You need to check out the AV Science Forum Home Theater Computers board. Most people there are less intested in using or not using a specific OS and are more interested in getting more out of the HTPCs. That said, most of the people are Windows users, though there are a few linux threads.
That poll would be highly suspect since its "enthusiasts" who would be answering it. There's probably an order of magnitude more TiVo users out there who just aren't into squeezing the last bits of technology out of the products they use.
I played around with that. The 30 second skip is another nice marketing feature that ReplayTV has, but I find that I can get to where I want to quicker the way TiVo has things set by default than I can with the 30 second skip.
I would say that it's maybe a mistake to make predictions about the usage based on the response from online sites. While many people (thousands) participate in the TiVo forums, those are the real enthusiasts... the ones who probably would set up the dual tuner. But the rest of the population of TiVo owners is many hundreds of thousands, I'm sure huge numbers of which got their TiVo through deals with the DirecTV installers or who are "casual" users.
Maybe you're right, but I think 25-40% is probably on the very optimistic side. I'm guessing 10-20%.
The only consumer-grade sources with Dolby Digital I can think of (since we can rule out TiVo ever getting away with recording content from a DVD) are broadcast or satellite HDTV, neither of which seem to be supported at all.
The DirecTiVo units do indeed support Dolby Digital. If you want them to, they will gladly record the dolby-digital audio track of any channel that supports it. Right now, there's only a hand-full of DD channels though... a couple of PPV, HBO, and STARZ channels.
I'd love to know the percentage of people who own DirecTiVo units who are actually using the dual tuners. I suspect that as a marketing feature, it was a necessary thing to add to compete against UltimateTV, but I think the reality is that only a small percentage of people are utilizing it.
The added cost to a standalone TiVo of adding a second tuner is probably not trivial. For those systems, the TiVo is doing on-the-fly mpeg compression. Adding another tuner also means adding at least another compression co-processor. For the DirecTiVo versions, the signal is already compressed coming from DirecTV, so those are parts they didn't have to add. For a dual-tuner the thing needs to be able to handle three video streams at once... two recording/compression and one playback. That's a lot of number-crunching. The DirecTiVo only ever has to deal with set of number-crunching (for playback).
The new features are all well and good, but I think the key to TiVo's long term success will continue to lie in its simplicity. Right now, it's something that your grandmother can use. It's simple, intuitive, and useful. While adding ports may up the "geek factor" to compete with ReplayTV, it really adds very little in the long run.
If you really want a whiz-bang system with home networking and other features built in, the way to get that NOW is to roll your own PC based system. There's plenty of software available.
If TiVo makes the mistake of over complicating their product and bogging it down with vaporware (see previous RealNetworks article), then they may have problems. Ask yourself what level of technology your non-technical friends and relatives are comfortable dealing with. Most can't even hook up their VCR correctly.
I love my TiVo. It's easy to use and simply works great. I don't ever see myself being without some sort of PVR.
Well, I honestly can't say what was going on in his mind, but my thinking is this... I'm standing there with a plastic gun in my hand firing away at a TV screen and somehow he equates this with the possibility that maybe I'd be a good person to have a little gun play with.
He works fine in the book, but would have inturupted the darkenng flow of the movie. I'm re-reading FOTR now (it's been a while) and so far I'm actually quite pleased with the compromises they made for the movie.
I was recently on a trip to Indianapolis with a friend and one night we had some extra time... so we were spending some time at the arcade in the big mall right downtown. As it got later, the arcade began to fill with more and more city kids.
While I was standing there playing at a (particularly violent) first person shoot-em-up, some kid (maybe 20 years old) pokes me in the back and says "You better watch where ya go when ya get outta here 'cuz I might just wanna shoot ya with my real piece." Great... I've just been threatened with death.
Yes, I know that the problem is the kid and NOT the game... but if that's the attitude of a human being on in this country... that he might just like to shoot me for the fun of it... then maybe games like this shouldn't be allowed to coexist in the same place with this person. There ARE clealy people in this world who have very little respect for human life. Who aren't intelligent enough to delineate between a video game and reality.
The experience of having a complete stranger threaten to shoot me did leave me a little shaken. It gave me pause to think about such laws and to make me reconsider my long-standing anti-censorship position. I'm honestly on the fense on this one. Just look at my.sig. Censorship is something that I take very seriously. I'm bothered by what happened and I'm bothered that my convictions have been weakened.
