ReplayTV Does Advert Skipping Already
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
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· Score: 1
A PVR could do collabortive advert skipping.
My 2001-vintage ReplayTV PVR does "dumb" auto advert skipping (using simple heuristics) that works around 95% of the time. I'm not sure you would get a good improvement over 95% with this extra technology...
Does anyone know how to get around these restrictions?
Get an unlimited, uncrippled media sharing solution. Go with something like VideoLAN (free!) or my personal favourite, Media Center. MC can upsample or downsample or transcode on the fly, serves up library audio and video to unlimited number of clients across LAN or WAN (I tried to max it out with 8 LAN clients and 5 WAN clients onetime and it just kept on chugging), and works with pretty much every codec I throw at it.
It's no coincidence that Cali spends among the lowest in the US per capita on education, and on adult education. With a constant influx of immigrants, and eager new college grads, why bother paying to nurture talent in-house when you can externalise the costs? Embedded in this milieu, the Silicon Valley companies have absorbed much of this culture: get em young, work em hard, get rid of them when they begin to get a clue, replace them with new recruits with the latest buzzy skills. Rinse and repeat.
it would be vaporized (before any radionuclides or uraniumoxides, as you call them) would be transported into the atmosphere
These chemical reactions (yes, even those at a few thousand C inside lava/magma) are too weak to affect the nuclear cores of the elements involved. What you would end up with, then, is a dirty cloud of radioactive vapour which would follow wind patterns for a while and then fall onto land as preciptation (rainfall) and dust. Look at a volcano - see all the stuff billowing up? Right not it's just smoke and dust. Imagine if it was radioactive!
Apple really should have just integrated this on the MB. My $20 sound card (Envy24 HT-S) does bit-perfect 48-192KHz 16/24/32-bit output on SPDIF or coax, using ASIO, up to 7.1 channels. If I could buy this card for $20 then Apple could get it as an IC for like $5.
Why can't we use active lava domes to destroy nuclear waste
Either you're kidding, or you haven't thought about the effects of combusting assorted radionuclides and spewing radioactive metallic oxides that will be carried aloft and deposited as dust and ash for thousands of miles.
The media should dig deeper. There is no "ownership" of this email beyond Yahoo's. It owns the email, it just grants you access rights to it, and has decided not to grant it to heirs. If Yahoo, for whatever reasonm, decides to terminate your account (for "violation of TOS") then you lose all access to *any* of the information stored on Yahoo's servers: email, photos, contacts, files, mailing lists, notes, etc. Yahoo doesn't even have to to tell you what you did to lose your acces rights, it can just say "NO ACCESS" and you're toast. Do a search and you will find hundreds of people vainly trying to recover lost data from Yahoo's servers.
Yeah, well the Amiga never really went away either. But is it "doing fine"?
As for the "wobbles" in sales, what do they look like?
Apple Computer's worldwide market share fell to 1.8% in the third quarter of this year from 2.1%, and dropped to 3.2% from 3.6% in the U.S., according to figures from research company Gartner. The numbers also showed dramatic declines in the quarter-to-quarter growth rate of Macs sold while Apple's Windows-based competitors saw double digit increases in the U.S and an almost 10% rise worldwide... Compared to other PC vendors, Apple had a 5.0% decline in unit growth worldwide from the previous quarter. While Apple declined, its competitors gained 9.8% in unit growth from Q2. Year-to-year figures showed Apple with a 5.7% jump, as other vendors rose 9.8%. No other PC vendor in the top ten posted a decline in year-to-year unit growth worldwide but Apple. The leader in worldwide market share was Dell in first place with a 16.8% share, followed by HP with 15.0% and IBM at 5.6%.
If you always tend to wobble downwards, while your competitors tend to wobble upwards, then even during a prolonged steady-state of wobbling around equilibrium it's easy to see the final conclusion.
Dude, he's parrotting me. *I* was being charitable, seeing that this is an online site with an overrepresentation of Macs. What are the real stats like?
