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. "

Comments

TiVo is a Linux box

[Bryan Ischo]

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.

Why tv channles don't like it.

[dayeight]

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?

Linux entrepreneurs - take this one and run!

[timothy]

Hello all:

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 ... 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?

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