I called Dell a few days ago looking to get pricing information. It turns out, with their low-end offering in the Dimension line, you can choose Wordperfect Office, MS Office SBE, or MS Office Pro -- bt not MS Works. On a low-end PC. WTF?
So I called Dell, asking if they could override this and somehow install Works. The rep said: "No." I said "No big deal I guess. I have Office 97 Pro from an old PC which I can install instead." This got him revved up.
Rep: "Well, sir, that's not legal."
Even after explaining that I bought this product at a retail store, and told him that the old PC was being tossed because it was no longer working, I could hear that he still wanted to lecture me.
So I reiterated, "I'm literally throwing out this computer because it doesn't work -- my license therefore is unused, and I can install it on my new PC, right?"
Rep: "That's illegal. Throwing away a PC is illegal. You might be able to see if someone would take it for parts if you gave them $30 or $40, but you can't just throw it away. You might be able to ask the manufacturer to take it back."
I did know this already, and had planned to bring it to my local waste facility for recycling.
But here's the punchline...
Me: "It's a Dell. Will you take it back?" Rep: "No."
This might not be suitable as a gift, but older, used audio components make a better computer-speaker system than just about anything I've come across from computer-speaker manufacturers.
I've got an 28-year-old Harmon-Kardon receiver (usually around $30-$40 on ebay) hooked up to Boston Acoustics HD5 bookshelf speakers (bought them years ago for under $100). It sounds FANTASTIC. If I was a gamer, I might buy bigger speakers or a sub, but I'm thrilled with the performace for playing back music (and I'm not just talking MP3's here - which sound worse as the quality of your amp/speakers increase). There's a reason why this amp weighs 20lbs., and that has to do with power handling capabilities, heat sinks, and rugged, metal construction.
My speakers aren't.5" thick, suctioned to the table, transparent, or otherwise fancy. They are, however, about 7" deep, giving them decent bass response for a bookshelf speaker. While the 5" driver won't shake the room, its output is more than sufficient, considering you sit only about a foot away from them.
Speakers designated for use with computers are typically made using very cheap components. Before this, I had a set of Altec-Lansing computer speakers, with a sub, that lasted not even a year before unexplicably falling silent. But my old HK amp has been going strong for... 28 years!
As I said above, giving an old, used stereo might not be the way you'd prefer to say "Happy Holidays" - but if there's anyone else reading this looking to buy a decent speaker setup, consider first searching your local garage sale, goodwill store, flea market, or online auctioneer. And just remember - heavier is BETTER.
Take a look at the information for filmmaker Peter Hall's lawsuit against Earthlink. He's been fighting them since 1997, after they wrongly identified him as a spammer and shutdown his account. His film Delinquent was just about to be released, and Earthlink's refusal to release his account from (incorrectly identified) "spammer" status caused him to miss a number of critical emails related to the film's release and distribution.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 1998 --- The Law Office of Andrew Grosso announced today the filing of a civil complaint against EarthLink Network, Inc., an Internet Service Provider headquartered in Pasadena, California. The complaint charges EarthLink with breach of contract, libel, negligence, and a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in relation to the company's abrogation of electronic communications services it provided to the plaintiffs, as well as to its subsequent appropriation of these subscribers' e-mail. The complaint was filed today in Manhattan, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
I hate to jump to "lawsuit!", but this is an instance where a sternly-worded letter from a lawyer might at the very least get their attention. Unfortunately, you'll end up spending more than the stolen funds to pay said lawyer.
Any lawyers out there willing to help out AbiWord pro bono?
These units aren't the cheapest VOIP solution, but among the easiest. They come in FXO and FXS flavors, which means (check me on this) you can hookup one end to a phone company provided POTS line (FXO?) and extend that to a remote location (FXS?), or hookup one side to your PBX and another to a POTS phone at the remote office (both FXS?), or PBX-to-PBX (??), or whatever.
The have a demo. You call a toll-free number which rings into a MultiVOIP device co-lo'd at some ISP in Chillicothe, OH (I've been to Chillicothe - it's sufficiently remote to convince me that it would work beautifully over a half-decent connection). That device connects you to a (very nice, I might add) sales rep at Multitech.
