Tivo Source Code Released

notsosilentbob writes " Philip's Tivo Linux changes are up on their website." I've been lusting over a tivo for quite some time now. Its super cool to see a big company make good on the GPL tho. Now I just got to buy one. (for those who don't know, the tivo is a digital VCR that runs linux and stores up to 30 hours of tv on an internal harddrive).

Comments

Nifty...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how long it is before people start
hacking/modifying their Tivo's...
"Is that your tivo?"
"Yeah...I added a couple of self modifications"
"Like what?"
"You can't get UPN anymore."
"About time!"

(Now, if there were enough good programs on TV
to make this buyable...)

Re:Nifty...

[whoop]

I've had my Tivo for three weeks now (approximately), and it is well worth the $500. Now I watch more programs that are to my liking, and not the crap out there. The Tivo Suggestions thing is wonderful. It gets a dumb program every now and then, but usually is on target. Just mark those with a thumbs down and go on. That's just one feature, there's a whole lot more too.

Re:Nifty...

[Anonymous Coward]

Swell - now that Voyager's the only thing worth watching on TV, YOU'LL be stuck with "Must See TV" and MTV. BAH!

Re:Nifty...

[freeBill]

TiVo already has an anti-UPN hack. You pick the channels you want to exclude when you do the original setup and that can be modified at any time.

Re:Nifty...

[C.Lee]

>Swell - now that Voyager's the only thing worth watching on TV

My God. You must have no life at all.

Does this mean...

[Myddrin]

Does this mean I can buy a cheap ole 486 or 601(PPC) computer, patch my source code with their diffs and have a working TiVO? That would be cool! (Although I assume that they still have properitary(sp?) hardware.)

With or without getting a free(beer) TiVO it's cool that there is a free(speech) one!

Re:Does this mean...

[Zurk]

nope. TiVo uses a special quantum drive that can read and write at the same time as well as special ppc hardware. dont count on putting a 486 or anything else as a digital recording box without tivos add on hardware.

In the UK?

[zero-one]

Does anyone know if this will be avalible in the UK? It looks like a nice toy.

Re:In the UK?

[Gord]

It was featured on Tomorrows World (BBC 1) a while back, but that's the only info I have heard about it in the UK so far.

I remember when PDC(?)(Program Digital Control??) was first banded about for videos. It makes sure you video at the right time even if the schedules change.

There was some talk about this being used so you didn't have to record adverts (i.e. a signal at the start and end of the ad breaks) but no channel would annoy its advertisers by doing this.

I thing PDC is supported by C4, BBC2 and BBC1 in some areas, although it may have higher coverage now.

Re:In the UK?

[edwazere]

PDC = Program Delivery Control

Uptime

[arnoroefs2000]

If Slashdot has had 18 days uptime I'm Dilbert, I couldn't connect for hours up until 5 minutes ago...how does this uptime counter work anyway? I don't suppose someone manually updates it?

Re:Uptime

[Myddrin]

Just because you couldn't connect doesn't mean the server was down. httpd might have gone down and been unnoticed for a few hours or something, leaving you unable to connect, but the OS still being up.

OTHO, something funky did happen, because as another person pointed out it was readin' 30+ days not long ago (in the past few days), so it couldn't have gone down, come back up _and_ been up for 18days w/o a timewarp of some kind....

Let's do the timewarp AGAAAAAAAAAAAIN....
RobK

Re:Uptime

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was down for hours last night. I have co-loc boxes on digitalnation -- as well as checking trace -- and the boxes were up. However, the httpd daemon wasn't responding no matter which one of the three IP's I accessed (I tried home, work VPN, 2 proxies) and none of them responded upon trying to load slashdot. Therefore it was down.

Re:Uptime

[toolj23]

Here is what mine says.

date: 7:19pm
uptime: 74 days, 10:15, 0 users,
load average: 0.11, 0.08, 0.02
processes: 49
yesterday: 554461
today: 1 (this always says 1)
ever: 219713147

Linux Infrared Remote Control

[SEWilco]

Well, now someone with the TIVO remote control has to create a configuration file for the Linux Infrared Remote Control program.

Re:Linux Infrared Remote Control

[robwicks]

Well, now someone with the TIVO remote control has to create a configuration file for the Linux Infrared Remote Control program.

Hmm, I wonder could you hack an HP 48SX calculator with that. I still have one from my skool daze.

Digital commercial deletion?

[kramer]

Okay, I've never played with the Tivo, but I've been thinking about the one feature that would make this thing perfect. Digital commercial deletion. I'd love to be able to watch my favorite shows with VCR automatically skipping commercials.

I remember reading about a VCR that had this as a feature. It detected the commercials by the half second or so of blank screen that precedes the commercials. It kept track of these blanks, and those that were only a few minutes long were judged to be commercial breaks. These were auto fast forwared through by the VCR. I understand it worked pretty well except for the fact that it occasionally cut out the credits.

Now the random access of the Tivo offers the oportunity of instantly skipping the commercials instead of waiting for the fast forward. Even better, the TIVO could delete the commercials and save on disk space.

With the release of the code, I would think this would be a great open source project for someone to try. I might even consider buying a TIVO if someone got this feature working.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[kramer]

It kept track of these blanks, and those that were only a few minutes long were judged to be commercial breaks.

Err, that should have been "It kept track of the interval between these blanks, and those that were only a few minutes long were judged to be commercial breaks". Damn proofreading.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[schporto]

Yeah but like the saying goes: Build a better mouse trap and the world will build a better mouse. (offer null and void in Kansas)
The TV stations need you to see those commercials. That't their money. If a TV station can't promise that you'll see the commercials they'll loose revenue. The remote's already done a number on them. They'll start changing the blank times, change the blank screen color maybe even add a logo there. But I thought there was a signal that got passed down that was a cue to run the commercials. Not sure what it is though.
Or they'll just start slipping the commercials into the show. Kinda like Bond. Look Drew Carey is driving a Toyota. Oh and drinking Pepsi. The problem is this wouldn't work for documentaries. Therefore documentaries wouldn't be shown cuz they can't make money.
OK I'll stop now.
-cpd

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[SEWilco]

Certainly, the TV networks send programming signals to their affiliates. And TV stations also have various scheduling systems. But the TV stations are not required to broadcast those cues, and if a device which uses them becomes widely available they'll certainly stop broadcasting them.

Remember: it's free TV for you because the advertisers expect some of their commercials will be seen. If the advertisers know that a significant percent of the audience will never see the commercials, the advertisers will pay less and less money to make the shows will be available. There ain't no such thing as free TV.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Twinky]

A project to remove commercials from Video-recordings already exists. It has been a master thesis at the Fachhochschule Muenster in Germany. In issue 13/99 of the German Computermagazine c't they had an article about it.

The article came complete with instructions on how to build a device to control the VCR over infrared signals.

The software works by determining the logo that TV stations have to put on the screen. It is being switched off during the commercials, so you have a kind of indicator.

You can get the GPL'd sourcecode for Windows 95 and Linux from their webpage: http://www.ktet.Fh-Muenster.DE/ina/

Unfortunately, you have to know German.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Chacham]

OK, so let's have a VCR record the commercials. How many peple actually watch the commercials? Would it be safe to say that the overwhelming majority fast-forwards through the commercials? If that is the case, then what is the difference between fast forwarding and skipping them?

----------------

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[SlydeRule]

I remember reading about a VCR that had this as a feature. It detected the commercials by the half second or so of blank screen that precedes the commercials. It kept track of these blanks, and those that were only a few minutes long were judged to be commercial breaks. These were auto fast forwared through by the VCR.

I've got one, the Panasonic PVS-9670. It works pretty much like kramer says.

During recording, it makes an internal note each time it thinks it detects a DC restoration signal. When recording is done, and it's got some free time, it rewinds the tape and marks the beginning and end of each commercial break. It does appear to use time spans to distinguish commercials from program; the short bits are the commercials. This marking process is time-consuming; for a 1-hour program recorded at SP, it takes about 15 minutes before the VCR finally shuts down.

During playback, on encountering a "start commercial" marker, it goes into fast-forward to the next "end commercial" marker.

There are setup menu options to turn off the marking on record, and to turn off the auto-skip on playback.

The results are pretty good. I'd estimate it gets it right >80% of the time. It's most likely to mess up when there are a lot of commercials in a row, especially if your local station breaks in to run local spots. In that case, it tends to stop skipping early, leaving you watching the last couple of commercials.

I've never seen it skip anything which wasn't a commercial.

In any event, if it gets it wrong, the worst that happens is you have to grab the remote control and do it yourself, which is what you'd've had to have done anyway. No real loss.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[karnal]

well, crap, I pay for cable, and I still have to watch commercials.

Should be "There ain't no such thing as commercial free TV". Even the movie channels throw in commercials (granted, usually for their movies) between movies.....

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[mmontour]

Now that we're dealing with digital technology, it should be possible to create a signature of known commercials (i.e. you see a commercial, then press a button telling the unit to remember it and skip over that sequence in future). All you'd need is to store a few frames of each commercial in a database, then scan the video stream looking for matches. This could also be done in the background whenever the unit was not recording a program.

Advertisers wouldn't like this of course, so it would be hard for a manufacturer to sell a unit with this feature. However, the advertisers could still use 'Truman Show'-style product placements to replace their beloved commercials.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[whoop]

A much simpler approach, since stations will always find a way around these schemes, is just a 30sec skip button on the remote. That way you don't have to worry about the program accidently deleting 30 seconds from your show. They've got that 7 second rewind button which I never use, just replace it with this function. :)

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[LetterJ]

Wasn't there a story on /. about a company that was putting changing adverts in syndicated shows and sporting events. For example, I think they were digitally putting in a logo on a soccer field so it looked like it was painted on the field, but in the stadium it wasn't there. I think another example was that if Rachel was drinking a soda on Friends, it could be changed digitally to be a different brand every time the episode ran. They were claiming to be able to put advertising just about anywhere like changing the scenery outside of windows etc.

LetterJ

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[stripes]

How many peple actually watch the commercials? Would it be safe to say that the overwhelming majority fast-forwards through the commercials?

I have to admit, I watch maybe 25% of the comercials in a taped show. Sometimes I just plain forget I'm watching a tape and can skip. Sometimes the first comercial of the bunch looks intresting (like for a movie I havn't heard about, or a comercial that's actually entertaining). I'm kind of embarased to admit, but I have also been known to stop the FF and watch a comercial I find intresting.

I know I'm not the only one who does it. I've seen my wife do it too :-) Besides it's no less weird then people who watch the superbowl just to see the comercials.

The thing I wish I could skip (even in live TV, even at FF speed) was the comercial for a TV show I'm going to watch anyway, and all the ad will do is spoil the plot. I allways end up knowing more about the next episode of ER then I want too.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[SpinyNorman]

That's why the networks are scared shitless about TiVo and ReplayTV - they're losing control. If the guys at TiVo are smart, they'd start selling advertising themselves - they could guarantee that you're going to watch it (or at least that it will appear on the "channel" you're watching). What'd be a decent trade off would be if they added their own advertising, perhaps skipped network advertising when recording, and dropped the subscription fee.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[My_Favorite_Anonymou]

when I frist saw my vcr doing forword-rewind after midnight, I thought it was crunching seti@home number sent by the black helicopter. The "aftermach" marking is more of a "mark the beginning of the show 2 second ahead" so it can stop fast forward atperfect ninosecond. This feature is about worth every dollar they charge me. You have no idea how pain in the ass over fast forward is. I'd rather watch the commercial than miss the first 5 second of the show.


CY

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Wumpus]

How many peple actually watch the commercials? Would it be safe to say that the overwhelming
majority fast-forwards through the commercials?

