertising that is more relevant to you".
Digital VCR sounds interesting, but people do collect episodes of their favourite programmes on large numbers of Video Cassettes. There might be some consumer resistance if they realise they're limited to a cache of 24/48 hours worth of recorded programmes.
;)
:)
Some form of removable "backup" media would be interesting to allow folks to build up their own digital video collections. Tivo + dvdram backup unit?
If you follow negroponte's ideas of the digital future, backups probably wouldn't need to be done on site and we'd have full media on demand. But hey, we're a long way off from having a T1 in everyones house so, for the short term at least, home backup of favourite programs would be useful.
Of course, there are copyright issues involved in keeping collections of recorded TV shows. Perhaps the unit's modem could be used to implement some kind of fair priced pay per re-view instead of counting the average amount of time people stay tuned to the playboy/girl channel... Oops
-ad
Hello all:
... the more things are genericized into bits, the less the price of the format per se matters ... prices on hard drive storage fall nicely, but how much have video cassette prices changed in the last year?
I'm not the only one of course, but a big memory buffer to allow replays, commerical skipping, etc has been on my 'why don't they have' list for at least 5 years
Now, the question is: What hardware / software requirments would there have to be for this to work under Linux / other Free OS?
Here are the ones I see. Please correct my non-techy but sincere self!
Hardware:
- Big, fast hard drive (a given), probably one dedicated to this task
- Video card with appropriate ins (as many formats as possible) and lots of memory
- Firewire input
Software:
MPEG (some other acceptable) compression to turn incoming video into files on the hard drive
MPEG (or whatever) playback to replay said files.
Management software that lets you select time and date to record, or what to playback, or what to edit etc, with a nice graphical interface.
Again, please let me know if what I'm saying is obviously silly (it's happened before), but:
For the cost of the video systems described (around $700), wouldn't it be possible to outfit a PC with the above hardware and software?
Or better, couldn't some smart Linux entrepreneur package appropriate software and hardware (matching what's in those ready-made boxes) for people to install on their linux boxes?
Does Linux have no MPEG compressors right now, or are they not fast enough for this task? (head spins, confused.)
I would pay happily for a dedicated hard drive, CD-ROM full of appropriate software and maybe some games or something, too, and a new video card that was appropriate to the task, if it would let me watch Ally McBeal at my leisure and without interruptions.
If you have the know how to do what I'm saying, your market is out there.
Timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
For recording, TiVo works much like a regular VCR if you disconnect the phone line. You tell it the time, channel, and quality, and it records a show. You will still have all the pause, frame-forward and back, fast-forward and back and slow motion features in live tv.
However, without dialing in, the box won't know what shows are coming on or when, so the shows won't be labeled and you won't have any information on them. And if the networks move the show, the box won't know.
I have heard of customers who plug the phone line in, get the data, and then un-plug for a while. The TiVo downloads 14 days in advance, so the occasional download works well for people with RVs and shortage of phonelines.
Hope this answers your question.
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVo Webmaster