I agree that noise is a big concern, and it was for me as well. My HTPC is not silent, but it's fine unless it's really otherwise quiet in the room.
There are companies that specialize in building quiet PC parts. This was discussed not terribly long ago.
I also agree with the comment about mp3 quality. I too think it sounds pretty crummy, and having a HTPC as part of my regular stereo system really brought that home. A decent system really exposes the flaws. But for "casual" listening when I've got friends over and whatnot, it's just fine.
That said, I'm finding that the quality really isn't too bad if I encode the files myself with something like razorlame using VBR.
I put together a HTPC system and I too was frustrated by the lack of black PC cases for reasonable $$$. Instead I bought a nice Antec case for about $60 and a can a black semi-gloss spray paint for about $3. Remove the buttons and clear plastic pieces, clean with grease and wax remover, scuff with a scotchbrite pad, and paint. It's also pretty easy to take the bulkheads off of floppy drives and CD/DVD rom drives to paint those as well.
What I ended up with was a surprisingly good looking black case that goes extremely well with the rest of my equipment.
Anyone capable of putting together a computer from scratch really should be able to paint one as well. It's amazingly easy.
If this discussion forum is any indication, there are a lot of people building Home Theater PCs.
I recently put one together to co-exist with my home theater setup in the living room. A low end machine... 800 MHz Duron, 32MB Radeon, Hauppauge WinTV card (for video capture), 512MB ram, 80G HDD... the whole thing set me back about $700. I painted the case and all front panels black... it fits in quite nicely with the rest of my stereo.
With that system I can now capture video, compress it to mpeg1 (or mpeg2) for burning onto VCD and/or SVCD. I'm copying many of my most played CDs over to it, so I'll have an audio jukebox. I can play non region 1 DVDs. I can read/. on my TV. I can listen to internet radio stations. Pretty much anything I could do before on my office PC, I can do here... but now it's intergrated with my Home Theater.
We had a holiday party last week, so I ripped all of our holiday CDs, downloaded some other songs, recorded some of the "seasonal" music channel on the satellite, created a playlist, and threw it into random mode... and all day the thing happily churned out Christmas music from a fairly large library.
And in reality it's probably much higher than that since their statistics come from people who visit browserwatch.internet.com. People who visit that site are probably slightly more technically astute than the average computer user and therefore are more likely to be using something other than IE. I would guess that the average across all sites is something above 90%.
When I wrote that I just knew someone would bring up ogg vorbis. I suppose I should have qualified the statement. When I said "something better", I meant it in terms of...
a) Sound quality (which ogg does have)
b) Software player selection (nope, still not widely accepted, though getting better, as you say, through plugins)
c) Encoder algorithms (mp3 has many... I like lame. I'm less familiar with ogg)
d) Hardware player selection (lots play.mp3, but I don't know of any that play ogg).
So yes, ogg is clearly better in at least once sense, but not all.
What quality of speakers are you playing these out of? If you've got reasonable speakers attached to mine, but have a flatmate who likes her MP3s at 192Kbps and then plays them though a pair of $20 speakers.
I have a computer attached to my stereo system, so that's what what I'm using for a source. The stereo is Klipsch KG4 main speakers, Klipsch KSW-10 Subwoofer, all controlled by a high performance Marantz receiver. Yea, I can tell the difference between MP3 and uncompressed. At 128Kbs, mp3 is pretty ugly. 160Kbps, it's pretty good, but not perfect, and sometimes I can't tell the difference. Anything above that and I generally can't tell. It's more obvious on very subtle music like classical violin. When it's at decent volume, you'll hear a sort of bubbling/gurgling sound that comes with the compression.
You may not like 128Kbps, but I'm wondering how many people would want files at 192Kbps.
I don't care what other people want. I'm talking about what I want. When I poke around on places like AudioGalaxy, it's obvious that most people are happy enough with 128Kbps. And most are probably listening through $20 computer speakers, so it's probably fine. I'm not. If that makes me an audiophile snob, then so be it.
You've suggested lossless. That's basically.wav - have you seen the size of those files? 40mb a track, typically.
There are lossless compressors.