I heard quotes of studies that show 90% of the viewers sit through the commercials. Informal studies I've done (sitting with friends, watching TV) suggest the same.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Cramer]

Your memory is correct; there are several VCRs with "commercial advance technology." It's patented, but I've never bothered to look it up.

My RCA VCR has this wonderful little feature. In four years or recording crapy, noisy and snowy broadcast TV, it's only gotten the commercial marking wrong a half dozen times. It's not simply looking for a "blank screen." It's watching for a lot of things... breaks in CC, changes in advisory data, changes in the VBI, as well as the commercial marker signals -- you'd be surprised how many stations "leak" those.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[jonathanclark]

I was thinking about a real-time version of this. Recall how "live" programs on TV and radio are cencored by using a 7 second delay? What if we did the same thing for commercials. Someone else watches your programs and sends live information on the internet ragarding when a commercial starts and ends. Most of the work could be done by looking for the blank screen.

When a commercial comes on, your TV automatically mutes or switches to another channel.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[mindstrm]

Yes. It's been done before, and there are several ways to do it.
One is commercial blanks. Another is a signal used to cue commericlals.
I believe the problem is the amount of friction the TV industry gives when someone announces a product like this! THEY THROW A FIT! They *HATE* the idea of people watching TV without commercials..... it's where their money comes from.

Now.. I gotta say, though....
Either 1) I pay for the TV I watch, therefore, I don't have to watch commercials, or
2) I don't pay anything for the TV I watch, and I have to put up with commercials because that's how you make your money.

As it stands now, they get you in both ends.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Animats]

That's the big difference between Tivo and Replay. Replay lets you easily skip commercials, and Tivo makes it difficult to do so. Neither skips them automatically.

In the late 80s, Blair Newman developed SmarTV. The concept was similar to Tivo/Replay, but it was too early; it took a stack of VCRs to make it work. Part of his plan was to have senior citizens paid to push a button on their remote indicating a commercial, use a voting scheme to clean up the data, and transmit the commercial time info to the home unit via phone line, so the home unit could skip commercials. He committed suicide a week before product launch.

It's now possible to make this idea work. But watch your back.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[holz]

I think TiVo hyped the ability to skip commercials in the beginning, but the several networks became big investors and they either got rid of that feature or don't really publicize it.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Anonymous Coward]

A break is already sent to local broadcasters to tell them when to start commercials. This same break signal is used on VCR's to cut out commercials. This could be used to accomplish this. Advertisers, of course, won't take this without a bit of kicking and screaming.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of completley skipping them, you have to fast forward through them at a fast rate.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Erore]

It's a Pavlonian response. TV viewers (US most likely by possibly worldwide) have shortened attention spans because of the typical show, commercial, show, commercial sequence.

We are used to taking a break and diverting our attentions to something else (food, advertised product, the restroom) every few minutes, I think it was 7. So, when we watched a taped show we find it comfortable to go ahead and watch the commercials because it gives us our needed break.

Movies actually have changes in pacing every few minutes as well. That is what keeps us interested to sit through 2 hours. A movie that doesn't provide these pacing changes is perceived as long and sometimes boring.

Personally, I find I am more productive when I step away from any long task for a minute or so every 10 minutes. Otherwise, I become bored and find it difficult to continue with full concentration or interest. I'm in the process of trying to break this habit.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Anonymous Coward]

My VCR does have a 30 second FF. In fact, it has a 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, and 240 second FF. Mighty nice I must say. One button push, and it skips most of the commercials. (anonymous coward? more like lazy...)

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[dmacon]

They have been doing product placement since before TV existed, but I guess we could write software to replace the Macintosh in X-files with a PC with a Gnome desktop :-) We could use the Apple logos as a marker for rendering the Gnome screenshots realtime.

Unfortunately, It's a bit harder than training a neural net to just recognize a station logo.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[billybob jr]

One similar application I've seen of this is networks drawing a painted yellow line on the football field for NFL games. The line is where the first down marker is at, and on my less than perfect tv looks as real as any other line drawn on the field. When players step on the line, there foot is shown as being on top of the line. I would guess that they do this by only drawing yellow on the screen where the green field is shown on the display. The perspective of the imaginary line seems to be pretty consistent with the real lines on the field.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[terryfoster]

TiVo doesn't stop you from fast fowarding through the commercials, but it isn't as nice as my RCA VCR that has the automatic fastforward through commericals. Not to say that my VCR can even touch the features that the TiVo has. I highly recommend, if you have the means, buying TiVo.

Re:Digital commercial deletion?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the big difference between TiVo and Replay is that Tivo is based on Linux and doesn't have any connections with Amazon.com. Replay can't say the same thing.
Boycott Amazon.com and Replay.

Great!

[robwicks]

I can break /etc/inetd.conf on a whole new platform. Too bad it doesn't run X. I could have a whole bunch of stuff to tinker about with ignorantly and totally disable in a few minutes. I'm waaaay too stupid to trust with code.

do you have a tivo? comments please!

[freq]

I have been thinking about getting one of these. my question for the masses is do any of you have a Tivo right now? how big is the drive in it (i checked their faq but they don't really get into the specifics, only saying they sell a "14 hour" and a "30 hour" version of tivo.

I am guessing those are the max times with extremely high compression. does anyone have any "real world" #'s out there for how much decent quality video it will hold, how big the drive(s) are, and how well does the box work for YOU?

--freq

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[chchchain]

I've been scoping them out for a while. Their competition just released a 20 hour version, so I can't imagine tivo being far behind. But tivo has a $100 rebate if you buy this year (clearing out the old drives???)

Tivo is only $500 compared to ReplayTV's $700, but the scam is that tivo charges you for the "subscription" necessary to use their service - $10/month vs $200/lifetime - so the costs are really comparable.

I think I read that the 30 hour tivo only gets 9.3 hours at the best compression rate, but many reviewers have said that the highest compression rate is usually acceptable. I think it's still better than VHS.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Hall]

how big is the drive in it (i checked their faq but they don't really get into the specifics, only saying they sell a "14 hour" and a "30 hour" version of tivo

You didn't check very hard... From their FAQ:

What size are the drives in the receiver?
The drive in the 14 hour receiver is 13.6 GB and in the 30 receiver is 27.2 GB.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[el jefe]

I saw that the subscription is not absolutely necessary - if you don't have one, you just program Tivo like you would a vcr, no bells and whistles though. I'm just waiting for the next generation, when, according to their web page, you may be able to add more storage on your own, which would be cool. Maybe a 10/100 ethernet jack so I can drag and drop old shows using SMB to one of my computers on my home network. That would be sweet. Oh, through in a basic web browser that can be used with any ISP, and I'm there for sure!

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[chchchain]

saw that the subscription is not absolutely necessary - if you don't have one, you just program Tivo like you would a vcr, no bells and whistles though.

I'm just about certain that you do need one. In fact, Tivo loses $ with each device it sells. Their whole business model is based on selling subscriptions.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[whoop]

I wouldn't expect connecting this to your computers anytime soon. They are going for the general TV appliance market. Your general idiots that can't open a doorknob or program a VCR. And the thing is pretty idiot proof, there is no power button for one. And I'm sure idiots can learn to go through the tv guide and just hit "Select" to record their shows.

If you want a complete video editing station, spend the $20k and get a professional one. ;) Or spend $70 on a WinTV capture card and one of those video cards with TV out to do all your PC-based editing. But don't whine on here, "Unless Tivo does these 50,000 features, they ain't getting my $500!" It's whiny.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Quack1701]

Strickly speaking, you don't need the subscription to enjoy the TIVO. However, with that said, the TIVO loses most of it's power if you don't have the subscription. The features such as, automatically record every Simpsons, Futurama, and Southpark that ever comes out, even if they change thier timeslot would not be possible. Neither would haveing the TIVO find the 4:35am showing of HeavyMetal on the off satelitte channel noone ever tunes into.

The TIVO has some minor problems. However, I would find my 300+ channel DirecTV pretty much worthless with it.

Quack

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[LazyBoy]

but many reviewers have said that the highest compression rate is usually acceptable. I think it's still better than VHS.

Don't take anyone's word on the video quality, see it for yourself. I'm talking about the hightest quality setting, not the highest compression.

I saw a live Tivo at the Western Cable Show last week, and was disappointed with the vid quality. Of course the pitch guy had a lot of excuses about how bad the video feed was at the show, etc. ("But hey, didn't you bring that recorded content with you?") I'll wait till I see another demo before I give up on it, but I've read a lot videophiles who are turning their noses up. See news:alt.video.ptv.tivo

And note, "live" viewing with these things means constant NTSC->MPEG and MPEG->NTSC conversion, so that it's ready when you "Pause" or "Rewind". So make sure that the vid quality is acceptable to you, because it applies to all your viewing.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[mkgray]

I have a 14 hour Tivo. I record everything on the highest compression rate, and while I notice the MPEG artifacts especially in high action scenes, unless you're a real videophile, it doesn't detract from most programs. So, I get 14 hours
of video on it.

Additionally, 14 hours is plenty unless you want to use it to record lots of movies and then be able to sit down whenever you want and pick one.

Despite my original skepticism, the recommendation feature is outstanding. Having the disk always full with programs I generally like is very cool.

Overall, it's a great device, well worth it.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Wumpus]

Having been to the Western Cable Show with equipment to set up, I can tell you that the video feed can be pretty bad there.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[larryj]

For me, the lowest quality setting is great (14 hours). I use basic for everything and it looks a lot better than my worn out VHS tapes. I do see compression artifacts occasionally, but it just doesn't bother me. Other people obviously have a different opinion. There are several quality settings, but I can't even tell a difference between the 2nd lowest level and my Dish receiver. When I want the ultimate picture, I watch a DVD. When I want to see last week's Futurama, I watch Tivo. I LOVE this thing...

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[larryj]

I've had the 14 hour model for about 2 months now. It's the best geek purchase I've ever made. I've never run into any space problems, but I use the highest compression/worst quality setting for everything (which looks great to me).

The space management is great, when Tivo needs space to record something, it deletes it's suggestions first. After that, any show that is at least 48 hours old will be eligible for deletion. The 'now showing' menu gives you a quick picture of what's available, using icons to identify those shows that are about to be axed if Tivo needs space. You can also tell it to save a show until you delete it.

If you're on the bubble, buy it and take advantage of the return policy if necessary. I doubt you'll want to give it back though. "There's nothing on but crap" quickly changes to "I don't have enough time to watch all these great shows". I've seen more great documentaries on the Discovery Channel, History Channel, etc in the last few weeks than I've watched all year.

Oh yeah, if you have DirecTV, you get a $100 rebate. If you sign up for the service between 12/15 and 12/31, you get another $100 back. Also, at least until the end of the year, they have a $50 refer a friend program where BOTH parties get $50 back (with up to $250 back per person). That's a pretty easy $250 back for a lot of people (I don't have DirecTV and I missed the other deal too).

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[lushmore]

You definitely need a subscription to set it up and get it working, but the device would not croak if you didn't have one--it would just be much less interesting.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[audiokat]

We've had a 14-hr tivo since just about when it came out (June or July) and love it. My roommates and I can set it to record the shows that we like to watch, but have time conflicts. Not only that, but we watch with strategy. If we are watching a 30 minute program, we usually let TiVo start recording it and then come in 10 minutes later and watch the program and fast forward through the commercials, but it's almost as if we are watching in real time =) As far as the whole commercial thing goes, it's not that horrible. Kudos to phillips for realizing that if they put this together with a feature that allows people to just hit a button to skip commercials that we would have another DAT frenzy on our hands. We also record movies on it, but found that the best way to do so was to record the movie (from HBO or whatever) and then dump it down to VHS. Yeah the quality drops slightly, but it saves the disk space and us having to be up at 4am ;) All in all we really like it, and found that when our warrantee is up we are opening the puppy up and maybe making some mods ;) --ak

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[LazyBoy]

"Better than VHS" is fine when you're watching something that would've been taped otherwise. But isn't your main feed (cable, whatever) better than this?

