I had trouble with getting my VCR to play one show while recording another. I also had some difficulty getting it to stream video from my home network. I couldn't figure out how to set the IP address on the VCR. It doesn't seem to use DHCP either. I think the IP is hardcoded to 1.2.0.0 or something, but setting my gateway to 1.2.0.1 didn't help, it won't ARP for it.
The commercial skip feature works, but it's pretty slow. Resetting the file to the beginning also takes forever for some reason. The REW button works eventually, but I can't find the slider. At first I thought it was hung, but I just let it sit for 5 minutes, and it finally switched from the REW state to the STOP state.
There's some sort of bug, the media cartridges keep auto-ejecting if I try to record more than 3 hours. There's a low quality mode (mpeg1?) which works for 6 hours, but the quality is just about unusable. This problem is interfering with the monthly show scheduling.
I also can't seem to get it to load any games, browse the web, or play DVDs. I'm not sure how to even load code onto it. Does anyone have an VHS API reference?
I haven't tried either, but I wouldn't doubt your statement.
Seems to me, though, that more people doing homebrew and using those services ought to help improve the quality a bit. I imagine it could work something like the CDDB.
I'm of the opinion (though the law does not often agree) that if you buy something, you can do with it what you like. In the case of IP, that's anything you want with your copy, short of giving it to someone else while also retaining a copy for yourself, if they don't own a copy. So, if your kids trashed your Windows CD by scratching it up, I have no problem with burning you a copy. The only gray area (by my thinking) is how to verify that the recipient owns their own copy before you hand over a copy of yours or a mod.
Imagine an e-book. If I make electronic notes in the margins of my copy, I ought to be able to give it to you, if you own a copy of the original. The only reason that one should take offense if it makes it onto Kazaa is because there's obviously very little opportunity to verify ownership for all the people downloading.
In the case of an XBox mod, it seems reasonable to be lax about verifying ownership at the moment, because there's no other practical use for the BIOS. Once XBox clones come out, then that would change.
(If it makes a difference to anyone, I am an author. However, like most any modern paid author, you can't take my opinion as permission to do x, y, or z with a book I wrote... you'd have to talk to my publisher for that because they own the rights to it.)
So, he was selling them a chip with an XBox BIOS on it, which is only useful in an XBox. So the consumer has a license to use the XBox BIOS on his (one) XBox. Had he sold a blank chip, and the consumer put the modified BIOS on the chip himself, he would have been fine? (Though the consumer is probably violating a "no modifications" license clause at that point.)
It's not quite the same as my buying a burned copy of Windows to use on a second PC with no OS license. I mean, I see the technical violation of the law... he was making unauthorized copies of software.. but he was giving them to people who had a right to have them (morally, if not legally.)
Thanks for correcting me. You're right, I saw that it was a $99 option, and that you needed 1 per Tivo. This link clarifies it, and the pricing is as you say:
I'm glad to see that it's a little better than I thought... but I still think it's a bit much that they want to charge for the hardware AND the service AND new features that I think belong there in the first place... Sure, they can charge for whatever they like, I'm just saying it makes them a lot less attractive when other options are available.
Yes, I wasn't impressed either. That's $99 per Tivo. You really need to have 2 to make it worthwhile. If you just have one, then all the $99 buys you is the ability to display pictures and play MP3's off your computer. As you point out, you have to buy the USB adapters, as well. So, $200-$300 on top of buying 2 series 2 Tivos, for a feature that I'm guessing most owners think should have been included in the first place. Note that you can't play movies stored on your PC. Note that the Tivos have to be on the same account, so no sharing with neighbors, roommates, etc.. let alone across the 'Net.
Tivo really needs to quit gouging their customers. They're just begging to have some competitor come along and eat their lunch. There have been some very visable failures in that market, but I think there's lots of room for competition. At the price that all the features of a Tivo net add up to, I could pay someone to build me a custom HTPC.
Can't we just buy the RIAA, and be done with? According to this chart: http://www.riaa.com/pdf/2002yrendshipments.pdf if I'm reading it right... the various media companies had 12.6 Billion in revenue in 2002. That's revenue, not profit. The $97B still looks pretty silly, eh? Anyone know what the profit amount is? Surely it's much less.
Anyway, for 250M Americans, that's about $48/year/person. How about we just include that amount in our taxes, and we all get all the free music we want? Let the record stores, P2P services, etc... all compete to sell $.50 CDs, all the downloads you can eat, etc..
I'm sure the dollar amount will be much less if we just consider the profit amount, too. Then radio stations dont have to pay licensing fees, and the RIAA can let go all the staff who have to track piracy, thereby increasing their per-employee performance.
We'll still let them exist so they can tell us who the top 40 are, who has gold "records", which record companies and artists get how much of the share, etc.. you know, all that stuff they are supposed to exist for.