One such is FLAC. There are others. Compression rates are generally about 50%. I'd like to be able to download the song lossless and then do what I want to do with it (such as compressing using lame in VBR mode). You can be that the record companies won't be aiming for the the best quality sound they can get.
The record companies don't get it. People want music that they can have... forever (or at least seemingly so). It has to be easy to deal with, portable, and saveable.
I'll sign up when....
- They offer high quality files. 192Kbps MP3 is the MINIMUM. Lossless CD quality would be better.
- They use an open format. No ticking time bombs. No proprietary players. Ability to take those files and burn onto CD..mp3 is a reasonable standard until something better comes along.
- They offer a LARGE and unrestricted catalog. I want obscure songs, b-sides, pretty much anything that's been commercially released.
- They offer cover and insert art in a high quality format. If I download a CD, I want to re-create the whole CD... including the artwork.
If they do that, yea, $10 or even $20 per month is more than reasonable. Anything short of that and I'm not buying.
Well, in a way Mr. Bill is right. If it weren't for the fact that MS's software is in many ways fundamentally flawed, then there likely wouldn't be a -need- for open source. Would Linux be where it is today if MS software was solid, crash-proof, secure, and if everyone here just loved them to pieces? No, I don't think it would.
Wouldn't it be a lot nicer if they could have posted VCD-ready mpeg files (or better yet, SVCD-ready mpeg2)?
Yes, I'll still download the quicktime files and convert them with TMPENC and then burn them to VCD (so I can watch on my DVD player). I'd imagine many other people will do the same.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm glad they released these. I'm just surprised that no one seems to ever release VCD-ready files.
Wow, that's a great way to get influential people to agree to answer questions on Slashdot. Chastise them for taking so long in getting back their answers. Smart.
And it took how long? A month? I'd say that's hardly worthy of the put down.
By my count, you spent $441 on stuff to make the system "quieter" (between the case, power supply, fans, silent-drive, etc.). Also figure that a "standard" good quality case would probably cost (at most) $140 or less. So you're at least $300 over for the reduced noise parts.
For $200, you could have picked up a pair of noise canceling headphones that would also have had other uses as well (such as traveling on planes, etc). That's $100 savings. Could have thrown that towards more memory, larger HDD, faster CPU, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
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That poll would be highly suspect since its "enthusiasts" who would be answering it. There's probably an order of magnitude more TiVo users out there who just aren't into squeezing the last bits of technology out of the products they use.
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I played around with that. The 30 second skip is another nice marketing feature that ReplayTV has, but I find that I can get to where I want to quicker the way TiVo has things set by default than I can with the 30 second skip.
-S
I would say that it's maybe a mistake to make predictions about the usage based on the response from online sites. While many people (thousands) participate in the TiVo forums, those are the real enthusiasts... the ones who probably would set up the dual tuner. But the rest of the population of TiVo owners is many hundreds of thousands, I'm sure huge numbers of which got their TiVo through deals with the DirecTV installers or who are "casual" users.
Maybe you're right, but I think 25-40% is probably on the very optimistic side. I'm guessing 10-20%.
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The DirecTiVo units do indeed support Dolby Digital. If you want them to, they will gladly record the dolby-digital audio track of any channel that supports it. Right now, there's only a hand-full of DD channels though... a couple of PPV, HBO, and STARZ channels.
-S
I'd love to know the percentage of people who own DirecTiVo units who are actually using the dual tuners. I suspect that as a marketing feature, it was a necessary thing to add to compete against UltimateTV, but I think the reality is that only a small percentage of people are utilizing it.
The added cost to a standalone TiVo of adding a second tuner is probably not trivial. For those systems, the TiVo is doing on-the-fly mpeg compression. Adding another tuner also means adding at least another compression co-processor. For the DirecTiVo versions, the signal is already compressed coming from DirecTV, so those are parts they didn't have to add. For a dual-tuner the thing needs to be able to handle three video streams at once... two recording/compression and one playback. That's a lot of number-crunching. The DirecTiVo only ever has to deal with set of number-crunching (for playback).
-S
The new features are all well and good, but I think the key to TiVo's long term success will continue to lie in its simplicity. Right now, it's something that your grandmother can use. It's simple, intuitive, and useful. While adding ports may up the "geek factor" to compete with ReplayTV, it really adds very little in the long run.