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, go get some coffee, or take a vacation, or something. Whatever you do, please lighten the fuck up.

He wasn't whining about anything, he was just mentioning some ideas that he thought would be cool additions.

For what it's worth, your post was far more whiny than his.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that. Those ideas were cool and he didn't sound 1/10th as whiny as this bitch whoop.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[HamNRye]

There have been some comments made about the "High Quality" (HQ) vs. "Low Quality" (LQ) recording. the LQ recording is fine for most things, and you do indeed get 14 hours. A few small visual defects, but for watching "Meet the Press" or "Babylon 5" it's fine. HQ is great for recording something you plan to "port" to VCR. You get about 4 hours with this mode. There is also an in-between quality that would be good for movies you don't want to move to VCR, but you still want fairly sharp. This comes in at about 8 hours. The Matrix comes to mind.

Naturally, double these for the 30 hour version.

There are still alot of desirable features that are not included in the Tivo, so if you are cautious, I'd wait. They'll have bigger drives to work with in a year, cheaper, and competition will drive them to include more features.

~Jason

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[larryj]

Yes, my Dish Network system has more lines of resolution, etc. than Tivo at it's lowest quality setting. Honestly, unless there's a lot of movement (action scenes, football game), I just can't see a difference. Even then, it's the blocky compression artifacts, not a grainy picture, bad sound and other imperfections that make watching something on tape annoying. A lot of people think the lowest picture setting is competely unacceptable. I was afraid of the same thing, but was pleasantly surprised to find that I'm happy with the basic setting. If you're thinking of getting one and you're concerned about picture quality, try to demo one at a store or check out a friend's machine. You may be surprised too.

BTW, 'live' TV is always recorded at the best setting. Even when you hit the 'live tv' button, your signal is still going through the Tivo. At the 'best' setting, I can't tell ANY difference whatsover (remember, the second worst setting looks the same to me though). The 'best' setting is supposed to rival DVD as far as lines of resolution (I admit, that sounds like marketing-speak). My default setting of 'basic' only affects what I tell it to record. You don't have an option with live tv, it's always 'best'.

The best part of this thing though is that you don't watch much live tv anymore. We always go to the 'now showing' menu and pick from the shows listed. When a show airs doesn't have much of a meaning any more. If Fox shows a bonus episode of 'The Simpsons', I don't have to worry about it (my season pass will pick it up). I love 'Family Guy' but it hasn't been on lately. Since I have a season pass though, my Tivo is set to record the episode that will be on this week. I would've missed it otherwise (probably). I don't want to discount the concerns of others about picture quality, because I know that is a VERY big issue for a lot of people. For me though, the picture looks fine and the convenience has paid for the Tivo several times over.

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[HalfWalker]

All right. Given this, how do the two compare ? The Tivo and Replay that is. Pros and cons for each ? Anywhere else you can get the Tivo information from ? That website for WebTV from Micro$oft ?

Re:do you have a tivo? comments please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found great comparisons at http://www.avsforum.com

What We Need Next

[Coldraven]

-Would be a really cheap edit controller, some additional memory drive modules with larger storage...oh, and some s-video in/out, an i/r sync with four track audio mastering...

...Heh-heh...With all that rigged to a couple cameras and the right server, "home network" TV would gain a whole new definition.

Re:What We Need Next

[fosh]

Don't forget the digital S/PdIF in/out.

E2fsprogs 1.06?!?

[tytso]

I pulled down the README and was very surprised to find out they're using e2fsrprogs based on version 1.06; that version dates back to October 7, 1996, and there have been a huge number of bug fixes since then, including some that prevent data loss when faced with certain "interesting" kinds of filesystem corruption.

Given that they're using a 2.1 kernel, I don't know why they didn't bother to use a more recent version of e2fsprogs. Hopefully all of the programs are on a romfs, and the only thing on the data disks is data that on a powerhit you can just recover from by running mke2fs on the data partition. (After all, the data is just broadcast TV shows --- it can't be very valuable. :-)

Re:E2fsprogs 1.06?!?

[Michel]

running mke2fs on the data partition

One of the developers said (nluug conference, nov 4) that they are not using e2fs on the data disk, because of [something I forgot]. They use raw disks for the data...

Is quality/price ratio good enough, yet?

[dmorin]

The only reason I didn't buy a Tivo for the folks this xmas is that I want to see the difference in quality of the recording. In the 14 hour version, you only get that much if you record at the lowest quality, which their chart shows as being good for "talking heads" whatever the hell that means. If you want to record "action" you're down to 4 hours, which is barely enough for 2 movies. Would that even hold an entire football game, ya think? The best use of this device is NOT, as they're marketing it, to be an "instant rewind" for when you go to the bathroom. The best feature is the idea of the preferences, and of smart recording. If every week I record Computer Chronicles and push the "thumbs up" button, then when PBS shows Triumph of the Nerds again, Tivo will *automatically* record it for me because it knows I like computer shows. And for that feature, it is important to have lots of disk space so that it can record a bunch of stuff for you.

What I hope to see by next xmas is several companies come out with these things. Possibly a standard or two. And a 30-50 hour version for about $400-$600, instead of $1000. Then, I'd buy one in a snap.

I thought it would be cool to add a voice synthesizer. You come home from work, turn it on, and it tells you "Hello, Duane. Jenna Jameson was on Good Morning America this morning, and I thought you might like that so I recorded it."

d

Re:Is quality/price ratio good enough, yet?

[whoop]

There are four quality levels from the lowest at 14 hours to the highest at 4 hours plus change. Everyone else has said how the lowest quality is oh so horrible, but I just don't see that. I have my default set to that and have had no problems. I can watch whatever show/movie just fine, and I can get the most Tivo suggestions on my hd. Things I want to keep forever, put on VHS I will record at a higher level. But for these throw-away things, who cares?

Re:Is quality/price ratio good enough, yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually use the basic (lowest quality mode) for all my recordings. I have DirecTV and this might be part of the reason. The DirecTV picture is so clear and their is no noise or interference. I think this helps the MPEG encoding on TiVo. A noisy antenna or cable TV signal might look worse on basic mode, but for me basic is fine, and I get all 14 hours for recordings.

Me bitchin' about lame moderators (Re:Uptime)

[Myddrin]

How is my post offtopic, but the
post I'm responding to is ontopic?

What the?????

BTW, Mr. Moderator, please read the
moderator's guidlines. My post was ontopic for the thread I was posting to... as far as I know
that would make my post ontopic according to the moderator's guidlines.

Sigh, of course that makes this post offtopic, but
that's ok.

Read The Fine README, everyone

[Zach Frey]

Note to all who think they can convert their Linux PC into a TiVo now, please remember that the GPL requires Philips to release the changes they make to the Linux kernel and all GPL'ed untilities, but not to the TiVo application itself. (Although Philips are going above and beyond the call of duty here, by releasing changes to GPL'ed development tools which are not shipped as part of Tivo, something they are not obligated to do).

From the README --

This directory contains three different archives - "commands", "kernels", and "toolchain". The archives are in GNU "tar" format, and have been compressed using GNU Zip (.gz suffix) and BZIP2 (.bz2 suffix). The .gz and .bz2 versions of each archive are identical except for the compression format - you need only one version of each.

If you're reading this README from our FTP site, and don't want to spend the time to download these archives via your Internet connection, you can receive a copy of the software on CD-ROM if you wish. A nominal copying-and-distribution charge applies if you order the CD-ROM. Please contact "webmaster@tivo.com" for information if you're interested in order a CD-ROM copy of this software.

Please refer to the COPYING file in each directory for detailed information on the license and distribution terms which apply to each specific tool, utility, compiler, kernel, or whatever. Most of this software is under the GPL, while some of it (e.g. libraries) are under the LGPL.

The "commands" archive contains the source code for all of the GPL-licensed programs which are included in the TiVo Personal Television System software. These versions are current as of the 1.2.0 and 1.2.1 versions of the TiVo software.

total 17
dr-xr-xr-x 10 dplatt root 3072 Oct 14 10:56 bash-2.02/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 dplatt root 2048 Oct 14 10:56 cpio-2.4.2/
dr-xr-xr-x 12 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 10:56 e2fsprogs-1.06/
dr-xr-xr-x 9 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 10:56 fileutils-3.16/
dr-xr-xr-x 8 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 10:57 grep/
dr-xr-xr-x 10 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 10:57 gzip-1.2.4/
dr-xr-xr-x 10 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:00 modutils-2.1.85/
dr-xr-xr-x 6 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:00 net-tools-1.432/
dr-xr-xr-x 5 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:00 procps-1.2.9/
dr-xr-xr-x 5 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:00 ps/
dr-xr-xr-x 11 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:01 sh-utils-1.16/
dr-xr-xr-x 3 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:01 sysklogd-1.3.26/
dr-xr-xr-x 10 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:01 textutils/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:01 tnlited/

The "kernels" archive contains the source code for the Linux kernel in the TiVo Personal Television System software. The "linuxdist-2.1.24" source tree is configured for use on an Intel X86 development platform. The "linux-2.1" source tree is configured for use on the PowerPC-based hardware system on which the TiVo software actually runs.

total 2
dr-xr-xr-x 15 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 10:58 linux-2.1/
dr-xr-xr-x 15 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:00 linuxdist-2.1.24/

The "toolchains" archive contains the source code for various GNU software development tools and libraries used in the development of the PowerPC-based TiVo software releases. Although the compilers and development utilities are not shipped with the TiVo-based receivers, they are provided here as a courtesy to developers and other curious individuals.

total 14
dr-xr-xr-x 3 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:01 binutils/
dr-xr-xr-x 3 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:03 gcc/
dr-xr-xr-x 5 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:09 gdb/
dr-xr-xr-x 59 dplatt root 8192 Oct 14 11:13 libc/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:13 libc-ppc/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:13 tcdmem/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 dplatt root 1024 Oct 14 11:13 xppcbt/

Re:Read The Fine README, everyone

[Basje]

Of course they don't distribute the Tivo application: they don't have a patent for it!

But seriously folks. These people put a lot of time (read: money) into the development of this thing. And they want to make money off it. As long as they do that in a decent way, which they seem to do, I can only applaud them for it.


----------------------------------------------

No.

[SEWilco]

This looks to be just their modifications to GPL software. It's their changes to the kernel and some commands.

Tivo obviously has a program which does copy-from-TV-signal-to-disk and play-from-disk-to-TV. I did not recognize that program, and if they wrote their own they do not have to publish it. With the Linux video interfaces it might not be technically difficult, but it sounds like they created a nice user interface and that's what is important (well, picture quality probably is most important..and a lot of Monday Night Football fans just found how important sound is to them when it failed).

Re:No.

[SEWilco]

Oops. For the record, there were two unrelated failures in that broadcast. The ABC TV network had a problem with their satellite feed which briefly interrupted the signal nationwide. My local ABC station (KSTP) lost its main antenna signal when a cable went bad a thousand feet up the tower, with assorted side effects.

But can you open a shell on it?

[CausticPuppy]

Looking at the back of the TiVo box (on their site), it looks like there are only A/V connectors along with the serial remote. How would you go about getting a shell open on the TiVo and start tweaking? Via a remote session on the modem port (can it auto-answer) or rig up something via the infrared/serial connection?
Once that's done, it seems like it would be easy to upgrade the hard drive inside and mount other volumes. And if we open the box up (voiding the warranty of course), maybe there's even a hidden PCI slot in there, for some 100BT ethernet action!
Now I'm just speculating of course, without having read in-depth about the TiVo hardware...

