About the only game I know of that would benefit from it is Doom 3. There is an "ultra high res" texture mode which uncompresses all of the game textures. This mode needs more than 256MB of RAM for texture storage.
Full blown DVD trading has been going on over Usenet for quite some time. And let's not forget that DVD's are compressed. Using mpeg4 is not necessarily going to make the image quality worse. Homegrown rips are not a fair comparison, as they are typically using an automated analysis of the source data. Commercial DVD compression is tweaked to allow for more key frames during heavy motion sequences. The same can be done for DIVX or mpeg4.
The last rumors I heard were of a flash memory system to replace the hard drive. This would solve the problem of being prone to damage and also could be made proprietary to prevent the piracy problem. The reason the hard drive helps with piracy is that you can replace the 8Gig model with a standard IDE drive of larger capacity. Yes this requires modding the Xbox which opens you to the possibility of being banned on Xbox live (although modern mod chips have a mechanism where you can turn them off). With the mod in place you load an alternate bios and then can run either Linux or a custom "dashboard" application. From there you can rip games, dvds etc. to the hard disk or you could download and install the game over a network. To be fair Xbox modding is not all about piracy, there is excellent media player software available for divx, mpg, mp3, ogg etc. playback.
Apple (at least the business side) hasn't had that fun-lovin geek spirit for a hell of a long time. This has nothing to do with the success of the iPod. Jobs is and has been a cut throat businessman for ages. Apple is a big company and it's legal arm is very protective of Apple IP. If you want warm fuzziness, look to Wozniak. There is a reason he's no longer a big part of Apple. If you want business and market sense that has allowed Apple to exist as the only viable commercial alternative to Windows based PCs, look to Jobs.
It's a good thing Tivo used Linux as their OS
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 1
I mean if they had went with BSD, they would be dead already!
Console game controls are heavily adjusted for the gamepad. I think you would really need a seperate "mouse" mode for this to be effective. I much prefer PC gaming to console for FPS. On the console you need to be able to give up the desire for absolute control. Most games have an auto aim function which allows you to tap the stick to snap it close to an opponent. Takes some getting used to but it works decently.
You know what, I do to! I have it emulated on my Xbox and it plays great with dual analog controllers. It is an amazingly intense game. I have to admit the highest score I've ever had so far is around 130,000 points at level 8. One of my all time favorite arcade games of all time!
They changed the developers but the code base for KOTOR 2 was based off of the source from the original hence without additional bug fixing it suffers from similar problems. One possible source of the problem could be that the engine was built with the Xbox graphic architecture in mind (nvidia based).
This happened to me with Sim City 3000. The key could be used to register an online account to be able to download additional content. Well, when I tried to set it up it said that my key was already in use. Phone calls, emails, sending a scan of the cd case with serial numnber all resulted in nothing. I never got to register and I never got the additional content. This was bad enough for bonus content, but at least I could play the main game. I've never bought a Maxis product since.
The main problem with this is that Tivo would be competing in the software market along with a number of other players (sageTV, snapstream, etc.) or the convert your pc into a dvr hardware market such as elgato, haupage, ati etc. The only real advantage they would have is their high profile name and the interface. The big disadvantage is that unlike the "under-the-rader" guys, because the name is known, I would guarentee that Tivo would still need to DRM it's recordings. The other thing is that Tivo's market is not the pc/Mac user who wants to play with video, its the masses who just want something easy to use to plug into their TV. And that market is going to get squished by the cable companies. So sure they COULD switch markets, but the profit level for a niche application versus a mass market consumer electronic market is vastly different. I mean you are even talking about on the Mac - which is only a 5% or so of the computer market. Probably the best thing Tivo can do is license itself to cable companies for their boxes. Unfortunately it's probably too late for this. I know so many people who say "I have Tivo" when they really have a cable company dvr. Hell, even the cable company dvrs offer some advantages over the Tivo (i.e. dual tuners). On the hardware side Tivo really has little to offer. If you look at the guts it uses standard hardware video processors and a powerpc chip designed for embedded applications. Don't get me wrong, I love my Tivo, but I hate somethings about it too. But the features I would want which are those that pc media center software offer are not important to the mass market.