If you really want a whiz-bang system with home networking and other features built in, the way to get that NOW is to roll your own PC based system. There's plenty of software available.
If TiVo makes the mistake of over complicating their product and bogging it down with vaporware (see previous RealNetworks article), then they may have problems. Ask yourself what level of technology your non-technical friends and relatives are comfortable dealing with. Most can't even hook up their VCR correctly.
I love my TiVo. It's easy to use and simply works great. I don't ever see myself being without some sort of PVR.
-S
Well, I honestly can't say what was going on in his mind, but my thinking is this... I'm standing there with a plastic gun in my hand firing away at a TV screen and somehow he equates this with the possibility that maybe I'd be a good person to have a little gun play with.
-S
He works fine in the book, but would have inturupted the darkenng flow of the movie. I'm re-reading FOTR now (it's been a while) and so far I'm actually quite pleased with the compromises they made for the movie.
-S
I was recently on a trip to Indianapolis with a friend and one night we had some extra time... so we were spending some time at the arcade in the big mall right downtown. As it got later, the arcade began to fill with more and more city kids.
.sig. Censorship is something that I take very seriously. I'm bothered by what happened and I'm bothered that my convictions have been weakened.
While I was standing there playing at a (particularly violent) first person shoot-em-up, some kid (maybe 20 years old) pokes me in the back and says "You better watch where ya go when ya get outta here 'cuz I might just wanna shoot ya with my real piece." Great... I've just been threatened with death.
Yes, I know that the problem is the kid and NOT the game... but if that's the attitude of a human being on in this country... that he might just like to shoot me for the fun of it... then maybe games like this shouldn't be allowed to coexist in the same place with this person. There ARE clealy people in this world who have very little respect for human life. Who aren't intelligent enough to delineate between a video game and reality.
The experience of having a complete stranger threaten to shoot me did leave me a little shaken. It gave me pause to think about such laws and to make me reconsider my long-standing anti-censorship position. I'm honestly on the fense on this one. Just look at my
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Good legwork. Here's some more contact info for those not into writing a snail mail...
n tactus.htms there's a whole slew of email addresses.
From http://www.interscope.com/contact/contact.asp comes is an feedback email address... feedback@igamail.com (same as A&M and Geffen)
On http://www.deccaclassics.com/dmg/contact.asp is a comment form.
On http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/yellowlounge/co
On http://www.defjam.com/gen/classic/ is their email address... info@defjam.com
The farmclub.com site has a whole bunch of email addresses at http://www.getmusic.com/info/contact.html
On http://www.mcarecords.com/about.asp?promoid=1 is their email address... mcarecords.fanmail@umusic.com
On http://www.vervemusicgroup.com/aboutus/ is their email address... contact@vervemusicgroup.com
[all unlinked for the paranoid among us]
You know what to do...
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I just installed it... and it deleted IE!!!!
Worked perfectly, I'd say....
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There are companies that specialize in building quiet PC parts. This was discussed not terribly long ago.
I also agree with the comment about mp3 quality. I too think it sounds pretty crummy, and having a HTPC as part of my regular stereo system really brought that home. A decent system really exposes the flaws. But for "casual" listening when I've got friends over and whatnot, it's just fine.
That said, I'm finding that the quality really isn't too bad if I encode the files myself with something like razorlame using VBR.
-S
What I ended up with was a surprisingly good looking black case that goes extremely well with the rest of my equipment.
Anyone capable of putting together a computer from scratch really should be able to paint one as well. It's amazingly easy.
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I recently put one together to co-exist with my home theater setup in the living room. A low end machine... 800 MHz Duron, 32MB Radeon, Hauppauge WinTV card (for video capture), 512MB ram, 80G HDD... the whole thing set me back about $700. I painted the case and all front panels black... it fits in quite nicely with the rest of my stereo.
With that system I can now capture video, compress it to mpeg1 (or mpeg2) for burning onto VCD and/or SVCD. I'm copying many of my most played CDs over to it, so I'll have an audio jukebox. I can play non region 1 DVDs. I can read /. on my TV. I can listen to internet radio stations. Pretty much anything I could do before on my office PC, I can do here... but now it's intergrated with my Home Theater.