Re:But can you open a shell on it?

[whoop]

That's a simple, "No." The last thing they need is to tie up their support lines with idiots, "What do I do at this "tcsh#" prompt?" If the feature is there, no matter that they say there's no support for it, idiots will call nonetheless. This is a simple TV recording device, not an all in one hack box/video editor.

But if you want to hack (of course voiding the warranty), there are some pictures someone took at here.

Re:But can you open a shell on it?

[slim]

I wouldn't be surprised if there was no shell as we know it. It may not even contain init -- everything but the kernel could be proprietary software.

Wonder what you could build for the same price... you'd lose the rating features, the automated recording etc... you could implement the pause-live-TV... you could set stuff to record remotely... you could program your video using cron and at, rather than the nasty, nasty interfaces we usually have to suffer... you'd have random access... you could archive to CD...

Hmmm...
--

Re:But can you open a shell on it?

[CausticPuppy]

Seems like you could pull the drives out and mount their Ext2 filesystems on another box. That's the only way I can think of to make changes to the source and update the TiVo with it.
I bet you could even get bash on there and use the infrared remote port as a TTY.
However, I have not the money to tinker with such an expensive toy.

Re:But can you open a shell on it?

[mindstrm]

Simple. You yank the drive and mount it on a different box so you can see how things are set up, and then change them to your own designs.

Re:Totally offtopic...

[Paul Carver]

The uptime message isn't all that useful because slashdot.org is made up of more than one machine. I don't know which machine the uptime message is taken from, but it's possible that the machine with a 60 day uptime went down and its responsibilities were moved to the machine with the 18 day uptime.

Hacker Potential

[chchchain]

The fact that Tivo is running on Linux is very cool, but I'm not sure how much that means to us. Others have already pointed out that you need Tivo hardware for their stuff to run, and that their whole application isn't available to us.

Another question is whether or not we could even touch the OS. Tivo needs its own telephone line to connect to its service. It must dial out itself. AFAIK that's the only contact with the world 'cept for the TV signal in & out. It'd be extremely cool to telnet tivo and write your own app to do commercial filtering (tho it matters much less with tivo than a tape based vcr) or other snazzy stuff...

perhaps they'd put a NIC on the next model if everyone at /. promised to buy one to play with :)

Voice Synthesis:

[Craig Maloney]

Yeah, I can see it now:

"I'm sorry Duane, but I cannot allow you to watch Regis and Kathy Lee today."

"Let me see Regis, Hal"

"I think you should sit back calmly, take an aspirin, and watch 'Meet the Press', Duane."

"That does it"

"Just what do you think you're doing, Duane. My memory is going. I can feel it... My mind is... LILO: Loading Linux........."

Build a Tivo-ish System

[giberti]

Recipe for your own Tivo:
Take one ATI All-in-Wonder video card
1 40Gb HD
Mix in a little Linux and for kicks an IR port so you can set up a remote (or PDA) to run it (for the couch potatos or geeks!) Anyone who would like to contribute source?

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[mmontour]

If you're serious about this, I wouldn't mind joining a project to work on it. I've considered buying either a Tivo or a ReplayTV, but the main reason I haven't yet is this - control. I do not want Yet Another Sealed Box with a proprietary and cumbersome remote-control-navigated interface (such as my recently-purchased StarChoice DTH satellite dish). I do not want boxes that have to phone the central office at random hours (the StarChoice phones in to order pay-per-view movies, but is otherwise a stand-alone unit. It gets its programming information from the satellite signals). I want the ability to integrate my various units so I can (for example) program a week's worth of TV viewing from my desktop PC's web browser (or my Palm IIIx).

I see a few problems with the DIY approach:

- Noise, size, heat, and power consumption. A typical desktop PC is an offensive beast compared to an embedded-style unit. A Netwinder would be a nice base platform (it even has IR), except I don't believe its video hardware can handle full-motion video.

- Hard drive contention - you may not be able to do the simultaneous record/playback without a special hard drive (but you could do it with two drives).

- Compression ratio / compression speed. You need some serious CPU power unless your video card can do hardware compression. From their web page it looks like the ATI card doesn't ("Pentium III recommended for full resolution MPEG-2 capture"). The Matrox Marvel G400-TV has hardware MJPEG (Motion JPEG) compression, so it might be a better choice.

- Hardware drivers and chipset programming information. The situation is improving, but I don't know if there's enough available for Linux yet.

In the end, I don't know that a DIY solution would end up any cheaper than a Tivo/ReplayTV. It would certainly be larger and louder. However, it could easily be a superior product for the technically-inclined folks who want to take back control of their appliances.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[whoop]

In the end, I don't know that a DIY solution would end up any cheaper than a Tivo/ReplayTV. It would certainly be larger and louder. However, it could easily be a superior product for the technically-inclined folks who want to take back control of their appliances.

Even when you have one unit, try to do it in under $500 in time and parts. Then try to base a business off it. Imagine how many, "Where is this teleynet thing in my Start Menu?" "This RJ45 cable doesn't fit in my WinModem, what do I do?" "How do I order a bowl of Frosted Flakes with this?" Tivo's goal is not the hacker/linux market but your average Joe Schmoe. So keeping it as simple as possible, but with enough TV-related features is important. And as anyone who's spent a little time in tech support, if the feature exists, people will ask bout, abuse it, etc.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[Cramer]

While I'm certainly game for doing this, I don't think anyone has the spare time to design one. Yes, this could be hacked together with an "expensive" PC in short order, but it'd be just that, "a hack" -- clunky, huge, expensive, and overly complicated for your average idiot.

Completely on the rumor side, I've heard the ReplayTV uses a Motorola Coldfire processor -- as do a great many set-top DVD players. Having played with the coldfire, it's a good choice for such a thing as long as you have hardware for encoding and decoding. The instant you add hardware MPEG encoding, you add a few zeros on to the price.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to not have a firewire or other high speed communication port on the box. It'd be nice to be able to interface it with other hardware. But I'm sure "the industry" would shit solid gold bricks if one could copy the MPEG data off the TiVo onto, say, a DVD.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[giberti]

At the chance of sounding overly optimistic, I think you could (do it under $500). I was looking at the documentation which came with my 64Bit All in wonder card....

I can set this thing to record (under windows) at specified times, and I can capture at some pretty good frame rates (30fps) (240x180) with 44Hz. 16Bit Stereo Sound. It did it when I built the machine which is a P2-400... which are pretty cheap now, all you really need is a big a** hard disk to put the stuff on, and a 40Gb is retailing for about $280 now at CompUSA...

As setup, it takes about 80Mb / Minute to store at thoes settings, so you are looking at about 8Hrs on a 40Gb Drive... if you drop the audio down you could gain another 8Hrs easily.

So I dont know that a $500 price tag is all that hard to come under... especialy if you are saving on things like monitors and winmodems.

As for grabbing the channel listings, they are all available online, you could have it grab it while you are online checking out /. for the latest and greatest shows to watch.

I think the worst part would be hacking the drivers to run the capture features under linux, then its just a few scripts to pull the information of the net, and a simple interface (web or x) to work as a front end.

Personaly, I don't think there is a need for it though, we watch too much television anyway. It would just be a fun project to add to the halls of geekdom.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[Smack]

the problem is the assumption that 240x180 resolution is adequate for regular tv viewing. It's not. And the technical requirements go up SHARPLY with added resolution.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[Breace]

Well, you are over-simplifying things a little here.

The remote control is going to be the easy part.

To record video you need compression. Why? Because recording raw video takes about 20GB for an hour, and that is low resolution (352x240). That's going to eat up harddisk space quickly, not to mention that you need a pretty decent drive to support the sustained datarate of 6MB/sec. If you wanted to play of the same drive, add an other 6MB/sec and seeking,- or just forget it.

I think the best bet for compression is MPEG (1 or 2). At least the standard is open and the quality is relatively good (there are better codec's out there, but I've never seen one with open standards that's better then MPEG)

But there's really no high performance compression software available for Linux. Same counts for MPEG decompression. I've seen the software MPEG decoder available for Linux and it really requires quite a fast CPU to get anywhere decent quality. This is because they have to make up for not being able to use the hardware optimizations that most any VGA chip has built in these days. (This is one of the major short-comming of Linux, as far as I'm concerned. It's the problem of the VGA chip manufacturers though because they are unwilling to release documentation quite frequently)

So in any case, you wanna run Linux, you gonna probably have to use hardware codec's. These exist but are relatively expensive,- more then a Tivo... :(

The simplest solution is to get a Windoze machine with a Voodoo 3500 TV. The only problem is that the software SUCKS! (,- the Voodoo 3500 software, we all know what Windoze is like) And you still can't playback and record at the same time (the MPEG-II software compression they use takes a lot o juice)

The interesting thing though is that several MPEG decoder manufacturers are now moving to codecs (encoder & decoder in one chip) because the market for decoders is disapearing (with PIII-500 machines doing full DVD decode in software). These new chips should be pretty cheap and hopefully one day we will be able to write Linux drivers for them.

Then making a Tivo-a-like would be a breeze.

Have fun, Breace.

Re:Build a Tivo-ish System

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.purediva.com/

It's basically the same as Tivo, but works as a windows application connected to tv tuners or video capture cards. Expect it to appear on a number of OEM's soon.

Its own telephone line

[SEWilco]

It's a tempting device, but I don't like its needing its own telephone line. I wish there were a 10BaseT connector so I could just let it use HTTP to chat with its server.

Re:Its own telephone line

[whoop]

Let's see. How many people out there can plug a telephone jack into an outlet when that is the only socket like it? Even your worst idiot could do this with enough coaching. Now add in another socket that looks similar, but is a little bigger. Now you've got phone lines tied up with, "My telephone cord isn't staying in this thing. What's the matter with you people??" Or the person is able to figure out enough that the ethernet jack is for connecting to a computer. So they go to Best Buy and get a net card, hub, etc kit. Now you've got morons trying to figure out how to plug in a card, set up a network, assigning IP addresses, getting an ISP, setting up stuff for that ISP, and more to use their Tivo.

The secret to Tivo's success is keeping it simple. If they lose a couple Slashdotters, oh well. You see, by just adding a tiny thing like an ethernet connection, you've just compounded the number of problems people will call with by 100 fold. :)

This is like the yahoos that claim since Playstation (or whatever console) doesn't do everything a computer can do, it's worthless.

Re:Its own telephone line

[Anonymous Coward]

It talks HTTP with the server.

And it doesn't need its own telephone line. Use a splitter and Tivo will make a call in the middle of the night for a few minutes and then hang up.

Re:Its own telephone line

[steve_bryan]

I've had the flu for two days so maybe I should just read and disagree quietly but this sort of theme is recurring ad nausiem. So some wise guys on Sand Hill Road decide we aren't bright enough to handle the PC's and Mac's we've so foolishly purchased and they insist on funding information appliance companies which each sell us a copy of the same capability in a dozen slightly different boxes. Thanks, but no thanks. The other darker side to this is the unspoken determination to keep that digital bit stream out of the hands of the unwashed multitudes, EVEN if it is only being digitized inside the box you've bought and paid for. As the complete unravelling of CSS has demonstrated they show little capability to manage their desired trick of maintaining essential control over what you can do with the signal they send to your home. No, the real challenge they face isn't the so-called clueless user calling tech support, it is the all too well informed user trying to explain basic facts to under-paid and under-trained tech support. A 10 base T port snuggly hidden inside the box in warranty revocation area would change this from a curious but inadequate consumer product to an irresistable hacker delight. Buzzt! Sorry but thanks for playing. Please go stand over there with all those other wildly successful information appliances.