Um, so you take tivo hardware connect it to the Mac mini and display the tivo interface on the Mac. So exactly how is this better than oh say, having a standalone tivo plugged into a tv?
Yeah my argument was that the setting is set to Medium by default and there is no mention of it during the install. I had to go poking around to find the source of the problem. My girlfriend just thought her computer was acting up. It would be nice if it told you during the install. Also having a server element which eats cpu when idle like that just seems to be bad programming. Unless the app is doing something odd or spyware-ish in the background. I'm not sure why it was causing problems. It may have been the Tivo app plus other things such as p2p running in the background causing the overall trouble but the problem did disappear when the tivo service was set to low or shut off (and the p2p still running). Not sure what speed you are burning at, I have a 16X burner. Yep, I use Nero too. Most people may not realize they can and Sonic MyDVD is crap. I got it bundled with a DVDR at work. I am a little annoyed that Nero only bundles their crap OEM version with burners now. I guess it works cus they got my cash to upgrade to full (and no I didn't want to go serial hunting to warez it).
You have go to be kidding. It even got worse when System 8 would chastise you for "not shutting down properly" when you were forced to hard reset the locked up bastard. Gah! Nothing like that smiling little MacOS face telling me I've been a bad boy and to be more careful next time. YOu! YOU! Be more careful! You don't overwrite other programs memory space and trash my work! Oh yeah and the crash dialog boxes may as well have been labeled "Fuck me" for all the good they did. Force quit? Yeah that worked well. Should have been labelled "Finish Crashing".
I agree completely. Most people don't even care about the DRM. I really don't care much. I pull the shows off to free up space or to watch them in another part of the house. Once I've watched it I delete it. For the warez scene I'm sure it's much less of a pain to rip it via another method. If I wanted a show for archival purpose I'd probably be more likely to buy the DVD if available or bit torrent it then rip it off the Tivo. Especially considering the time it would take to edit out the commercials. But the people most likely to be stressed by the DRM (the 1%) are also the ones most likely to be able to figure out the methods to circumvent it. So everyone is happy and no damage is done.
I just got my upgrade to support the Tivo to Go transfers last week. It took a super long time to get the service upgrade which was annoying. I've also noticed a few lame things about the software.
Tivo Desktop installs a server component on the PC (I believe for handling the sharing of pictures and music). By default the resource usage for this server is set to "Medium. Use this if you use your PC for light tasks such as word processing." Well, this medium setting uses a lot of CPU time. So much that it caused my DVD burning software to take twice as long as usual and ran the buffer very close to underrun. Normally I can burn DVDs while running other applications without a problem. Once I shutdown the Tivo server app, everything returned to normal. Considering the computer is a Pentium 4 3.2GHz I was amazed at how the Tivo server screwed up performance - especially considering it was idle (no transfers, no music playing on the tivo).
As others have noted, the file transfer time is very slow. I guess this may be due to the Tivo's slow processor and the fact that the Tivo is still functioning (recording and playing back etc.) while the transfer is going.
Supposedly the Tivo Series 2 units have USB 2.0 ports and the drivers with the 7.1 upgrade are supposed to enable USB 2.0 - but apparently this hasn't resulted in much of a speed gain. There are some notes on this in the Tivo forums.
The media files you pull over are protected with DRM. They are linked to your Tivo device's media access key and require a password to play. There are a few methods circulating for stripping the DRM such as this one using GraphEdit:
The files are MPEG2 which means they are pretty darn big. You can expect about 1.2 gigabytes for an hour show at medium quality. Despite the huge file size, the image quality on the shows I have transfered isn't that great. The output seems grainy compared to video caps I've done straight off of a composite video cable. The signal on the TV is clean.