We had a holiday party last week, so I ripped all of our holiday CDs, downloaded some other songs, recorded some of the "seasonal" music channel on the satellite, created a playlist, and threw it into random mode... and all day the thing happily churned out Christmas music from a fairly large library.
Money well spent so far...
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And in reality it's probably much higher than that since their statistics come from people who visit browserwatch.internet.com. People who visit that site are probably slightly more technically astute than the average computer user and therefore are more likely to be using something other than IE. I would guess that the average across all sites is something above 90%.
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That would be jobcurity .
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When I wrote that I just knew someone would bring up ogg vorbis. I suppose I should have qualified the statement. When I said "something better", I meant it in terms of...
.mp3, but I don't know of any that play ogg).
a) Sound quality (which ogg does have)
b) Software player selection (nope, still not widely accepted, though getting better, as you say, through plugins)
c) Encoder algorithms (mp3 has many... I like lame. I'm less familiar with ogg)
d) Hardware player selection (lots play
So yes, ogg is clearly better in at least once sense, but not all.
-S
I have a computer attached to my stereo system, so that's what what I'm using for a source. The stereo is Klipsch KG4 main speakers, Klipsch KSW-10 Subwoofer, all controlled by a high performance Marantz receiver. Yea, I can tell the difference between MP3 and uncompressed. At 128Kbs, mp3 is pretty ugly. 160Kbps, it's pretty good, but not perfect, and sometimes I can't tell the difference. Anything above that and I generally can't tell. It's more obvious on very subtle music like classical violin. When it's at decent volume, you'll hear a sort of bubbling/gurgling sound that comes with the compression.
You may not like 128Kbps, but I'm wondering how many people would want files at 192Kbps.
I don't care what other people want. I'm talking about what I want. When I poke around on places like AudioGalaxy, it's obvious that most people are happy enough with 128Kbps. And most are probably listening through $20 computer speakers, so it's probably fine. I'm not. If that makes me an audiophile snob, then so be it.
You've suggested lossless. That's basically .wav - have you seen the size of those files? 40mb a track, typically.
There are lossless compressors. One such is FLAC. There are others. Compression rates are generally about 50%. I'd like to be able to download the song lossless and then do what I want to do with it (such as compressing using lame in VBR mode). You can be that the record companies won't be aiming for the the best quality sound they can get.
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The record companies don't get it. People want music that they can have... forever (or at least seemingly so). It has to be easy to deal with, portable, and saveable.
.mp3 is a reasonable standard until something better comes along.
I'll sign up when....
- They offer high quality files. 192Kbps MP3 is the MINIMUM. Lossless CD quality would be better.
- They use an open format. No ticking time bombs. No proprietary players. Ability to take those files and burn onto CD.
- They offer a LARGE and unrestricted catalog. I want obscure songs, b-sides, pretty much anything that's been commercially released.
- They offer cover and insert art in a high quality format. If I download a CD, I want to re-create the whole CD... including the artwork.
If they do that, yea, $10 or even $20 per month is more than reasonable. Anything short of that and I'm not buying.
-S
Well, in a way Mr. Bill is right. If it weren't for the fact that MS's software is in many ways fundamentally flawed, then there likely wouldn't be a -need- for open source. Would Linux be where it is today if MS software was solid, crash-proof, secure, and if everyone here just loved them to pieces? No, I don't think it would.
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Wouldn't it be a lot nicer if they could have posted VCD-ready mpeg files (or better yet, SVCD-ready mpeg2)?
Yes, I'll still download the quicktime files and convert them with TMPENC and then burn them to VCD (so I can watch on my DVD player). I'd imagine many other people will do the same.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm glad they released these. I'm just surprised that no one seems to ever release VCD-ready files.
-S
Wow, that's a great way to get influential people to agree to answer questions on Slashdot. Chastise them for taking so long in getting back their answers. Smart.
And it took how long? A month? I'd say that's hardly worthy of the put down.
-S
For $200, you could have picked up a pair of noise canceling headphones that would also have had other uses as well (such as traveling on planes, etc). That's $100 savings. Could have thrown that towards more memory, larger HDD, faster CPU, etc...
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No, but it's a hell of a lot easier to be "blacklisted" in Hollywood than it is with other jobs.
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