Not quite the same as a VCR

[Bronster]

My first thought upon reading this was "cool, what a great idea - a VCR with brains". Then I checked the site.

From How TiVo Works:

You purchase the Personal TV Receiver and sign up to receive the TiVo Personal TV Service.

So you need to sign up for something other than just a data feed so this thing can be used. A bit further down:

The Service works by making a nightly phone call to get the up-to-date program information it needs to function.

No mention of other ways you can obtain this information. It would be nicer if it could be collected from the signal stream (character recognition on the "upcoming shows" advertisements + AI = nice). It does say that the number called is toll-free, and if you pick up then it drops the connection and tries again later. "[the] daily phone calls generally last less than 5 minutes and happen at random times - usually at night". It still works without the phone connection, but only as a manual recorder (same as a VCR).

Oh no, we're in Buzzword[TM] land here. Season Passes[TM], Now Showing[TM], TiVo Suggestions[TM], TiVolution Magazine[TM], Thumbs Up[TM] and Thumbs Down[TM]. The gist being that these are things that let the system "suggest new shows that you might want to watch" and "keep you up-to-date on the latest movies and best programs from television's biggest networks".

At least "you can watch a pre-recorded show while recording a live broadcast. You can also split the video signal input to your television so that one program can be recorded while you're watching a different channel". That's fairly standard VCR fair though.

The different recording options are answered quite well "the receiver uses the MPEG II compression system that allows a range of video quality settings" and "the drive in the 14 hour receiver is 13.6 GB and in the 30 receiver is 27.2 GB".

As for long term storage, you can attach a VCR to the output and backup to that, but there's no built in VCR or Recordable DVD (drool). They explain "TiVo uses a special file system that prevents you from being able to transfer the digital data from the Personal TV receiver to a PC". The reasoning is partially FUD "This feature is intended to prevent the fragmentation and file corruption that can occur in commercial file systems..." followed by honesty "...and to protect the copyrights of the network broadcasters and content providers".

They claim to protect your privacy too: "Unlike personalized Internet services, TiVo does not require any information to be sent back. All the intelligence is contained within the receiver, assuring complete privacy to you".

But enough pasting the interesting bits, go read the FAQ yourself.

I'll be buying one of these about when they provide an Australian toll free number and programming information!

It's great!

[Therlin]

I have a 14hr Tivo. It's amazing! 14 hrs is plenty, I have yet to complain about recording space. I love the suggestions it makes. It's great to come home to find out that Tivo recorded The Simpsons for you without having to tell it. The GUI is easy to use and it works without a problem. It's hard to watch TV without Tivo. When I go to a friend's place and watch TV I always want to pause or rewind, or to get the program summary, or to see what's playing next, but I can't because they don't have one. It's addictive. I don't work for Tivo or anything, I just have one and I couldn't live without it.

my experience with the recording qualities

[Therlin]

In my experience, low quality is only good for talking heads, just like Tivo says. But the medium quality is good for just anything else. I record everything in medium quality and you can never tell if you are watching TV or Tivo. Even during action scenes. I have recorded a couple things in high quality, but I was never able to see a difference big enough to justify using it.

eh?

[heh2k]

this is old news. they released the source months ago.

Translation

[FreeUser]

www.ktet.Fh-Muenster.de/ina/:

The "Initiative No Advertise" has the goal of preventing the recording of commercial blocks when a program is recorded on a VCR.

Subsections:
[...]
Download the Linux Software:

Here are the current results of Thorsten Janke's and Markus Koppers' Thesis. An application has been developed which runs on Linux using the KDE Desktop. Like most applications under Linux, the installation is thankfully very simple: 1) download, 2) untar, 3) configure, 4) make, and 5) make install (as root). The program requires access to the video4linux device /dev/video and the remote controll device /dev/ttyS*.

202104 Sep 30 13:07 noad2-0.1.tar.gz

The Thesis is available online (No, I'm not gonna translate their thesis) :-)

Re:Translation

[FreeUser]

The "Initiative No Advertise" project has the goal of preventing the recording of commercial blocks when a program is recorded on a VCR.

Argh! I even proofread it twice and still overlooked that! I need to get some coffee...

Re:IR on Palm (-1 offtopic)

[gatzke]

I just got a Palm Pilot and I have used OmniRemote from PacificNeoTek.com. It learns commands from your old IR remotes. The software is very configurable. I have used it with my IR keyboard to run MP3s and DVDs on my PC. Pretty slick stuff.

Sorry to interrupt the discussion. Ontopic: I want a Tivo too! Plus it runs Linux! Howard Stern says the Tivo is the bomb, so it must be cool.

ed

Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[schweda]

Can someone explain to me why in hell would I want to "pause" or "rewind" television?

This seems to be TiVo's big selling point. Why in the *hell* would I want to pause, say, "The West Wing" or rewing "ER".

I'm sorry, but there is nothing on television that even remotely necessitates me to "pause" it so that I can "study" it closer.

"Oh gee, did George Clooney really grab hold of that patient's arm like that?"

"Whoops, say, look at that. Did you just see what I just saw? Ally McBeal walked right past the Dean and DeLuca on the corner! Did you see that? Let's look at it again. Sure enough, she's *walking* right past. Wow. That's incredible!"

What a completely absurd notion.

And, yes, I understand sports *might* be something you want to pause and rewind -- but apart from football or baseball -- what televsion show necessitates a "pause?"

Please. What a bunch of idiocy from couch potatoes.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not for studying. It's for breaking loose from the "base your life around :00 and :30 timing" life.

Say it's 7:17 and the Simpsons is still playing on a Sunday night. You have to take a leak. But it's on! So you hold it. Then you forget during an ad, but remember right at the end, but then Futurama starts! Some time later, paramedics show up to scrape what's left of your now exploded bladder off the ceiling.

With Tivo I just hit pause, take that leak, then come back and hit play. So what if it's delayed a few minutes relative to the "real deal"? It's easy to catch up at the next ad break.

It's simple. Get a Tivo so you don't explode.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[mstra]

I don't think that the pause feature is included for "freeze frame" analysis of Kramer's entrance into Jerry's apartment.

Rather, it is intended to allow a person to "pause" the playback of live TV to answer the telephone, get the door, grab a snack, or otherwise engage in normal, non-TV behavior.

I myself have a Tivo, and have used the Pause feature to make it much easier to skip commercials. I simply pause the show for the first five or ten minutes (depending on the show length), do something else, and then start it up. This allows me to keep a buffer behind the show to skip the commercials.

Actually, I've discovered a couple things from having my Tivo. Number one, I have NO idea when shows are on anymore. I set the box to record X-Files, the Simpsons, Drew Carey, and various others, and just watch them when convenient (usually around 10 PM when I'm going to bed). I also saw that even after only having the box for two weeks, it has spoiled me. I was at a friend's house on Sunday, and was very irritated that I couldn't fast-forward through the commercials during Futurama.

Another nice feature of the Tivo is the three-second rewind after you stop the fast forward. When fast-forwarding through the commercials, one tends to hit "play" after two-three seconds of program playback have passed...this buffer is pretty much dead-on. It's one of my favorite features.

The only real drawback I've seen so far is that it has a slight error in my programming lineup - it has the wrong channel number for my local cable's BBC America channel, which meant I couldn't record the French and Saunders marathon the other day.

And speaking to recording quality...I don't use this thing to tape movies, so the second-highest recording quality gives me more than enough recording space and the quality still kicks the crap out of VHS.

m.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Anonynous Coward]

Some people may be interrupted during TV watching by friends on the phone or at the door. They may want to pause the show in progress not to "study" it, but simply to put it on hold so they can return to it slightly later. Since you are a friendless loser, this probably doesn't apply to you.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[andy@petdance.com]

I would love to have a Tivo specifically for ER, because my wife has a knack for discussing the mushy parts of ER right when there's good medical blather goin' on, and we all know that's the REAL reason to watch ER.

I now record ER as we watch it in case of just such a situation.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're watching Leno, Jenniger Lopez is about to come on, and you're dying for a piss... watcha gonna do???

Get a clue, goatfucker!

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[schweda]

This is what I mean: there is nothing on televsion these days that needs to be "paused" so I can stand up, walk down the hall, take a leak, come back, sit down, and pick up where I left.

You're telling me you can't miss 15 seconds of your television show to take a leak?

I'm not making any judgments -- I'm just amazed. Are people that smitten with their televsion shows that they can't miss even 15 seconds? Isn't that what commercials are for? Oh no, wait, you pause so that you don't have to *watch* the commercials -- yet you'd rather sit in your chair not watching the commercials than get up and take a leak and get a bowl of taco chips and guacomole?

This TiVo thing is just an excuse for organizing your life around a cultural black hole. Plus, it scores points because it's a "geek toy."

It's worthless. It does nothing to improve the quality of your life.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[LRJ]

Since when do high tech toys have to improve the quality of life? I haven't heard of too many life improving uses for $10,000 stereos or TV's but people still buy them.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Thomas Charron]

I answer the phone, I pause the playback, not missing a beat.

I *REALLY* need to goto the bathroom, I pause playback.

DAMNED, the kids where screaming, what the heck did I miss? *rewind*

I'm in commercial, and need to check dinner. I come back, and it's 1 minute into the show again.. *Rewind*. On next commercial, *FF* to catchup with the live broadcast.

I can think of many, and by testimony of other users, it's a VERY handy and addictive feature..

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Hal Roberts]

The core of your argument seems to be 'TV is stupid, Tivo just enhances TV, so Tivo is also stupid'.

Well, duh. If you don't like TV, you are not going to like the Tivo.

FYI, some people like TV for perfectly valid reasons that you just can't fathom. Really. You are in no position to judge whether TV improves the quality of my or anyone else's life.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Myddrin]

My mom *always* calls during the X-files. Every sunday. For me the TiVO would be great because
I wouldn't need to buy anymore VCR tapes "just in case" someone calls.....

Then again I'm not a judgemental person who feels the need to put down other people's interests...
go figure.

Re:Why Would I want to Pause Television?

[Frottage]

schweda, I think you're being a bit too specific with the term television. What if, for example, I'm watching Schindler's List (195 minutes long) on some pay movie channel (HBO, etc) which does not have commercial breaks? Sometimes I just gotta pee, ya know? I realize this apparently doesn't apply in your case, but friends always seem to call at exactly the wrong moment and I'd hate to miss the scene where the boy hides in the toilet.

Modification

[borzwazie]

Someone else here already got part of this, but:

What is the potential for modification for this device? Who here has one, and has opened it?
Can anyone here tell us what kind of interface the internals have? Can we get in there and tool around with it? Can we get a PLIP or serial port connection working to this thing? Maybe add our own functionality to the menus and such? This whole project sounds cool as heck. Kudos to Tivo!

High performance Power PC

[cdr]

In case anyone was interested, according to this (towards the bottom), the processor that the TiVo uses is an IBM 403GCX PowerPC. Cheers!

Re:High performance Power PC

[Cramer]

That's a fairly standard PPC for embeded uses. What did you think they put in there, a G3?

Re:High performance Power PC

[Anonymous Coward]

A Power4 would be cool

Re:IR on Palm (-1 offtopic)

[My_Favorite_Anonymou]

Is there any third party manufactory plan to OEM a palm with extra powerful IR port that match the range of a normal remote. I can buy a IIIe-clone just for that.

I'll settle for a springbroad module if it's possible. Please, give me an excuse to buy a palm :)


CY

Re:Totally offtopic...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sure didn't seem to be up late last night.