Apple Computer's worldwide market share fell to 1.8% in the third quarter of this year from 2.1%, and dropped to 3.2% from 3.6% in the U.S., according to figures from research company Gartner. The numbers also showed dramatic declines in the quarter-to-quarter growth rate of Macs sold while Apple's Windows-based competitors saw double digit increases in the U.S and an almost 10% rise worldwide... Compared to other PC vendors, Apple had a 5.0% decline in unit growth worldwide from the previous quarter. While Apple declined, its competitors gained 9.8% in unit growth from Q2. Year-to-year figures showed Apple with a 5.7% jump, as other vendors rose 9.8%. No other PC vendor in the top ten posted a decline in year-to-year unit growth worldwide but Apple. The leader in worldwide market share was Dell in first place with a 16.8% share, followed by HP with 15.0% and IBM at 5.6%.
kept SGI around long enough for them to reinvent themselves
SGI's new gig is deploying lots of Intel CPUs on some funky buses. If that excites you, well done.
HP loses money on PC's, so did IBM before they jetisoned that unit. Basically Dell is the only one making any money on PC hardware
All these companies you mention are many times Apple's size and have over the past 20 years produced shareholder returns many dozens or hundreds of times that of Apple's.
Apple is a very profitable company with no debt and huge cash reserves.
Ys, that's what they said about SGI, once upon a time. Look, Apple has some nice third-party software available for it, but most or all of that is going to fade away eventually if its market share stays so abysmally low. That's why people "care" about market share. Apple's cash reserves, while large for such a small company, are not infinite and it cannot afford to continue to subsidise the creation of an ever-increasing portion of Macintosh software by itself.
And if you break down Apple's profits for the past couple of years, you see that it makes basically zero profit from its computer hardware business. Zero. That's pretty piss-poor. It's basically being subsidised by the sales of low-end trinkets like the iPod and accessories. If it was possible I'd buy shares in an Apple iPod company, but not in the current Apple Computer company because so much of it is just a write-off, profit-wise. Divest!
Obviously you have found some secret way to make an iPod work as a computer or server, with four-figure USPs and high margins to boot.
iPod is a nice product but it is a distraction for a company like Apple. The smartest way to continue as a of any note would be emulate 3Com/Palm and divest itself of iPod, spinning off the division into a separate company. Better for the shareholders as well. Apple currently basically makes no profit from selling computer hardware, so you have massive inefficiencies within the company being disguised by the temporary profits from selling iPod baubles in shopping malls and Best Buy for chickenfeed.
Apple really needs this cheapo Mac to be a hit otherwise the Mac is going to go the way of the Amiga. I hope this new Macs quality is better than the eMac's lousy record.
Give me the entire game as a free download (or nominal charge to ship it), with a couple days of free access. Then, once I'm hooked, I'll start paying.
That's how they do it in Korea and especially China, the largest MMOG market in the world. China manages to support several dozen huge online games that dwarf anything available in the US, and manages this even without much of a credit card infrastructure, relying on point-of-sale prepaid time cards.
US-derived MMOGs are really quite niche. The largest MMOG company in the world, Shanda, regularly gets ~1m concurrent players for some of its games... and it hosts several. Shanda's MMOGs currently peak at around ~1.4m concurrent each, with around ~900K average.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Zona, an MMOG middleware company that was purchased by Shanda. You want to scale over a million concurrent players comfortably with no server dropout and speedy player updates, you're gonna need something like Terazona.
I have a 1TB media server RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array.
Anyway, one advantage I have noticed about DIVX over DVD is reduced bandwidth. You can get very respectable video quality from 1.5Mbps DIVX, versus ~4-5 times that DVD. Either of these is acceptable over wired connections, but 802.11a barely allows acceptable DIVX, and even 802.11g struggles to support more than a few DVD streams. But it manages several DIVX streams handily. There's also the issue of multiple seeks and STR rates on the RAID-array. So if you are in a family/group situation and you anticipate multiple simultaneous wireless access, recompressing to DIVX/XVID is a good option to reduce contention.