The last problem I've had is with playback of the Tivo files on Windows 2000. I have a DVD player installed and can play DVDs fine. I also have the AC3 codec installed so audio works fine (for example on Divx files with AC3 audio). But MPEG2 playback on any sort except standard DVD comes out squished. The horizontal aspect ratio is messed up, so everyone looks anorexic. Does anyone know how to fix this? I have no problems playing back on Windows XP.
So while it's nice to finally be able to move stuff off when the Tivo is getting full (and no I don't want to hack it - if I broke the Tivo the girlfriend would kill me) the service certainly has room for improvement. Also the fact that the upcoming software for burning the shows to DVD (Sonic MyDVD) is being sold not included with Tivo service is pretty lame.
Nothing to do with the money you do make. No high end game content. (Getting to make a new character at lvl 50, is not exactly exciting). No player owned anything (i.e. apartment, super base, frickin telephone booth for that matter). Repetitive quests. Sure the story text changes but not much else. No player vs. player. (ok this should sort of be in the next update)
Seriously, I am a CoH player and have been for about 7 months. I do enjoy the game and it's pretty impressive for me to find something that entertains me for that long. That being said, lately I have been getting bored as the high end game degenerates into a grind. Once I hit lvl 50 (I'm 46 currently and yes I don't have enough time to play to have 8 lvl 50s like some people) I will probably hang up my tights at least until City of Villains comes out. Especially if they do get the super/secret base thing in there. I wish there was more to SuperGroups than just being a convenient way to hookup with your friends. The game is a good start, but I think more features are going to need to be added to keep long term players.
I played in the beta weekend events. Guild Wars is definately an interesting game, but the feel really is more Diablo. For example the starter town is very samll and even has a bunch of guys standing around that serve the same sort of functions as in Diablo. The weaponsmith, the crafter who can combine items, the level up trainer etc. As far as I could tell, the quest party size maxes out at 4. You can also get NPCs to join you in your party if you can't find live players which was a neat feature. The one element I really didn't like was that you can only take a limited number of skills with you on a quest. You have sort of a skill load out. If I recall correctly, you get to take 4 skills from your primary class and 2 from your secondary (all characters are dual classed, such as fighter/necromancer etc.). You can change your buildout for each quest. The game engine is very nice looking but suffers from some odd limitations. You can't jump, so any difference in terrain level acts as a barrier. You may need to wind your way down a path rather than slide down a hill for example. If directly compared to World of Warcraft, it feels much more limited and sort of restrictive (I'm not a huge WoW fan, but I did play the open beta).
Considering it was his home computer which may be on a network shared with other home computers or at least shared by other users - no AV is not very smart. Sure you may not click on the shiny happy virus email, but your spouse or kids might. I would definately think that the Microsoft network is probably running some type of anti virus, at the very least on the email server. At my office we run our email through an external virus scanner from one vendor, then scan it internally with a product from another vendor and last of all a desktop anti virus watching the workstations. Seem like overkill? Well consider that since Nimda hit us before our anti virus vendor had a scanning engine update we haven't relied on a single source for protection.
If you have played Guild Wars and you have played a more traditional MMO, you would realize that Guild Wars is more like Diablo with a 3D interface. Diablo as well did not have a monthly fee, so I hardly see why Guild Wars model is considered so ground breaking. Smaller instanced zones, not much for towns, limited economy, small party size, limited crafting, no player buildings etc. Guild Wars will also charge extra for expansions featuring new zones or new character classes. Most MMOs develop additional content that is included with your monthly subsription. I find that when I am into an MMO I usually spend less a month on gaming. Since a new game can run upwards of $50, paying $12 or $15 a month is cheaper than purchasing even one new game. Considering I probably purchase 2-4 games a month when not heavily into an MMO.