Tivo should have been mentioned in this article. It's quite a give and take situation between Tivo, Inc. and the tivo-hacker community. On one hand, they didn't object to an ethernet card being un-officially added to the unit so that users could bypass the daily dialup. In fact, they started officially supporting the hack in the newer (3.0) versions of the software.
Yet at the same time, they strictly prohibit mpeg streams being extracted off the hard drive. Popular opinion has it that one or more established Tivo hackers have the ability to cleanly extract data, but Tivo threatened that they'd stop being hacker-friendly if the code was ever released.
There are a couple of small groups out there currently trying to extract data from the Tivo, but it's not an easy, 100% reliable procedure.
Looking at my post, I'm afraid that admitting to running linux on a 200MHz machine, Cyrix no less, makes me sound a little less than serious about my setup. I should point out that this is a thinknic PC with a HDD added on, running sendmail, imapd, apache, sshd, and a few other general linux thingies. I don't run X. It's been running for about 2 years, downed only a handful of times when I felt like updating the kernel. It's small and sits in the corner with no complaints.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is how long it takes to compile. Thus, this project is right up my alley. Good job, folks!
I'd love a speedup, but the time I'd save compiling would be wasted on having to fully install another linux box. Being able to boot a CD with a live linux distro and this software, and then connect to these slave machines to help compile would be immensely helpful. My linux box is a Cyrix 200MHz PC. Being able to stick a CD into my Athlon 1800 to help the compile would be fabulous.
My wish: slim down the memory requirements. Before anyone flames me with "memory is cheap", consider this:
I've got a few idle P100 laptops sitting around. I don't know if the cpu is fast enough, but if it is, this would be a perfect application (especially since most people consider these things useless these days). My only limitation: older laptops like this one have limited RAM. If we could get this to run on 8mb, or even 16mb, I'd be a much happier person.
I suspect a chunk of this RAM is setup for a RAM disk. Perhaps a hard drive install could be an option?
I have two dead cards, both Dell nVidia GeForce 2, which were fried because the fans stopped working. One card has no video at all, while another developed a problem where there are massive vertical lines throughout the display.
Since I didn't need performace on one of the machines, I replaced one card with a low-end card with no fan.
Check out Universal Display Corp, one of the major players in the field. From their web site:
Imagine a world where the news and information you want to see is available in non-traditional ways -- you can find the weather and the latest stock quotes from the ultimate handheld communication device -- the size of a pen.
These and other exciting technologies are being developed and commercialized by Universal Display Corporation, a world leader in the development of innovative Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED) technology for future generations of flat panel displays, lasers and other light generating devices.
This would be far more useful to me as a way to replace the vast array of wall warts and chaotic tangle of black wires which warm my feet.
I'd chop off the devices' wall warts and replace them with some sort of quick-disconnect plug on both sides of the cut wire; this way I could use the wall wart again if I was out of this environment.
EE's, help me here. Let's say I have a single 24VDC bench supply (I'm starting at 110v at home)at 15-20A. I'm thinking that for any item drawing under, say, 500ma, I could build mini step-down regulators (in something like 35mm film canisters) using something in the 78xx series of regulators (i.e. 7805 for 5v). I'd put one of those quick disconnect plugs (mentioned above) on the output, so it would easily and quickly interface with the device.
As for the input to these regulators, I'd like to be able to run one 6-ft. wire around my equipment and let the regulators somehow "vampire" tap (I *think* that what it's called) this one wire (perhaps 12 gauge stranded? thicker? help?!), so the number of wires around my setup are drastically cut down. Is this realistic?
I definitely need input here, so please -- someone in the know reply and correct my errors here. I'm specifically concerned with my lack of knowledge in DC power distribution and power loss, not to mention if anything would be likely to leak power back into the regulator somehow.
I wasn't a CS major in college, but I did take a couple of programming courses. At the time, we're talking turbo pascal and borland C... nothing mind bending here. The school wasn't known for having a particularly strong CS department, but it was popular for "returning" students who were getting reimbursed by their employers for taking classes. So it had a number of both young and older students.
Something which struck me as odd was the number of students in the class who could pick up the concepts of programming (we're not talking about OO here, or really anything above for..next/if..then/whatever), but at the same time couldn't figure out how to save the source to floppy. I thought that this was perhaps a problem only experienced by inexperienced undergrads or newbies, until I noticed that even CS and IS graduate students were not comfortable doing some of the most basic computer operations.