Heck, I've got more money and kids than most people.. I'd be happy to pay a proportionally higher amount to help subsidize poor people. Put it on my phone bill, $4/month, like we do to subsidize people in the middle of nowhere and old people.
4 kids (or ringleaders of groups of kids, I guess) managed to get 652,000 songs together, with no dupes, live music, legal MP3s, or any original recording by themselves? Wow, at an average of like 15 tracks per CD, that's 43,467 CDs, or so. And at $15/CD, that means that various people spend around $652,000 dollars on music. Clearly, these are wealthy college kids, so it makes sense to get after their money.
If you figre a conservative 3MB/song, these kids also have 1,956,000MB of storage, or just under 2 TB. Heck, that's not too bad... you could do that for about $20,000 or less nowadays.
I suppose they could have just downloaded them all, and not purcahsed a single CD. If they ran a T3 full-out for 4 days straight, they could suck down 2TB. With the massive pipes most colleges have, I'm sure they wouldn't have even noticed the little bump in traffic.
If you're listening to bands outside of all this, it doesn't effect you anyway.
Right. If you're careful about only trading MP3s that have only been legally downloaded from MP3.com, band websites, etc... then the RIAA won't bother you at all. They do extensive checking for each and every song to make sure that 1) The RIAA represents the artist in question, 2) that it's the right song, and not something with a similar name, and 3) that the band hasn't decided to make the MP3 available intentionally. Only then do they reluctantly issue a cease & desist order.
They would never abuse their position and simply issue a blanket C&D on the mere suspicion that there might be an infringement. Sure, it's more expensive to do the careful checking, but they can't take the chance that they might alienate their customers.
The resulting source code will be made available through the General Public License procedure
What procedure is that? The one where someone swipes some GPL code, tries to pass it off as proprietary, and has to be badgered and humiliated until they release the source or pull the product?
That kind of licensing just means that they have to carry a bond, which is a cheap form of insurance. Most licensed professions (eg locksmith) require a bond. (FYI, you can get a $30,000 locksmith bond for $15/year & a magazine subscription.)
Seems to me that the question in Texas just boils down to whether the programmers have passed the test, done the paperwork and paid the fees.
So, what's the Software Engineering Exam in Texas like? Hard? Do they test in C or pseudocode or what?
(In other words, you license particular professions that have a potential impact on public or customer safety, not the word "Engineer". If they feel that there's some danger that people will trust me to design their buildings because I'm a software engineer, then they have to restrict the word "Engineer" to a particular profession. Just like I can't call myself a MD or police officer.)
Thanks for the feedback. Couple of questions: What were you using for a display? TV or VGA? (though, I'm not sure that matters for performance...) What OS are you using? If it's Windows, the driver should be able to use the MPEG2 decoder to help with DVDs, yes? Or does your model not have that video hardware? The reason I ask is because I would tend to think it would play DVDs better, since it wouldn't be 100% CPU for the decoding.
Good to know that even the 533 does a decent job with soft codecs, though.
(And I meant "Crap" as in, "that's not going to work how I thought", not "this hardware is Crap.":) In fact, I think there is a great use for this kind of hardware... pretty much just what you described. I just want to make sure it will work for my purposes.)
Great, thanks for the info. So what firmware rev is the one with the networking features? (I hear a lot about the 2.60 firmware.. is this it?)
Your Windows/Samba comment means that it uses SMB for filesharing. Easy enough.
And thanks for the link to the forums... I had only found the Dutch ones before (these are in English.) Ah... I see 2.6.5 is the version that drives the Ethernet. Gets it's own IP via DHCP...
Very helpful. I gather you're in the UK. How much did yours cost?
Anyone have any links to places in the US to buy a DP-500? Any reviews of the new features (networking, mostly) in the DP-500? I've done some Google searching, and found some good info on the DP-450. I've even seen some stuff on the DP-500, but just from people using it as a (standalone) player.
I'd like to know what protocol(s) it uses, etc.. Also, the comments from users over the last several months (mostly about the 450 or prerelease 500s) talk about a lot of deficiencies. Since the firmware to support the networking has to be at least somewhat updated, does anyone know what else has been changed or improved? (For example, there were a lot of comments about the older ones supporting a very narrow set of Divx;) versions, contrary to what the new press release implies.)
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I tried this route.
I had trouble with getting my VCR to play one show while recording another. I also had some difficulty getting it to stream video from my home network. I couldn't figure out how to set the IP address on the VCR. It doesn't seem to use DHCP either. I think the IP is hardcoded to 1.2.0.0 or something, but setting my gateway to 1.2.0.1 didn't help, it won't ARP for it.
The commercial skip feature works, but it's pretty slow. Resetting the file to the beginning also takes forever for some reason. The REW button works eventually, but I can't find the slider. At first I thought it was hung, but I just let it sit for 5 minutes, and it finally switched from the REW state to the STOP state.