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About the only game I know of that would benefit from it is Doom 3. There is an "ultra high res" texture mode which uncompresses all of the game textures. This mode needs more than 256MB of RAM for texture storage.
Full blown DVD trading has been going on over Usenet for quite some time.
And let's not forget that DVD's are compressed. Using mpeg4 is not necessarily going to make the image quality worse. Homegrown rips are not a fair comparison, as they are typically using an automated analysis of the source data. Commercial DVD compression is tweaked to allow for more key frames during heavy motion sequences. The same can be done for DIVX or mpeg4.
I for one will NOT be buying an iPod.
I won mine for free at a seminar. SO there.
Just what we need. PCs labeled as being "bristley".
"I would have loved to buy that powerful Athlon 64, but the system bristled with ports, unlike the smooth surface of my legacy free Mac mini."
The line:
"Microsoft has since removed that drive to lower system costs"
Implies that the Xbox no longer has any hard drive. Which of course is not true, just like a lot of errors in this article.
The last rumors I heard were of a flash memory system to replace the hard drive. This would solve the problem of being prone to damage and also could be made proprietary to prevent the piracy problem.
The reason the hard drive helps with piracy is that you can replace the 8Gig model with a standard IDE drive of larger capacity. Yes this requires modding the Xbox which opens you to the possibility of being banned on Xbox live (although modern mod chips have a mechanism where you can turn them off).
With the mod in place you load an alternate bios and then can run either Linux or a custom "dashboard" application. From there you can rip games, dvds etc. to the hard disk or you could download and install the game over a network.
To be fair Xbox modding is not all about piracy, there is excellent media player software available for divx, mpg, mp3, ogg etc. playback.
Apple (at least the business side) hasn't had that fun-lovin geek spirit for a hell of a long time. This has nothing to do with the success of the iPod.
Jobs is and has been a cut throat businessman for ages. Apple is a big company and it's legal arm is very protective of Apple IP.
If you want warm fuzziness, look to Wozniak. There is a reason he's no longer a big part of Apple. If you want business and market sense that has allowed Apple to exist as the only viable commercial alternative to Windows based PCs, look to Jobs.
I mean if they had went with BSD, they would be dead already!
Console game controls are heavily adjusted for the gamepad. I think you would really need a seperate "mouse" mode for this to be effective.
I much prefer PC gaming to console for FPS. On the console you need to be able to give up the desire for absolute control. Most games have an auto aim function which allows you to tap the stick to snap it close to an opponent. Takes some getting used to but it works decently.
You know what, I do to! I have it emulated on my Xbox and it plays great with dual analog controllers.
It is an amazingly intense game. I have to admit the highest score I've ever had so far is around 130,000 points at level 8.
One of my all time favorite arcade games of all time!
They changed the developers but the code base for KOTOR 2 was based off of the source from the original hence without additional bug fixing it suffers from similar problems.
One possible source of the problem could be that the engine was built with the Xbox graphic architecture in mind (nvidia based).
The whole ball game has changed with OSX which is nice. OSX benefits tremendously from it's underlying BSD UNIX basis. A clear boon for developers.
This happened to me with Sim City 3000. The key could be used to register an online account to be able to download additional content. Well, when I tried to set it up it said that my key was already in use.
Phone calls, emails, sending a scan of the cd case with serial numnber all resulted in nothing. I never got to register and I never got the additional content.
This was bad enough for bonus content, but at least I could play the main game.
I've never bought a Maxis product since.
The main problem with this is that Tivo would be competing in the software market along with a number of other players (sageTV, snapstream, etc.) or the convert your pc into a dvr hardware market such as elgato, haupage, ati etc. The only real advantage they would have is their high profile name and the interface. The big disadvantage is that unlike the "under-the-rader" guys, because the name is known, I would guarentee that Tivo would still need to DRM it's recordings.
The other thing is that Tivo's market is not the pc/Mac user who wants to play with video, its the masses who just want something easy to use to plug into their TV. And that market is going to get squished by the cable companies.