I vivdly remember having a conversation where a number of the grad students were trying to convince me that the bitrate of our LAN was only slightly faster than a modem. This clearly wasn't MIT.
Over the years since school, I've encountered many people like this. A friend's mom is a cobol programmer, and has been for years and years -- but she barely has any idea how to use a Windows PC.
I'm about to pass out, so I'll make this quick: SOOOO many students don't make a connection between what they're coding and how the computer behind the code works. We should teach with things like 68000 CPU trainers and assembly; logic chips and homebrew circuits. I firmly believe that given this type of background, many of these strugglers will be able to better process the information they're receiving and make a connection between their code and how the CPU executes it.
I know this isn't quite the answer you were looking for... but perhaps if it influences even one teaching plan somewhere...
I have ZERO relation to this company (though I have bought from them before) and have ZERO experience with the product. But it looks like what you're after. I'm sure there are other vendors who supply this device as well.
Take a look at: http://www.viewcast.com/products/osprey/ospre y100. html
It's a BT878 based card which has four ins (3 composite, one S-video). You can only use one at at time, but they're software switchable. They claim to have linux drivers as well.
Jeff
Floppy needs: Acceleration and Error Correction
on
Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've got two big problems with floppies:
1. Speed. Why are these still SO SLOW?! Sony has put accelerated floppy drives in their Mavica cameras. Is such a drive available for the PC?
2. Reliability. Just yesterday I successfully transferred data from 18-year old 5.25" 140k disks (Apple//c!) without a hitch. But 3.5" 1.44MB disks are notoriously error-prone. Why didn't anyone employ an error-correction protocol when writing to floppies? Maintain backwards compatibility by writing the EC data to the "extended" tracks outside the 80-track (do I have that right?) spec.
Not quite as simple as it may seem...
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's scary to look at the reactions cable companies have to folks who are even SUSPECTED of stealing service in the manner the above article suggests.
With bandwidth restrictions like these, ReplayTV's networking feature is pretty much shot for anyone hoping to transfer programs outside the home LAN.
If restrictions are truly unavoidable (and I doubt they are) I agree with those promoting the idea of AVERAGE bandwidth used, not total volume transfered. As long as I have the ability to transfer large files at off-peak hours without restrictions, I won't be *too* unhappy.
On the other hand, could this be considered anti-competitive? Though most of us don't currently watch television via IP (well, not legitimately anway), it's likely that studios will eventually find DRM they're happy with and will sell programs online.
In the case of AOL/TW, assume that they will eventually allow downloading of video content, and that they will likely exclude their own packets from the user's quota. How will anyone else compete with that, when downloading a few decent sized programs will easily cost a few dollars each in excess bandwidth charges alone? How does this compare with "must carry" rules cable companies are currently forced to honor?
As mentioned in the article, Tivo has "teamed" with Best Buy to bring up a Sheryl Crow video when a Best Buy ad triggers it.
To bring this video to the box of (just about) every tivo user, Tivo buys time on Discovery Channel around 4:00am. They broadcast the video in the clear and have Tivo record it, but hide it from the list of recorded programs. The trigger to display the icon indicating extra available material is broadcast on a not often used (and masked by the Tivo) secondary closed captioning stream. Tivo intercepts this and acts accordingly.
Unfortunately, Tivo also adds an extra icon and menu item on the main menu, advertising the availability of (and giving you a direct link to) the videos. This isn't the first time this has happened -- Tivo "teamed" with BMW a few months back to do a similar promotion. There is a big debate going on in the Tivo Community Forums on if this is acceptable to Tivo users (who are already paying $13/mo for the service).
Re:Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR
on
PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I haven't done a whole lot of testing yet... but my initial reaction is "you get what you pay for". As usual, Creative is close, but it's not quite ready for prime time (har har...). For example, they include an IR remote control, but no program guide. They capture MPEG-2, but you need to convert it from their proprietary wrapper into an mpeg-2 format (with an included utility). It captures at 640x480 w/32kHz audio, but DVDs (wouldn't that be nice?) use 720x480 w/ 48kHz audio.
Also, Tivo et al include nice noise filters which help to smooth out the incoming picture prior to encoding - but the VBDVCR suffers from lots of noise (prob. 'cause it's sitting in a massively RF noisy computer) on the tuner inputs.