There's some sort of bug, the media cartridges keep auto-ejecting if I try to record more than 3 hours. There's a low quality mode (mpeg1?) which works for 6 hours, but the quality is just about unusable. This problem is interfering with the monthly show scheduling.
I also can't seem to get it to load any games, browse the web, or play DVDs. I'm not sure how to even load code onto it. Does anyone have an VHS API reference?
I haven't tried either, but I wouldn't doubt your statement.
Seems to me, though, that more people doing homebrew and using those services ought to help improve the quality a bit. I imagine it could work something like the CDDB.
You young punks.
When I was a kid, we had to pulse dial by tapping on the cradle buttons ('cause, you know, they had locks on the rotary dial) and we liked it!
No, you have to submit a working example of the invention, I believe.
I'm of the opinion (though the law does not often agree) that if you buy something, you can do with it what you like. In the case of IP, that's anything you want with your copy, short of giving it to someone else while also retaining a copy for yourself, if they don't own a copy. So, if your kids trashed your Windows CD by scratching it up, I have no problem with burning you a copy. The only gray area (by my thinking) is how to verify that the recipient owns their own copy before you hand over a copy of yours or a mod.
Imagine an e-book. If I make electronic notes in the margins of my copy, I ought to be able to give it to you, if you own a copy of the original. The only reason that one should take offense if it makes it onto Kazaa is because there's obviously very little opportunity to verify ownership for all the people downloading.
In the case of an XBox mod, it seems reasonable to be lax about verifying ownership at the moment, because there's no other practical use for the BIOS. Once XBox clones come out, then that would change.
(If it makes a difference to anyone, I am an author. However, like most any modern paid author, you can't take my opinion as permission to do x, y, or z with a book I wrote... you'd have to talk to my publisher for that because they own the rights to it.)
So, he was selling them a chip with an XBox BIOS on it, which is only useful in an XBox. So the consumer has a license to use the XBox BIOS on his (one) XBox. Had he sold a blank chip, and the consumer put the modified BIOS on the chip himself, he would have been fine? (Though the consumer is probably violating a "no modifications" license clause at that point.)
It's not quite the same as my buying a burned copy of Windows to use on a second PC with no OS license. I mean, I see the technical violation of the law... he was making unauthorized copies of software.. but he was giving them to people who had a right to have them (morally, if not legally.)
They probably threatened him with 20 years in jail per chip sold or something similar.
Thanks for correcting me. You're right, I saw that it was a $99 option, and that you needed 1 per Tivo. This link clarifies it, and the pricing is as you say:
http://www.tivo.com/4.9.1.asp#3
I'm glad to see that it's a little better than I thought... but I still think it's a bit much that they want to charge for the hardware AND the service AND new features that I think belong there in the first place... Sure, they can charge for whatever they like, I'm just saying it makes them a lot less attractive when other options are available.
Yes, I wasn't impressed either. That's $99 per Tivo. You really need to have 2 to make it worthwhile. If you just have one, then all the $99 buys you is the ability to display pictures and play MP3's off your computer. As you point out, you have to buy the USB adapters, as well. So, $200-$300 on top of buying 2 series 2 Tivos, for a feature that I'm guessing most owners think should have been included in the first place. Note that you can't play movies stored on your PC. Note that the Tivos have to be on the same account, so no sharing with neighbors, roommates, etc.. let alone across the 'Net.
Tivo really needs to quit gouging their customers. They're just begging to have some competitor come along and eat their lunch. There have been some very visable failures in that market, but I think there's lots of room for competition. At the price that all the features of a Tivo net add up to, I could pay someone to build me a custom HTPC.
Yes.. (Well, no... I don't want any Justin Timberlake, thanks.)
Do you buy an average of 1 CD per month? If so, that'd take care of it.
Yeah.
Heh, pretty bad when I' rather have a government agency running things, eh?
Can't we just buy the RIAA, and be done with? According to this chart:
http://www.riaa.com/pdf/2002yrendshipments.pdf
if I'm reading it right... the various media companies had 12.6 Billion in revenue in 2002. That's revenue, not profit. The $97B still looks pretty silly, eh? Anyone know what the profit amount is? Surely it's much less.
Anyway, for 250M Americans, that's about $48/year/person. How about we just include that amount in our taxes, and we all get all the free music we want? Let the record stores, P2P services, etc... all compete to sell $.50 CDs, all the downloads you can eat, etc..
I'm sure the dollar amount will be much less if we just consider the profit amount, too. Then radio stations dont have to pay licensing fees, and the RIAA can let go all the staff who have to track piracy, thereby increasing their per-employee performance.
We'll still let them exist so they can tell us who the top 40 are, who has gold "records", which record companies and artists get how much of the share, etc.. you know, all that stuff they are supposed to exist for.