Also, if you're setting up a media server, then Media Center is a good choice. Its ability to do on-the-fly codec transcoding and bandwidth downsampling based on client profiles is a godsend, as is its ability to control Tivo and uPNP media hardware devices on the network. Technical info here.
just in case you had to switch HDDs wonder how long it'll take to back up 1TB
I have a 1TB RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array. Using ntbackup with write-verify it takes 2 days for the backup, and 1 day for the verify.
XXCopy is quicker - takes around 1 day for write+verify.
These times would be cut to around a fifth if the data travelled over a faster bus than regular PCI and FW.
Tivo is better for consumers, more dumbed down than ReplayTV.
I've always wondered about this, about people who say Tivo is so much "easier" than RTV. I've used both Tivo and ReplayTV (have several RTVs) and honestly, the remote is a piece of piss. If someone *can't* figure out the "record" and "play" and "select" buttons then they are in trouble. Multiple networked RTVs passed the wife test *instantly*.
Tivo finally has everything that made replay special
Really? When Tivo has auto commercial advance, show sharing, Poopli, and something Java-based platform-agnostic like DVArchive then I might get interested. But I doubt it. Someone I know attended a TV industry conference where the Tivo CEO was a guest speaker. She said he was shilling for the media companies. He basically made nice with all the companies, told them they had nothing to fear, and looked forward to delivering "quality eyeballs" during pause breaks and fast-forwards.
The simplest and most platform-agnostic solution is to buy ReplayTV with autoconfig'd built-in ethernet. The Java-based DVArchive UI lets you control/stream/move shows between any LAN/WAN connected ReplayTVs or Java-enabled platform. It's uPNP-based so you can rig up some nice scripting. Think of each RTV as a loosely coupled scriptable capture device with significant on-device storage.
You use something like the ReVue UI to convert the RTV MPEGs to vanilla MPEGs, and burn to DVD or convert to MPEG-4 and burn/store/stream as required. Because ReplayTV recordings are unemcumbered by DRM and have a 4-year headstart on Tivo in sharing shows, you can go to online sites like Poopli and browse/download tens of thousands of shows stored on the networks of other ReplayTV owners. If you buy the right RTV model you also get automatic commercial advance - which when it works is like magic!
Media Center 11 has an elegant-but-beta Library Server that does realtime transcoding of bitrates and formats between its server and attached clients, across LAN or WAN. You can couple this with its "Media Scheduler" module to record internet radio streams and then serve them up in whatever format and bitrate a client specifies. What's nice is that you can also stream video and photos to clients. MC will also do bitrate transcoding while streaming from attached Tivo HMOs.
MC also has a beta uPNP module that lets you control attached media streaming devices and offload the transcoding duties to them.
And oh yeah, SlimServer is GPL'd. You can script this to do on-the-fly custom transcoding. It's more flexible than pre-rolled, but less friendly.
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A PVR could do collabortive advert skipping.
My 2001-vintage ReplayTV PVR does "dumb" auto advert skipping (using simple heuristics) that works around 95% of the time. I'm not sure you would get a good improvement over 95% with this extra technology...
Does anyone know how to get around these restrictions?
Get an unlimited, uncrippled media sharing solution. Go with something like VideoLAN (free!) or my personal favourite, Media Center. MC can upsample or downsample or transcode on the fly, serves up library audio and video to unlimited number of clients across LAN or WAN (I tried to max it out with 8 LAN clients and 5 WAN clients onetime and it just kept on chugging), and works with pretty much every codec I throw at it.
I think they should bring back the X-Men again for good measure!
It's no coincidence that Cali spends among the lowest in the US per capita on education, and on adult education. With a constant influx of immigrants, and eager new college grads, why bother paying to nurture talent in-house when you can externalise the costs? Embedded in this milieu, the Silicon Valley companies have absorbed much of this culture: get em young, work em hard, get rid of them when they begin to get a clue, replace them with new recruits with the latest buzzy skills. Rinse and repeat.
it would be vaporized (before any radionuclides or uraniumoxides, as you call them) would be transported into the atmosphere
These chemical reactions (yes, even those at a few thousand C inside lava/magma) are too weak to affect the nuclear cores of the elements involved. What you would end up with, then, is a dirty cloud of radioactive vapour which would follow wind patterns for a while and then fall onto land as preciptation (rainfall) and dust. Look at a volcano - see all the stuff billowing up? Right not it's just smoke and dust. Imagine if it was radioactive!