All of this aside, it's still MPEG-2, and $99 for this card really is a great price. If the software was written better, this would FLY off the shelves. Since Creative isn't making money on any post-sales subscription, I have to imagine it would be in their best interest to support Linux, or at least open up the specs so others could write drivers.
Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR
on
PVR For Linux
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· Score: 5, Interesting
One of the things which makes the Linux VDR project slightly easier (?) to implement is that the DVB card they're using as a tuner outputs MPEG-2 to the system. Thus, no messy (and cpu intensive) video input and number crunching. This Digital VCR product from Creative has an MPEG-2 encoder chip on-board, and outputs MPEG-2. It can either use it's own tuner OR it will control your cable box/sat receiver via IR commands. And it's only $99. That's not a typo. I'm not claiming it's output will be as good as a Tivo/DVB/whatever, but at 640x480 resolution, it's a step in the right direction.
And it's no longer vaporware -- I picked one up at CompUSA last week (in NYC - 38th & 5th location).
Now, who's up for tearing this thing apart and creating some linux drivers?!
It's quite clearly written on the box of the Philips DVDRW208 unit: "Archive up to 4.7GB on DVD+RW or DVD+R discs" and "Burn directly from your camcorder or VCR to your DVD+RW or DVD+R disc."
To make a long story short, HP, Philips, and others marketed their 1st gen drives as being DVD+RW, with DVD+R supported by a to-be-released firmware upgrade. Now, six months later, they (quietly) claim that the drives are physically unable to write to +R media, and are being elusive in making good on their promise to support that cheaper, more compatible media.
dvdplusrw.org is a great place to get more information on the media and current state of the community. It will also give you updates on what these manufacturers are doing to support their early-adopter customers.
Nope -- Sony DVM-CDA1
on
Digitizing VGA?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sorry folks, this is composite/S-video input only. This is not going to be able to input VGA.
Though it probably won't get too close to what you're after, HD on DVHS is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, these recorders usually accept only the pre-digitized bitstream (already conpressed w/MPEG-2) coming off a set-top box... so unless you're ready to drop a truckload of cash on an HD MPEG-2 digitizer, you're pretty much right where you started.
Let's say MS updates their DRM policies and you don't agree with them, and they distribute an "update" to their customers. You disabled auto-updating, and you decide against applying this patch. Now WMP can't play some recently released media, but no biggie, you can find other ways of playing media.
Now let's say a massive bug/hole is discovered and Microsoft is responsive and develops a fix. What's to say they won't release this patch ONLY as a Service Pack, which contains this patch and also includes the DRM patch (and who knows what else!)?
Slashdot Mirror
I called Dell a few days ago looking to get pricing information. It turns out, with their low-end offering in the Dimension line, you can choose Wordperfect Office, MS Office SBE, or MS Office Pro -- bt not MS Works. On a low-end PC. WTF?
So I called Dell, asking if they could override this and somehow install Works. The rep said: "No." I said "No big deal I guess. I have Office 97 Pro from an old PC which I can install instead." This got him revved up.
Rep: "Well, sir, that's not legal."
Even after explaining that I bought this product at a retail store, and told him that the old PC was being tossed because it was no longer working, I could hear that he still wanted to lecture me.
So I reiterated, "I'm literally throwing out this computer because it doesn't work -- my license therefore is unused, and I can install it on my new PC, right?"
Rep: "That's illegal. Throwing away a PC is illegal. You might be able to see if someone would take it for parts if you gave them $30 or $40, but you can't just throw it away. You might be able to ask the manufacturer to take it back."
I did know this already, and had planned to bring it to my local waste facility for recycling.
But here's the punchline...
Me: "It's a Dell. Will you take it back?"
Rep: "No."
This might not be suitable as a gift, but older, used audio components make a better computer-speaker system than just about anything I've come across from computer-speaker manufacturers.
.5" thick, suctioned to the table, transparent, or otherwise fancy. They are, however, about 7" deep, giving them decent bass response for a bookshelf speaker. While the 5" driver won't shake the room, its output is more than sufficient, considering you sit only about a foot away from them.