That thing sounds fantastic

[slim]

A couple of considerations:

1) Recording stuff based on what you've enjoyed in the past is all well and good -- but won't your viewing get more and more homogenous? Maybe they could build communities, so that people could recommend stuff to each other, or something -- some human element to keep it from getting too samey.

2) I'd be interested to know how cheap/easy a tivo-alike would be to build. I'd love to have a direct-to-disk VCR which I could control remotely: if I could check its status from work, ask it to record a program via email (or via an SMS->email gateway), that would be so cool.
--

Re:That thing sounds fantastic

[GeorgeH]

1) Recording stuff based on what you've enjoyed in the past is all well and good -- but won't your viewing get more and more homogenous? Maybe they could build communities, so that people could recommend stuff to each other, or something -- some human element to keep it from getting too samey.

What you want is called "collaborative filtering." Imagine if the TiVo kept track of what you watch, and submitted it to their central database, along with everyone else's watching habits. They could then look for patterns, such as you watch the Tom Green show and you watch Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Then it could match your patterns against other people's patterns, ie most people who watch Tom Green and Space Ghost also tune in to the Daily Show. The TiVo could then suggest watching the Daily Show.

If people use it to plan events to watch, it could even notice that people who watch Space Ghost and Tom Green have programmed their TiVo's to record the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on PBS, and ask you if you want to do the same. Privacy concerns aside, this would be welcomed by most people, but wouldn't prevent homogeny in their TV viewing. Then again, most people don't mind homogeny, they even encourage it.

BTW, if this all sounds familiar, think back to the days of yore and Firefly.
--

TIVO Rebates

[Quack1701]

Anyone interested in purchasing a TIVO, I know of four different rebates out there.

1) $100 christmas rebate. Buy unit between dec 15 and dec 31 and you qualify!

2) $100 DirecTV rebate. You have DirecTV? Then you get $100 back.

3) Referral. $50 for you, $50 for existing customer. Anyone want me to refer them, send me (steven-tivorebate@evatt.com) some email and we can each make $50!

4) $20 rebate if you get the lifetime membership. I didn't do this, so I don't know the details. Check out www.tivo.com for more info.

I don't know about all the rebates, but I do know that the Christmas rebate can be used with any other rebate with upto $500 in total rebates.

I love the TIVO and would highly suggest it to anyone with a dish or more than basic cable.

Quack

HBO screws it up tho

[Smack]

Yep, mine does this too. I've occasionally seen it screw up though, in cases where there is a black screen either 30 seconds or a minute before a real commercial. It'll think that's the start of the commercial and you'll miss a little bit of program.

It tends to go nuts when you record HBO though. It spends a LOT of time looking for the commercials, unsuccesfully.

Slightly OT - How does it integrate?

[Scutter]

Lots of people have said how great it is, but how well does it integrate with a system that has DVD, CableTV and a VCR already attached? My DVD, for example, has no pass-throughs, so it's impossible to daisy-chain equipment. Is Tivo the same way?

Re:Slightly OT - How does it integrate?

[mstra]

Basically, after much ado and thought, here's how I set mine up (this describes integrating digital cable box, analog VCR, Tivo, DVD player, and receiver)

The cable comes out of the wall and into the digital cable box via coax. The coax then runs into the Tivo, where it then passes through to the VCR, where it passes through to the TV.

The digital cable box sends audio and video via composite RCA cables to the RCA inputs on the Tivo. The Tivo's RCA outs go to the TV/DBS ins (both audio and video) on my receiver.

The DVD player's optical audio in goes to the receiver, and the video composite goes to the receiver as well.

Finally, the receiver dumps out to the TV via composite RCA from the monitor port.

What does this accomplish? If I want to watch DVD's, well, that's the easiest part - just set the TV to "video in" and the receiver to "DVD" and rock and roll.

It also allows cable and VCR tapes to be viewed either in full stereo surround through the receiver, or through the TV's speakers (I added this ability for two reasons - one, I don't always want to have full-on surround when watching, for example, Headline News in the morning, and two - my roommate's not that techinical, and it's much easier for him to just use the TV's volume then training him properly on the care and feeding of my Denon).

I programmed the TV to only display channels "Video" and "3", so using the channel up/down on the TV sets you to the proper place.

The Tivo doesn't much care where it's sending out or through - it will send it's "outs" via the coax, even though you specify the composite in the setup. This is also how the VCR can be set to record from the Tivo.

Hope that was helpful. The only thing that's odd is I have a General Instruments cable box for my AT&T digital cable, and the front of the box reads "Dolby Digital." However, the only audio outs on the box are composite - no coax or optical digital outs. Hrm. I wonder how they are accomplishing AC-3 via composite?

(The last sentence was sarcasm)

m.

Inside a 30 hour TiVo

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who want to see the guts of a 30hr TiVo, visit http://www.dsidsi.com/tivo2.htm.

The TiVo is a remarkable device. It's even more impressive when you actually own one and use it for a while -- after about 2 weeks, you'll find that you don't care what's on live TV. There's ALWAYS something to watch on the TiVo, since it mines and records shows that it "thinks" you will like to watch.

BTW, according to the TiVo forum on avsforum.com, you cannot add a 2nd drive to a 14 hr TiVo to make it 30 hrs... each drive has to be 'blessed' for a specific unit. TiVo will have special upgrades for this -- a shame since it means we'll have to take our units to Best Buy for upgrades. Anybody want to try and hack the file system and start a drive blessing service? :)

Filesystems

[volsung]

Hmm, I did some poking around in the kernel source they provide, and I found their MFS (stands for Media File System) in the x86 kernel tree which looks like a hacked up version of NFS. In fact, their README describes it:

The kernel portion is simple and straightforward. It was created by cloning the kernel's MFS[sic, they mean NFS] client, locking it in small room in the East Tower, and turning Meenie Eenie loose with a sharp meat-cleaver.

It does NFS without TCP/IP (I guess that means no Ethernet in there!). I haven't found the server. They say it's in userspace, so they may not have chosen to provide it.

In the PPC kernel tree, the only new filesystem (at least for me) was bext2, a cut-and-paste version of ext2 that stores all of the data on disk in big-endian order so you don't have to cpu_to_le32()/le32_to_cpu() all of your int's. That certainly would make the filesystem incompatible with normal kernels, but it's a trivial change. Does anyone know if they even use this filesystem?

Does anyone have anymore information about their method to prevent the files from being transferred to the PC? bext2 can't be it; it's too simple a change.

Re:Filesystems

[slim]

I'm guessing they've licensed or written some proprietary filesystem designed for very low fragmentation (after all, fragmentation would be a disaster for real time video). Implementing an interface for userspace filesystems is nice, though. People could use that for all sorts of neat tricks -- akin to the /proc filesystem, but not in the kernel.
--

Re:Filesystems

[Cramer]

As I recall, there's a flag in the ext2 super block that specifies the byteorder. I know there was some discussion years ago in this respect for sparc/linux systems -- back then, they file systems were not compat.

As for "MFS"... it make perfect sense for them to bury it in userland. Thus they'd never even have to think about releasing it. Of course, a new file system isn't a modification of the kernel as per the GPL. (Transarc has never released the source code for the linux AFS modules)

Reading that makes me wonder just how badly the TiVo works internally... a userspace file system cloned off of the worst possible file system: NFS.

So, who's up for reverse engineering their filesystem?

Re:Filesystems

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't surprise me a bit if it's not a variant of BEOS's filesystem but living under a userland interface layer.

Re:Filesystems

[nrc]

Reading that makes me wonder just how badly the TiVo works internally... a userspace file system cloned off of the worst possible file system: NFS.

I have no clue whether it works badly internally, but externally where the photons hit my eyeballs, it works great.

Tivo is fantastic.

[mjackso1]

A friend of mine has one of these things, and it's really really neat. It exhibits some weird behavior occasionally, but that may be more the fault of an outdated cable box. The UI is great, and the preferences thing is really the killer app. Watching tv with it is like channel surfing in some world where tv only shows things you like....

Price

[AchillesA]

Gee and Tivo is only like $600 plus $10 a month. Yeesh definitely not worth it.

Re:Price

[lushmore]

TiVo is $400 after the current $100 rebate, and I doubt you would say that if you'd ever used one.

Re:Price

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is $499 for the base unit. Then one of three options for the service. $9.95 a month $100 a year $200 lifetime. So $699 worst case if you do it all. Also factor in $100 rebate right now if you buy before the holidays are up. $100 rebate for DirecTV subscribers. $50 rebate for you a friend you get to subscribe. Not bad at all.

Re:Price

[Anonymous Coward]

Get replayTV, no anal monthly charges

Re:Price

[larryj]

ReplayTV - $699.
Tivo - $499 + $199 for 'anal' lifetime subscription (or, you can pay 9.95/month or 99/year).

What's the difference?

Coupla questions

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems with VCR's is that you have to FF/RW to look for a suitable spot on the tape to put the next recording. With a disk based system, that's not a problem anymore--you just set up the start/end times and the OS will create a new file in the available blocks.

THAT'S ALL I REALLY NEED. I don't need this service to look up everynight what shows are going to be on. I can look that up in the newspaper myself. Do I still need to sign up with that service for a Tivo to work? Can't I just use it as essentially a hdd-based version of what I already do with a VCR?

And does anyone see anything coming down the pike doing the same thing on a PC where you can just put the channel/start/end times into a PC software app and it will automatically tell a video card connected to cable (like an all-in-wonder) to record a show to later watch on your monitor? (21" monitors will be relatively cheap in a year-or-so)

Meenie Eenie

[Larne]

This is way offtopic, but I just wanted to mention that the "Meenie Eenie" reference comes from the brilliant radio drama "The Fourth Tower of Inverness." The fact that at least some of their staff are fans makes me want to give them my money even more.

See ZBS for more info.

Nomenclatura Nitpickinae

[timothy]

Isn't it time we came up with an appropriate TLA for devices like the TIVO?

Digital VCR is an OK analogy, but since that means "Video Cassette Recorder," it's a little silly to describe a device based on a hard drive. "VR" unforuntunately has other connotations already, and besides would not be very descriptive. "Video Recorder" is all that would be left.

How about "DVR"? (Digital Video Recorder)
Or "CFT"? (Cool Toy)

timothy

Re:Nomenclatura Nitpickinae

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe marketing for Replay and TiVo are both using the designation PTV (Personal Television).

Re:Nomenclatura Nitpickinae

[kennylives]

Already done... it's called a Personal Television Reciever. Most of the references I've seen refer to it simply as a PTV - dropping the reference to reciever. Gotta love those marketing types.

Although, I think CFT fits just as well.

Re:Nomenclatura Nitpickinae

[powerlord]

Might just be me but when I see
PTV, all I think of is Pay TV (ie. expensive) ...

probably not what their marketing types want :)
- Reunite Gondwana-land

The service is what makes it really great

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use it without the service, but it's really really lame without it -- you basically have a VCR with random seek and 30 min time buffer, but no archival methods other than to dump to VCR (which is done in real-time).

Is that what you really want? I paid for the $199 lifetime service option and don't have to worry about a monthly fee ever.

LC-DAT

[borzwazie]

Please note that an audio-only version of this sort of thing exists. How difficult would it be to add video to this?

The LC-DAT Project

at http://www.mesterhazy.net/LCDAT/index.shtml.

This looks like a wonderful base to build this sort of project on.

Only dials once a day

[Anonymous Coward]

The TiVo does the "phone home" routine only once a day. If you're on the line, or the phone rings, or whatever, it will abort and try again later. I've never noticed mine dialing out.

Re:Totally offtopic...