So sure they COULD switch markets, but the profit level for a niche application versus a mass market consumer electronic market is vastly different. I mean you are even talking about on the Mac - which is only a 5% or so of the computer market.
Probably the best thing Tivo can do is license itself to cable companies for their boxes. Unfortunately it's probably too late for this. I know so many people who say "I have Tivo" when they really have a cable company dvr. Hell, even the cable company dvrs offer some advantages over the Tivo (i.e. dual tuners).
On the hardware side Tivo really has little to offer. If you look at the guts it uses standard hardware video processors and a powerpc chip designed for embedded applications.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Tivo, but I hate somethings about it too. But the features I would want which are those that pc media center software offer are not important to the mass market.
Um, so you take tivo hardware connect it to the Mac mini and display the tivo interface on the Mac. So exactly how is this better than oh say, having a standalone tivo plugged into a tv?
Thanks! I'll try this out when I get home. :)
Yeah my argument was that the setting is set to Medium by default and there is no mention of it during the install. I had to go poking around to find the source of the problem. My girlfriend just thought her computer was acting up. It would be nice if it told you during the install. Also having a server element which eats cpu when idle like that just seems to be bad programming. Unless the app is doing something odd or spyware-ish in the background.
I'm not sure why it was causing problems. It may have been the Tivo app plus other things such as p2p running in the background causing the overall trouble but the problem did disappear when the tivo service was set to low or shut off (and the p2p still running). Not sure what speed you are burning at, I have a 16X burner.
Yep, I use Nero too. Most people may not realize they can and Sonic MyDVD is crap. I got it bundled with a DVDR at work. I am a little annoyed that Nero only bundles their crap OEM version with burners now. I guess it works cus they got my cash to upgrade to full (and no I didn't want to go serial hunting to warez it).
Hard to hate something like that?
You have go to be kidding. It even got worse when System 8 would chastise you for "not shutting down properly" when you were forced to hard reset the locked up bastard. Gah! Nothing like that smiling little MacOS face telling me I've been a bad boy and to be more careful next time. YOu! YOU! Be more careful! You don't overwrite other programs memory space and trash my work!
Oh yeah and the crash dialog boxes may as well have been labeled "Fuck me" for all the good they did. Force quit? Yeah that worked well. Should have been labelled "Finish Crashing".
I agree completely. Most people don't even care about the DRM.
I really don't care much. I pull the shows off to free up space or to watch them in another part of the house. Once I've watched it I delete it.
For the warez scene I'm sure it's much less of a pain to rip it via another method. If I wanted a show for archival purpose I'd probably be more likely to buy the DVD if available or bit torrent it then rip it off the Tivo. Especially considering the time it would take to edit out the commercials.
But the people most likely to be stressed by the DRM (the 1%) are also the ones most likely to be able to figure out the methods to circumvent it.
So everyone is happy and no damage is done.
As others have noted, the file transfer time is very slow. I guess this may be due to the Tivo's slow processor and the fact that the Tivo is still functioning (recording and playing back etc.) while the transfer is going.
Supposedly the Tivo Series 2 units have USB 2.0 ports and the drivers with the 7.1 upgrade are supposed to enable USB 2.0 - but apparently this hasn't resulted in much of a speed gain. There are some notes on this in the Tivo forums.