Heck, I've got more money and kids than most people.. I'd be happy to pay a proportionally higher amount to help subsidize poor people. Put it on my phone bill, $4/month, like we do to subsidize people in the middle of nowhere and old people.
4 kids (or ringleaders of groups of kids, I guess) managed to get 652,000 songs together, with no dupes, live music, legal MP3s, or any original recording by themselves? Wow, at an average of like 15 tracks per CD, that's 43,467 CDs, or so. And at $15/CD, that means that various people spend around $652,000 dollars on music. Clearly, these are wealthy college kids, so it makes sense to get after their money.
If you figre a conservative 3MB/song, these kids also have 1,956,000MB of storage, or just under 2 TB. Heck, that's not too bad... you could do that for about $20,000 or less nowadays.
I suppose they could have just downloaded them all, and not purcahsed a single CD. If they ran a T3 full-out for 4 days straight, they could suck down 2TB. With the massive pipes most colleges have, I'm sure they wouldn't have even noticed the little bump in traffic.
Well, there's the logic then... it must be someone's fault that the RIAA doesn't have all the money in the world yet. Must be those college kids.
Heh, thanks for clarifying on my behalf. Like an idiot, I forgot to include the <extremely obvious sarcasm> tags in my original post.
If you're listening to bands outside of all this, it doesn't effect you anyway.
Right. If you're careful about only trading MP3s that have only been legally downloaded from MP3.com, band websites, etc... then the RIAA won't bother you at all. They do extensive checking for each and every song to make sure that 1) The RIAA represents the artist in question, 2) that it's the right song, and not something with a similar name, and 3) that the band hasn't decided to make the MP3 available intentionally. Only then do they reluctantly issue a cease & desist order.
They would never abuse their position and simply issue a blanket C&D on the mere suspicion that there might be an infringement. Sure, it's more expensive to do the careful checking, but they can't take the chance that they might alienate their customers.
Ha, if it doesn't support x-ray writing of DVVDvD +- R/RW/RO/WO 1.5 TB Discs with Dolby 15.3 SRS and XHDTV2, it won't even be worth $50.
Yes, now they can go after the US Mint.
So what happens now, they get the death penalty?
The resulting source code will be made available through the General Public License procedure
What procedure is that? The one where someone swipes some GPL code, tries to pass it off as proprietary, and has to be badgered and humiliated until they release the source or pull the product?
That kind of licensing just means that they have to carry a bond, which is a cheap form of insurance. Most licensed professions (eg locksmith) require a bond. (FYI, you can get a $30,000 locksmith bond for $15/year & a magazine subscription.)
Seems to me that the question in Texas just boils down to whether the programmers have passed the test, done the paperwork and paid the fees.
So, what's the Software Engineering Exam in Texas like? Hard? Do they test in C or pseudocode or what?
(In other words, you license particular professions that have a potential impact on public or customer safety, not the word "Engineer". If they feel that there's some danger that people will trust me to design their buildings because I'm a software engineer, then they have to restrict the word "Engineer" to a particular profession. Just like I can't call myself a MD or police officer.)
Thanks for the feedback. Couple of questions: What were you using for a display? TV or VGA? (though, I'm not sure that matters for performance...) What OS are you using? If it's Windows, the driver should be able to use the MPEG2 decoder to help with DVDs, yes? Or does your model not have that video hardware? The reason I ask is because I would tend to think it would play DVDs better, since it wouldn't be 100% CPU for the decoding.
:) In fact, I think there is a great use for this kind of hardware... pretty much just what you described. I just want to make sure it will work for my purposes.)
Good to know that even the 533 does a decent job with soft codecs, though.
(And I meant "Crap" as in, "that's not going to work how I thought", not "this hardware is Crap."
Great, thanks for the info. So what firmware rev is the one with the networking features? (I hear a lot about the 2.60 firmware.. is this it?)
Your Windows/Samba comment means that it uses SMB for filesharing. Easy enough.
And thanks for the link to the forums... I had only found the Dutch ones before (these are in English.) Ah... I see 2.6.5 is the version that drives the Ethernet. Gets it's own IP via DHCP...
Very helpful. I gather you're in the UK. How much did yours cost?
Anyone have any links to places in the US to buy a DP-500? Any reviews of the new features (networking, mostly) in the DP-500? I've done some Google searching, and found some good info on the DP-450. I've even seen some stuff on the DP-500, but just from people using it as a (standalone) player.
I'd like to know what protocol(s) it uses, etc.. Also, the comments from users over the last several months (mostly about the 450 or prerelease 500s) talk about a lot of deficiencies. Since the firmware to support the networking has to be at least somewhat updated, does anyone know what else has been changed or improved? (For example, there were a lot of comments about the older ones supporting a very narrow set of Divx;) versions, contrary to what the new press release implies.)