[Locutus]

Uptime can be applied to other things besides single machines. Why do you thing MSFT NEEDS clustering in Windows? So they can get a server (group servers providing a SERVICE) to provide more then 70% uptime. The uptime of the slashdot.org website makes plenty sense to me.

for pooping, silly ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you eat a great big prime rib. Mmmmmmm .. prime rib .. *drooool*. Then you're watching "Friends" with your friends. Then you're like, man, I gotta go poop. So you get up to go poop and when you're done, you come back and you're friends are like "dude, Jennifer Aniston just flashed her boobies." So you missed her boobs because you were pooping. Now if you have the Tivo, you can "pause" the live TV so you don't miss anything while you're in the bathroom.

I pulled this from a Tivo product brochure.

Custom hardware

[amos nomor]

There is almost assuredly an ASIC on the Tivo
motherboard that does the realtime MPEG2 encoding.
This strikes me as the limiting factor for building your own Tivo.

I can see it now....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Damn, My TV segfaulted again....."

Re:I can see it now....

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Damn, My TV segfaulted again....."

I hope someone will port *BSD to it.
I want a stable VCR.

Re:I can see it now....

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have used windows 2000. No steenkin' *BSD or Lunix in my VCR!!!

Re:I can see it now....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this would give "blue screen" a different
meaning:

"Have you seen the fantastic match today?"

"No. I've recorded it so I can watch it when I'm back home. I just hope the dammned VCR has not bluescreened after 10 minutes as it did last time."

"Yeah, I know this. Things where better in the 1900s, when VCRs where mechanical with tape 'n stuff and Windows was just on desktop computers."

Russian Crackers trashed Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Last night Hemos mouthed off with some racist remarks directed at the Russian people. Bad idea. Shortly thereafter some Russian Crackers left their calling card, trashing Slashdot from limb to limb. I wonder why Hemos is so ignorant? He seems childishly naive. What the hell did he expect by pissing off the Russians?

Re:Russian Crackers trashed Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw, the M12 logo looks likea russian logo on tank hardware

can you poop in 15 seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

see my other post below.

It doesn't have what I want.

[Anonymous Coward]

The TiVo is cool and all: i.e. they use Linux (I asked ReplayTv what OS they use and they just said they "use a proprietary OS"), they obey the GPL, they use a PowerPC chip, all the features they offer, like the "Season Pass" option and stuff. But (IMHO) it's missing the most important features:

1) First, I'd like to be able to export the MPEGs to another computer. I don't want to record the digital movie on a video tape -- if that's what I'm going to do, what was the point of recording it digitally? I want to have a RAID setup where I can keep my movies. TiVo doesn't need to supply this, I can do this on my own.

2) Second, I'd like some kind of ethernet link to the unit. Plain-text connections are fine, because it wouldn't make sense to keep the TiVo anywhere but behind a firewall. Imagine you're at work and you have to stay late, but you want to see that episode of "Dawson's Creek" because Joey is going to break up with Dawson for like the bazillionth time. :) Of course there's no one at home for you to call and ask them to record it for you, BUT you own a TiVo so you ssh into your home network, then you telnet into the TiVo:

TiVo(R) v1.0
Running Linux kernel 2.1.109
login: root
Password:

~ # record

Welcome to TiVo(R).

What date do you want to record? 12/22/1999

What time do you want to start? 20:00:00

What time do you want to end? 21:00:00

What channel do you want to record? 14

What quality do you want to record at:
(B:Best, G:Good, L:Least)? g

Thank you.
TiVo will record on 12/22/1999 from 20:00:00 to 21:00:00 on channel 14 at a quality of 'Best'.

Is this correct? y

Program saved.

~ # logout

Tell me, would this, or would this not be a kick ass system. You get home, you watch the show, and then you ftp it to your RAID archive.

Re:It doesn't have what I want.

[VideoGrabber]

Yes, these are nifty ideas, but...

The digital offload isn't going to happen because program providers are extremely paranoid about copyright issues. If you could export digital copies (even with the MPEG2-compression artifacts), they're going to be really unhappy. Why would TiVo/Philips care? They have strategic partnerships with many companies, including broadcasters, etc. So this isn't going to be provided by TiVo.

The 2nd idea of remote access is slick, but somewhat unnecessary. If you tell TiVo you want a Season Pass to Dawson's Creek, you'll get every episode where they break up, even if they time shift it to a different slot, or move it to another day (on that channel). Or, if you just gives it Thumbs Up (and you have some free space on the drive) it will record it automatically for you as a Suggestion.

Since TiVo has a 2-week lookahead guide (actually 12-ahead, plus today and yesterday), it's less likely that a program will "sneak up" on you (like it can on the mini-dish systems with ~48-hour guides.

If there was some compelling reason for providing remote control of your TiVo, they could implement a web page where you'd edit your settings, and they'd be downloaded to your unit the next time it "phoned home". Potentially, they could phone your TiVo at home immediately, but that raises some issues that would have to be resolved first (currently the only access is when _your_ TiVo calls them).

A lot of the discussions here about modification possibilities are of the nerd/tekHead variety (which I share). However, if you haven't seen/played with a TiVo unit, be aware that it's designed as a mass-market consumer-electronics appliance (and revenue-generating Service). It's not designed for you (or me) to add your own tweaks. Even adding your own HD isn't feasible, since the drive requires a custom firmware chip so TiVo will recognize it and use it. These are only available on drives OEM'ed (and custom manufactured) by Quantum for TiVo/Philips.

So they've got _all_ the control over the system. About all you can do is make suggestions, and hope that sometime in the next 6 months to a year they get around to implementing them. And cross your fingers that the next phone call doesn't load new software into your unit that changes the operation in a way that you _don't_ like.

This isn't necessarily bad, but you need to know what you're getting into before you lay down your $$$. Or just pick one up and try it out for 30 days. That should answer most of your questions.

Re:It doesn't have what I want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only lamers make telnet commands to devices like this, its not hard to make a fully HTTP capable interface via port 80.

If you cant, then your a looser programmer living in the 70's, go back to school

Re:It doesn't have what I want.

[Frottage]

Anonymous Coward whined: >If you cant, then your a looser programmer living in the 70's, go back to school Yes, I recall the old days when I was a looser programmer... but I've tightened up quite a bit since then.

Replay for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to pay a subscription to use my VCR.

Re:Replay for me

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo + cost of lifetime subscription = Replay

The prices are the same... how they choose to market is different. Some people would rather pay less initially and pay $10/mo, and some want the prices all in one shot.

TiVo's interface is a lot more mature than Replay, but Replay has more "power" features that TiVo lacks.

Re:Replay for me

[Anonymous Coward]

amazon has replay for $699

And why should weuse TIVO when its doing a DIVX and telling its HQ what we watch

Re:Replay for me

[notsosilentbob]

Because it's not. Their website states that your viewing habits are NOT sent back to Tivo headquarters.

Multiple Servers (Was: Re:Uptime)

[MenTaLguY]

I believe there are now multiple servers.

But if I DON'T want the service,

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it still have a decent menu to manually setup record times for shows? Does it also have decent menu to select from the shows/files you've already recorded? (Again, I could really care less about the serrvice)

Re:But if I DON'T want the service,

[VideoGrabber]

Yes, manual recordings can still be scheduled via the normal (and easy to use) menu: day(s), time, channel, and quality mode.

All the shows you've already recorded will remain on your "Now Showing" list, with new entries simply identified as "Recorded on (date) at (time) on (channel)". That makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of what you've recorded, since you don't have the program name or description any more.

So I think it would do everything you want, without buying the Guide Service. One annoyance though... it seems like every day I get a reminder that my Service has expired, and I should call in to restart it right away. I haven't figured out how to shut that off yet.

TiVO Expansion

[gsfprez]

I emailed TiVO a long time ago.... and got one of their tech geeks responding..

he said that the things that are planned for TiVO next were built-in DSS/pay cable decoding (thus no longer requiring a separate box) and Firewire to allow for not only expansion.. but transport..

"Dood, i recorded X-Files last night... should i ring it by?"
"Yeah, and put a copy of Unreal Tourney on there, would ya? @Home crashed on me again so i couldn't download it."

To read the "Vanity Card"...

[Royster]

on Dharma & Greg, of course.

You don't need the service

[Therlin]

The service is what makes Tivo great. But if you want to manually enter the channel/times for recording, you can do that too.

linux-2.1? Old devel tree?

[fluffhead]

Are they stuck that far behind, to still be using 2.1 kernel devel tree (2.2 & 2.3 have been out how long now? We're on the verge of 2.4 any day now...), or are they using some other nonstandard numbering scheme? Any Tivo devel's wanna comment?
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak

Re:linux-2.1? Old devel tree?

[HamNRye]

Yes, they probably are using an old devel tree. In set-top boxes you don't worry about upgrading to the latest greatest, you make sure it works. With the amount of time that the Tivo has been out, it would seem that they were very early adopters of 2.1. Matter of fact, they probably started R&D with the devel model 2.0.

BTW, the 2.1 devel tree would be a prerelease of 2.2 anyway and the 2.4 is not yet stable.

~Jason

Re:linux-2.1? Old devel tree?

[puetzk]

2.1.24 was the 'stable' reference for PowerPC right up to the 2.2.0 release. It was parallel-developed and patched, fixed, etc, (just as 2.0 was while 2.1 was being worked out) but 2.0 was not usable on PowerPC.

So, they probably did their development of the box during the pre-2.2 timeframe and used the kernel tagged as 'stable' by the LinuxPPC team at that time.

Re:No. and wierd

[Maserati]

funnny, I was watching that game on KGO-TV in San Francisco. They lost their video feed but not the audio. We got a test pattern onscrren for a few seconds with the audio behind it. There was a few seconds with neither, just the station logo, then the normal signal resumed.

Re:No. and wierd

[Maserati]

funnny, I was watching that game on KGO-TV in San Francisco. They lost their video feed but not the audio. We got a test pattern onscreen for a few seconds with the audio behind it. There was a few seconds with neither, just the station logo, then the normal signal resumed.

Open TiVo = ATI Video Wonder?

[skommando]

Anyone heard about the soon be released ATI Video Wonder? (it was decided to postpone its release and pulled the FAQ) As far as I can remember this was inteded to be a low cost (250$?) Video Card able to do the same stuff as the TiVo: Real-Time-MPEG-Encoding and Decoding at the same time (equipped with C-Cubes DVDExplore chip)and software to use it in a similar way. This would be an open (or at least very hackable) PC-solution...

HAcked TViO's

[Lumpy]

Anyone done the best hack that the thing needs yet?
the removal of the code that MUST dial into their service in-order to set the record times?

What a crock, buy a $600USD device that I must pay $9.95 a month just to use it!

as soon as someone removes that code I'll buy one.

Re:HAcked TViO's

[nrc]

You don't need a subscription to set record times, only to get the guide listings.

Tivo lists at $499, not $600.

There, go buy.

Philips did NOT create TiVo

[Darkw]

Philips creates a box that uses TiVo's technology. TiVo is a company started by a couple of ex-SGI people. The TiVo service and the original hardware were/are completely designed by TiVo. The company has already annouced partnerships with DirectTV and Sony to produce boxes featuring the TiVo service. Eventually you'll see TV's and digital cable boxes coming with the hardware already inside, hell the Playstation 2 runs linux, maybe Sony will release a TiVo add-on for the thing.

Love it.

[nrc]

I've had my Tivo for about a month now and I love it. It changes the way you watch TV. The programs you want to watch are on when you want to watch them.

I don't care for the 14 hour quality much, the picture is okay, but the motion artifacts bug me. I record most shows medium quality and it looks better than the best VCR quality to me. Medium quality gives you about 8.5 hours which isn't bad.