I've got an 28-year-old Harmon-Kardon receiver (usually around $30-$40 on ebay) hooked up to Boston Acoustics HD5 bookshelf speakers (bought them years ago for under $100). It sounds FANTASTIC. If I was a gamer, I might buy bigger speakers or a sub, but I'm thrilled with the performace for playing back music (and I'm not just talking MP3's here - which sound worse as the quality of your amp/speakers increase). There's a reason why this amp weighs 20lbs., and that has to do with power handling capabilities, heat sinks, and rugged, metal construction.
My speakers aren't
Speakers designated for use with computers are typically made using very cheap components. Before this, I had a set of Altec-Lansing computer speakers, with a sub, that lasted not even a year before unexplicably falling silent. But my old HK amp has been going strong for... 28 years!
As I said above, giving an old, used stereo might not be the way you'd prefer to say "Happy Holidays" - but if there's anyone else reading this looking to buy a decent speaker setup, consider first searching your local garage sale, goodwill store, flea market, or online auctioneer. And just remember - heavier is BETTER.
Check out his film while you're at it...
I hate to jump to "lawsuit!", but this is an instance where a sternly-worded letter from a lawyer might at the very least get their attention. Unfortunately, you'll end up spending more than the stolen funds to pay said lawyer.
Any lawyers out there willing to help out AbiWord pro bono?
For a linux-centric solution, check out the VoipBlaster, or more specifically, voip.ring.org and Fobbit.
For a ready-made setup, checkout Multitech's MultiVOIP
These units aren't the cheapest VOIP solution, but among the easiest. They come in FXO and FXS flavors, which means (check me on this) you can hookup one end to a phone company provided POTS line (FXO?) and extend that to a remote location (FXS?), or hookup one side to your PBX and another to a POTS phone at the remote office (both FXS?), or PBX-to-PBX (??), or whatever.
The have a demo. You call a toll-free number which rings into a MultiVOIP device co-lo'd at some ISP in Chillicothe, OH (I've been to Chillicothe - it's sufficiently remote to convince me that it would work beautifully over a half-decent connection). That device connects you to a (very nice, I might add) sales rep at Multitech.
Tivo should have been mentioned in this article. It's quite a give and take situation between Tivo, Inc. and the tivo-hacker community. On one hand, they didn't object to an ethernet card being un-officially added to the unit so that users could bypass the daily dialup. In fact, they started officially supporting the hack in the newer (3.0) versions of the software.
Yet at the same time, they strictly prohibit mpeg streams being extracted off the hard drive. Popular opinion has it that one or more established Tivo hackers have the ability to cleanly extract data, but Tivo threatened that they'd stop being hacker-friendly if the code was ever released.
There are a couple of small groups out there currently trying to extract data from the Tivo, but it's not an easy, 100% reliable procedure.
Looking at my post, I'm afraid that admitting to running linux on a 200MHz machine, Cyrix no less, makes me sound a little less than serious about my setup. I should point out that this is a thinknic PC with a HDD added on, running sendmail, imapd, apache, sshd, and a few other general linux thingies. I don't run X. It's been running for about 2 years, downed only a handful of times when I felt like updating the kernel. It's small and sits in the corner with no complaints.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is how long it takes to compile. Thus, this project is right up my alley. Good job, folks!
I'd love a speedup, but the time I'd save compiling would be wasted on having to fully install another linux box. Being able to boot a CD with a live linux distro and this software, and then connect to these slave machines to help compile would be immensely helpful. My linux box is a Cyrix 200MHz PC. Being able to stick a CD into my Athlon 1800 to help the compile would be fabulous.
My wish: slim down the memory requirements. Before anyone flames me with "memory is cheap", consider this:
I've got a few idle P100 laptops sitting around. I don't know if the cpu is fast enough, but if it is, this would be a perfect application (especially since most people consider these things useless these days). My only limitation: older laptops like this one have limited RAM. If we could get this to run on 8mb, or even 16mb, I'd be a much happier person.
I suspect a chunk of this RAM is setup for a RAM disk. Perhaps a hard drive install could be an option?
Jeff
I have two dead cards, both Dell nVidia GeForce 2, which were fried because the fans stopped working. One card has no video at all, while another developed a problem where there are massive vertical lines throughout the display.
Since I didn't need performace on one of the machines, I replaced one card with a low-end card with no fan.
This would be far more useful to me as a way to replace the vast array of wall warts and chaotic tangle of black wires which warm my feet.