The media files you pull over are protected with DRM. They are linked to your Tivo device's media access key and require a password to play. There are a few methods circulating for stripping the DRM such as this one using GraphEdit:
TiVo To Go MPEG2 Decrypting
The files are MPEG2 which means they are pretty darn big. You can expect about 1.2 gigabytes for an hour show at medium quality. Despite the huge file size, the image quality on the shows I have transfered isn't that great. The output seems grainy compared to video caps I've done straight off of a composite video cable. The signal on the TV is clean.The last problem I've had is with playback of the Tivo files on Windows 2000. I have a DVD player installed and can play DVDs fine. I also have the AC3 codec installed so audio works fine (for example on Divx files with AC3 audio). But MPEG2 playback on any sort except standard DVD comes out squished. The horizontal aspect ratio is messed up, so everyone looks anorexic. Does anyone know how to fix this? I have no problems playing back on Windows XP. So while it's nice to finally be able to move stuff off when the Tivo is getting full (and no I don't want to hack it - if I broke the Tivo the girlfriend would kill me) the service certainly has room for improvement. Also the fact that the upcoming software for burning the shows to DVD (Sonic MyDVD) is being sold not included with Tivo service is pretty lame.
There are methods you can use to strip out the DRM from the .tivo files:
TiVo To Go MPEG2 Decrypting
This is one method, there are a few others.
Well, let's see:
Nothing to do with the money you do make.
No high end game content. (Getting to make a new character at lvl 50, is not exactly exciting).
No player owned anything (i.e. apartment, super base, frickin telephone booth for that matter).
Repetitive quests. Sure the story text changes but not much else.
No player vs. player. (ok this should sort of be in the next update)
Seriously, I am a CoH player and have been for about 7 months. I do enjoy the game and it's pretty impressive for me to find something that entertains me for that long.
That being said, lately I have been getting bored as the high end game degenerates into a grind. Once I hit lvl 50 (I'm 46 currently and yes I don't have enough time to play to have 8 lvl 50s like some people) I will probably hang up my tights at least until City of Villains comes out. Especially if they do get the super/secret base thing in there. I wish there was more to SuperGroups than just being a convenient way to hookup with your friends.
The game is a good start, but I think more features are going to need to be added to keep long term players.
I played in the beta weekend events. Guild Wars is definately an interesting game, but the feel really is more Diablo. For example the starter town is very samll and even has a bunch of guys standing around that serve the same sort of functions as in Diablo. The weaponsmith, the crafter who can combine items, the level up trainer etc.
As far as I could tell, the quest party size maxes out at 4. You can also get NPCs to join you in your party if you can't find live players which was a neat feature.
The one element I really didn't like was that you can only take a limited number of skills with you on a quest. You have sort of a skill load out. If I recall correctly, you get to take 4 skills from your primary class and 2 from your secondary (all characters are dual classed, such as fighter/necromancer etc.). You can change your buildout for each quest.
The game engine is very nice looking but suffers from some odd limitations. You can't jump, so any difference in terrain level acts as a barrier. You may need to wind your way down a path rather than slide down a hill for example.
If directly compared to World of Warcraft, it feels much more limited and sort of restrictive (I'm not a huge WoW fan, but I did play the open beta).
Considering it was his home computer which may be on a network shared with other home computers or at least shared by other users - no AV is not very smart.
Sure you may not click on the shiny happy virus email, but your spouse or kids might.
I would definately think that the Microsoft network is probably running some type of anti virus, at the very least on the email server.
At my office we run our email through an external virus scanner from one vendor, then scan it internally with a product from another vendor and last of all a desktop anti virus watching the workstations. Seem like overkill? Well consider that since Nimda hit us before our anti virus vendor had a scanning engine update we haven't relied on a single source for protection.
If you have played Guild Wars and you have played a more traditional MMO, you would realize that Guild Wars is more like Diablo with a 3D interface. Diablo as well did not have a monthly fee, so I hardly see why Guild Wars model is considered so ground breaking. Smaller instanced zones, not much for towns, limited economy, small party size, limited crafting, no player buildings etc. Guild Wars will also charge extra for expansions featuring new zones or new character classes.
Most MMOs develop additional content that is included with your monthly subsription. I find that when I am into an MMO I usually spend less a month on gaming. Since a new game can run upwards of $50, paying $12 or $15 a month is cheaper than purchasing even one new game. Considering I probably purchase 2-4 games a month when not heavily into an MMO.