Where I run into trouble is with sports. I record sports at Best quality to avoid any motion artifacts and that gives you only 4.5 hours on a 14 hour Tivo. When racing season rolls around again things are going to get pretty tight. By then I hope to have something with more capacity. Phillips is supposed to make 30 hour upgrades available and Sony is rumored to be coming out with a combined DBS/Tivo unit that could be worth looking into.

Format

[Anonymous Coward]

They Just format the drives for Contiguous acceess...

Porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

..Enough said

Where's the DVD drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Peace! At above 600$, I don't understand why they won't put a DVD drive on this box too so you don't have to buy a separate box. After all, they already have all the decoding hardware so I figure it's just a snap to add a simple drive.

Patent issues?

[Dr.Evil]

I saw some comments about creating an open-source version of TiVo (GDVR, maybe?) to run on a run-of-the-mill Linux machine (with a TV decoder, of course). I'm wondering - are there patent issues to be aware of? I'm guessing, since ReplayTV is competing with them directly, that the idea itself isn't patented. What about the underlying technology, though? Any thoughts?

Re: just buy a REPLAYTV

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buy a replaytv, its better, more room

Re: build your own

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to www.jpg.com, download PICVIDEO codec for windows and it can encode realtime MJPEG at 30fps, full screen on a P400 ok. Or you can stick with 352x288 and only use 12% CPU.

Yeah its windows, but hey, this is one time when free stuff sux compared to FREE Commercial stuff.
This codec kicks ass.
It would be 2010 before any linux weener coders make a realtime mJPEG codec for capture cards.

Re:IR on Palm (-1 offtopic)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://members.aol.com/gmayhak/tcl/hotlink.htm

Is fifteen feet good enough for you? 8-) It fits in the HotSync port.

TIVO = DIVX, replaytv is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Dump Tivo, its using DIVX ideals, telling its HQ what you are watching etc... what a joke.

Get a REPLAYTV.

Re:TIVO = DIVX, replaytv is better

[notsosilentbob]

Again, this is not true - the Tivo website FAQ spells it out clearly enough: they do not collect your viewing habits and sed it back to their server.

Look here if you don't believe me.

Re:TIVO = DIVX, replaytv is better

[larryj]

Although you make a compelling argument, I'll try to break through that airtight statement...

What makes you think Tivo is 'telling HQ' what you watch while Replay isn't? AFAIK, neither company transmits 'what you watch' info back to the server. Both pretty much do the same thing: dial up a server each night and download listing info. The potential is there for both companies to sell your info to marketing companies (although neither have stated any plans to do so). Why would Replay be above the temptation while Tivo has apparently (based on your in depth analysis) already signed the dotted line?

Re:TIVO = DIVX, replaytv is better

[nrc]

Pure nonsense. Tivo doesn't report anything to HQ and you can buy a lifetime subscription or just skip it all together if you don't want the service. ReplayTV includes the cost of the subscription into every unit whether you want it or not.

The choice between ReplayTV and Tivo is really about which hardware and user interface you prefer. I prefer Tivo. YMMV.

Re:TIVO = DIVX, replaytv is better

[Anonymous Coward]

It is much more likely that a company in cahoots with Amazon.com will record and xmit your viewing habits than one that supports and uses Linux--don't you think? Tivo uses Linux and seems to be playing as a good net citizen by returning source code (and even source code that isn't required by the GPL). Replay is working with Amazon.com and doesn't support the Linux community. Your choice. Boycott Amazon.com and Replay

Ati Video wonder, same hardware as TiVo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Initial press release claimed the MPEG compression was handled by the same chips as the TiVo.

Unfortunately ATI isn't releasing the product any time soon:

ATI constantly reviews its product lineup to ensure that our product mix offers an excellent selection of products, features and price points. During our recent review, we have decided to postpone the introduction of ATI-VIDEO WONDER to the retail market. We will be re-evaluating this decision at the end of January.

In the interim, ATI will continue to offer our existing award-winning line of multimedia and graphics upgrades that offer the features and price points demanded by our customers. We appreciate the interest you have shown in this product and trust that our current multimedia product lineup meets your needs.

You're missing the most important part.

[HamNRye]

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to such a thing would be the lack of the Tivo service. The station listings and keyword database. The most impressive feature of the Tivo service is the "record what you might like" scenario, and you would need up to date station listings and a cross referenced database that would know the shows by type.

The recording and playback of video is not new, and could still be done even without the GPL additions of Phillips. It is the service that is exciting and original. Perhaps some entrepenuer out there will offer the service with some basic hardware options and distribute it as a downloadable prog.

And to reply to some of the later posts after this, the 2 hard drive solution would not be as practical as a good cacheing scheme. Of course you will want the box SCSI, not IDE, and there should be no problem streaming out and in with video. And yes, compression tech would be a pain to implement. (Gee, you mean we're actually paying Phillips for having a decent product??)

~Jason

Wouldn't the ATI Video Wonder be more appropriate?

[Anonymous Coward]

EOF

Re:Totally offtopic...

[toolj23]

"but daddy, mine says..."

date: 7:19pm
uptime: 74 days, 10:15, 0 users,
load average: 0.11, 0.08, 0.02
processes: 49
yesterday: 554461
today: 1
ever: 219713147

Re:Totally offtopic... and then some.

[toolj23]

haha and now it says...

date: 7:52pm
uptime: 19 days, 9:42, 0 users,
load average: 1.18, 1.72, 2.35
processes: 139
yesterday: 571835
today: 1
ever: 219713147

OUCH, This could potentially hurt their profits!!

[bholmberg]

Linux is easy to hack, that is for the Linux hacker. Now, the 14 hr. model costs $499, while the 30 hr. model costs a wopping $999. What is the only differece between these two models? The size of the DRIVE. Now, for $400, you could buy about 4 8.6 GB drives in a software raid array. At this point, you would probably be left with about 1 full week (168 hrs.) of TV quality video. If I were to get one, I would like to try this.

methods ?

[serialk]

how does doing this help people who dont use it ?

NFS only version

[Steve_OC]

Sounds like they need a low-cost version to really get some volume going.

A good way to save money on manufacturing costs would be to toss the harddisk, and add a cheap 10/100 ethernet chipset in its place. Set the thing to bootp of a LAN, and use NFS to mount a remote area and store / retrieve the recordings.

Ditch the phone, and just use a text file on the LAN to get programming info. Save all state information to the NFS drive as well.

Now, if they could produce this and sell it for next to nothing - and make sure that it _cannot_ see SMB drives at all - everyone will have to convert their home networks to Unix/NFS to be able to use it.

Use it extensively in my business

[freeBill]

I have the 14-hour version. It seems to me like the 30-hour version is a bit of a rip-off since you're basically paying double price for just a larger hard drive.

I make my tapes (audio) off the Medium Quality setting and have no problem (I make backups on VHS, but have never been forced to fall back on them).

Overall, the system is extremely user-friendly and the company is as well. They solicit feedback and make periodic upgrades when your system calls up theirs to download schedules. Tech-support seems to be there most of the time (since it's intended for home use, I guess this makes sense; people watch the tube all the time).

Watch out for the hidden costs, though. Salesmen in the stores may tell you the schedule subscription is optional, but it's not. You have to pay $200 (lifetime of unit) or $10/month whether you use the schedules or not.

Re:Use it extensively in my business

[nrc]

Why do you say that the subscription is required? Everything I have read says that it is not. From their FAQ:

Without the TiVo Service the receiver can perform limited functions. It can only pause live TV, record, and playback programs that have been manually selected by time.

Obviously the functionality without the service is limited but no more so than a normal VCR.

Homogeneity

[freeBill]

All this feature really does is record things you might be interested in if you have unused space on the hard drive. There is a human element in that their professional TV watchers rate shows according to who might be interested based on similarities of taste.

But community-building is certainly within the scope of the system. Sounds like a good idea, and they have a phone number where you can make such suggestions. Overall, a very customer-oriented company.

You also have the ability to tell it what you like with "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons. Could this make your TV-watching homogeneous? Yes, but only if you only watched what it recommended.

The real advantage here is that, if it notices you always watch "Silicon Spin" on ZDTV and you get held up in traffic one day, it will automatically record it for you. Then you can come in five minutes after it has started and watch it from the beginning EVEN WHILE IT IS STILL RECORDING THE REST OF THE SHOW.

And, finally, you can turn the whole "recording things you didn't ask for" feature off. Then the homogeneity of your viewing habits will revert to whatever they might have been without TiVo.

All in all, having something recommend things you didn't choose will almost always decrease homogeneity more than it increases it.

Generally pretty well, with some exceptions

[freeBill]

I use it at work, where I have an extremely complex setup, using both cable and satellite dish and multiple VCRs as well as audio recorders.

Generally, it is designed to work with a set-top box and it integrates with a wide variety (obviously I haven't tested them all). They seem to imply it will work with cable without a set-top box, but I don't see how this could work since it doesn't seem to have an RF tuner (although it does offer RF output on Channel Three or Channel Four). Has anybody tried that?

The two main integration limitations - the above-mentioned missing tuner and the fact that it cannot switch easily back and forth between two sources (like satellite and digital cable). Admittedly this won't be a problem for most users, but the switching process requires that you go through the lengthy setup procedure each time.

Can you say "Internet Appliance"?

[freeBill]

Despite the fact that Dvorak likes to pretend there are no Linux Internet Appliances and that Microsoft is out in front on this one, this is the real thing. Still expensive, yes. But this is what the future has wrought. Or God. Or something.

Now, we should show them the true power of Open-Source by making some neat improvements. If TiVo continues to out-user-friendly ReplayTV because their source is open, the world will soon know the truth about Open Source.

Today TiVo, tomorrow the world!

Re:Buy a Tivo-ish System

[Drakino]

The DishPlayer from Dish Networks will do everything the Tivo does now here soon. Right now it pauses TV, allows searching of TV listings including descriptions, has a reminder system, and can record to a VCR. In the future, an upgrade will allow recording of shows to the standard Quantum hard drive they use, and allow fast foreward and rewind on TV shows.

The best thing about the DishPlayer is that it's all one integrated unit. And since Dish Networks broadcasts in MPEG2, the system records to the hard drive at a higher resolution then the Tivo.

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Re:You're missing .... - scheduling

[Gigs]

Sorry I disagree that the scheduling is the easy part. A little Perl and LWP and some MySQL, you can look at tvguide.com or gist.com and get all you local programming. Use dialup to your ISP or install and ethernet card and uses you cable modem.

Re:Buy a Tivo-ish System

[Drakino]

Well I just recieved the update to my unit and activated the service. (Dish Networks released the update on the 15th, but the system only checks for updates when powered on, and since I keep my unit on 24x7, the rearrangement of the equipment triggered the check)

The rewind feature came in handy today when I stopped watching a movie on DVD. A show that I wanted to watch was on, and since the unit is always recording, I hit rewind and watched the entire show minus the commercials.

Right now I am playing with the record. The system has no record quality settings, but thats understandable since it would have to recompress the MPEG 2 stream it is saving to disk.

The record will come in handy for any shows I want to watch while at work. And it's also useful for the Babylon 5 episodes on at 5am.

The system is nicer then the Tivo for a few reasons now. One is not having to feed it a phone line. The system gets all it needs from the satelite. The second is that it gives me all the nice Personal TV features that I want without the stupid ones the Tivo has, like the voting. True, the system has WebTV and games built in, but none of those features waste space on the slim remote. It also comes with the ability to record to a VCR instead by sending out the record and stop IR signals. Last, since it uses a standard IDE hard drive, upgrades are just a screw driver and spare hard drive away.

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