I'd chop off the devices' wall warts and replace them with some sort of quick-disconnect plug on both sides of the cut wire; this way I could use the wall wart again if I was out of this environment.
EE's, help me here. Let's say I have a single 24VDC bench supply (I'm starting at 110v at home)at 15-20A. I'm thinking that for any item drawing under, say, 500ma, I could build mini step-down regulators (in something like 35mm film canisters) using something in the 78xx series of regulators (i.e. 7805 for 5v). I'd put one of those quick disconnect plugs (mentioned above) on the output, so it would easily and quickly interface with the device.
As for the input to these regulators, I'd like to be able to run one 6-ft. wire around my equipment and let the regulators somehow "vampire" tap (I *think* that what it's called) this one wire (perhaps 12 gauge stranded? thicker? help?!), so the number of wires around my setup are drastically cut down. Is this realistic?
I definitely need input here, so please -- someone in the know reply and correct my errors here. I'm specifically concerned with my lack of knowledge in DC power distribution and power loss, not to mention if anything would be likely to leak power back into the regulator somehow.
I wasn't a CS major in college, but I did take a couple of programming courses. At the time, we're talking turbo pascal and borland C... nothing mind bending here. The school wasn't known for having a particularly strong CS department, but it was popular for "returning" students who were getting reimbursed by their employers for taking classes. So it had a number of both young and older students.
Something which struck me as odd was the number of students in the class who could pick up the concepts of programming (we're not talking about OO here, or really anything above for..next/if..then/whatever), but at the same time couldn't figure out how to save the source to floppy. I thought that this was perhaps a problem only experienced by inexperienced undergrads or newbies, until I noticed that even CS and IS graduate students were not comfortable doing some of the most basic computer operations.
I vivdly remember having a conversation where a number of the grad students were trying to convince me that the bitrate of our LAN was only slightly faster than a modem. This clearly wasn't MIT.
Over the years since school, I've encountered many people like this. A friend's mom is a cobol programmer, and has been for years and years -- but she barely has any idea how to use a Windows PC.
I'm about to pass out, so I'll make this quick: SOOOO many students don't make a connection between what they're coding and how the computer behind the code works. We should teach with things like 68000 CPU trainers and assembly; logic chips and homebrew circuits. I firmly believe that given this type of background, many of these strugglers will be able to better process the information they're receiving and make a connection between their code and how the CPU executes it.
I know this isn't quite the answer you were looking for... but perhaps if it influences even one teaching plan somewhere...
I read this story earlier and just happened across this device a minute ago:
16 ft. USB Active Extension Cable
I have ZERO relation to this company (though I have bought from them before) and have ZERO experience with the product. But it looks like what you're after. I'm sure there are other vendors who supply this device as well.
Good luck!
Take a look at:e y100. html
http://www.viewcast.com/products/osprey/ospr
It's a BT878 based card which has four ins (3 composite, one S-video). You can only use one at at time, but they're software switchable. They claim to have linux drivers as well.
Jeff
I've got two big problems with floppies:
//c!) without a hitch. But 3.5" 1.44MB disks are notoriously error-prone. Why didn't anyone employ an error-correction protocol when writing to floppies? Maintain backwards compatibility by writing the EC data to the "extended" tracks outside the 80-track (do I have that right?) spec.
1. Speed. Why are these still SO SLOW?! Sony has put accelerated floppy drives in their Mavica cameras. Is such a drive available for the PC?
2. Reliability. Just yesterday I successfully transferred data from 18-year old 5.25" 140k disks (Apple
It's scary to look at the reactions cable companies have to folks who are even SUSPECTED of stealing service in the manner the above article suggests.
Slashdot Story: Get a Cable Modem...Go to Jail
Google cached link to subject's web page
Same story, different folks...
With bandwidth restrictions like these, ReplayTV's networking feature is pretty much shot for anyone hoping to transfer programs outside the home LAN.
If restrictions are truly unavoidable (and I doubt they are) I agree with those promoting the idea of AVERAGE bandwidth used, not total volume transfered. As long as I have the ability to transfer large files at off-peak hours without restrictions, I won't be *too* unhappy.
On the other hand, could this be considered anti-competitive? Though most of us don't currently watch television via IP (well, not legitimately anway), it's likely that studios will eventually find DRM they're happy with and will sell programs online.
In the case of AOL/TW, assume that they will eventually allow downloading of video content, and that they will likely exclude their own packets from the user's quota. How will anyone else compete with that, when downloading a few decent sized programs will easily cost a few dollars each in excess bandwidth charges alone? How does this compare with "must carry" rules cable companies are currently forced to honor?
To bring this video to the box of (just about) every tivo user, Tivo buys time on Discovery Channel around 4:00am. They broadcast the video in the clear and have Tivo record it, but hide it from the list of recorded programs. The trigger to display the icon indicating extra available material is broadcast on a not often used (and masked by the Tivo) secondary closed captioning stream. Tivo intercepts this and acts accordingly.
Unfortunately, Tivo also adds an extra icon and menu item on the main menu, advertising the availability of (and giving you a direct link to) the videos. This isn't the first time this has happened -- Tivo "teamed" with BMW a few months back to do a similar promotion. There is a big debate going on in the Tivo Community Forums on if this is acceptable to Tivo users (who are already paying $13/mo for the service).
Well, I haven't done a whole lot of testing yet... but my initial reaction is "you get what you pay for". As usual, Creative is close, but it's not quite ready for prime time (har har...). For example, they include an IR remote control, but no program guide. They capture MPEG-2, but you need to convert it from their proprietary wrapper into an mpeg-2 format (with an included utility). It captures at 640x480 w/32kHz audio, but DVDs (wouldn't that be nice?) use 720x480 w/ 48kHz audio.
Also, Tivo et al include nice noise filters which help to smooth out the incoming picture prior to encoding - but the VBDVCR suffers from lots of noise (prob. 'cause it's sitting in a massively RF noisy computer) on the tuner inputs.
All of this aside, it's still MPEG-2, and $99 for this card really is a great price. If the software was written better, this would FLY off the shelves. Since Creative isn't making money on any post-sales subscription, I have to imagine it would be in their best interest to support Linux, or at least open up the specs so others could write drivers.
One of the things which makes the Linux VDR project slightly easier (?) to implement is that the DVB card they're using as a tuner outputs MPEG-2 to the system. Thus, no messy (and cpu intensive) video input and number crunching. This Digital VCR product from Creative has an MPEG-2 encoder chip on-board, and outputs MPEG-2. It can either use it's own tuner OR it will control your cable box/sat receiver via IR commands. And it's only $99. That's not a typo. I'm not claiming it's output will be as good as a Tivo/DVB/whatever, but at 640x480 resolution, it's a step in the right direction.
And it's no longer vaporware -- I picked one up at CompUSA last week (in NYC - 38th & 5th location).
Now, who's up for tearing this thing apart and creating some linux drivers?!
Take a look at this thread over on dvdplusrw.org.
It's quite clearly written on the box of the Philips DVDRW208 unit: "Archive up to 4.7GB on DVD+RW or DVD+R discs" and "Burn directly from your camcorder or VCR to your DVD+RW or DVD+R disc."
... or any other manufacturer (Philips, for example) that put out a 1st generation DVD+RW drive and refused to honor their promise to support DVD+R on those drives.
To make a long story short, HP, Philips, and others marketed their 1st gen drives as being DVD+RW, with DVD+R supported by a to-be-released firmware upgrade. Now, six months later, they (quietly) claim that the drives are physically unable to write to +R media, and are being elusive in making good on their promise to support that cheaper, more compatible media.
dvdplusrw.org is a great place to get more information on the media and current state of the community. It will also give you updates on what these manufacturers are doing to support their early-adopter customers.
Sorry folks, this is composite/S-video input only. This is not going to be able to input VGA.
Though it probably won't get too close to what you're after, HD on DVHS is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, these recorders usually accept only the pre-digitized bitstream (already conpressed w/MPEG-2) coming off a set-top box... so unless you're ready to drop a truckload of cash on an HD MPEG-2 digitizer, you're pretty much right where you started.
Something else to consider -- Service Packs.
Let's say MS updates their DRM policies and you don't agree with them, and they distribute an "update" to their customers. You disabled auto-updating, and you decide against applying this patch. Now WMP can't play some recently released media, but no biggie, you can find other ways of playing media.
Now let's say a massive bug/hole is discovered and Microsoft is responsive and develops a fix. What's to say they won't release this patch ONLY as a Service Pack, which contains this patch and also includes the DRM patch (and who knows what else!)?