Not a good idea.
M-Audio-Transit [m-audio.com] AC3/DTS TOSlink adaptor.
Apple really should have just integrated this on the MB. My $20 sound card (Envy24 HT-S) does bit-perfect 48-192KHz 16/24/32-bit output on SPDIF or coax, using ASIO, up to 7.1 channels. If I could buy this card for $20 then Apple could get it as an IC for like $5.
I mostly use my 4G iPod connected to a Soundcraft mixing desk
And what's your connector between the iPod and the deck?
Why can't we use active lava domes to destroy nuclear waste
Either you're kidding, or you haven't thought about the effects of combusting assorted radionuclides and spewing radioactive metallic oxides that will be carried aloft and deposited as dust and ash for thousands of miles.
From Donald Luskin
And here's some ad hominem critique of the author:
Luskin Is A Stalker
The media should dig deeper. There is no "ownership" of this email beyond Yahoo's. It owns the email, it just grants you access rights to it, and has decided not to grant it to heirs. If Yahoo, for whatever reasonm, decides to terminate your account (for "violation of TOS") then you lose all access to *any* of the information stored on Yahoo's servers: email, photos, contacts, files, mailing lists, notes, etc. Yahoo doesn't even have to to tell you what you did to lose your acces rights, it can just say "NO ACCESS" and you're toast. Do a search and you will find hundreds of people vainly trying to recover lost data from Yahoo's servers.
Yahoo is evil, plain and simple.
Yeah, well the Amiga never really went away either. But is it "doing fine"?
As for the "wobbles" in sales, what do they look like? If you always tend to wobble downwards, while your competitors tend to wobble upwards, then even during a prolonged steady-state of wobbling around equilibrium it's easy to see the final conclusion.
Dude, he's parrotting me. *I* was being charitable, seeing that this is an online site with an overrepresentation of Macs. What are the real stats like?
kept SGI around long enough for them to reinvent themselves
SGI's new gig is deploying lots of Intel CPUs on some funky buses. If that excites you, well done.
HP loses money on PC's, so did IBM before they jetisoned that unit. Basically Dell is the only one making any money on PC hardware
All these companies you mention are many times Apple's size and have over the past 20 years produced shareholder returns many dozens or hundreds of times that of Apple's.
Who cares about market share?
Apple is a very profitable company with no debt and huge cash reserves.
Ys, that's what they said about SGI, once upon a time. Look, Apple has some nice third-party software available for it, but most or all of that is going to fade away eventually if its market share stays so abysmally low. That's why people "care" about market share. Apple's cash reserves, while large for such a small company, are not infinite and it cannot afford to continue to subsidise the creation of an ever-increasing portion of Macintosh software by itself.
And if you break down Apple's profits for the past couple of years, you see that it makes basically zero profit from its computer hardware business. Zero. That's pretty piss-poor. It's basically being subsidised by the sales of low-end trinkets like the iPod and accessories. If it was possible I'd buy shares in an Apple iPod company, but not in the current Apple Computer company because so much of it is just a write-off, profit-wise. Divest!
obviously, you have not heard of the iPod...
Obviously you have found some secret way to make an iPod work as a computer or server, with four-figure USPs and high margins to boot.
iPod is a nice product but it is a distraction for a company like Apple. The smartest way to continue as a of any note would be emulate 3Com/Palm and divest itself of iPod, spinning off the division into a separate company. Better for the shareholders as well. Apple currently basically makes no profit from selling computer hardware, so you have massive inefficiencies within the company being disguised by the temporary profits from selling iPod baubles in shopping malls and Best Buy for chickenfeed.
Even without the Mac Mini they were doing fine.
How exactly is declining in market share by ~50% over the past 5 years "doing fine"?
Latest W3C stats:
Mac: 2.7%
Linux: 3.1%
Apple really needs this cheapo Mac to be a hit otherwise the Mac is going to go the way of the Amiga. I hope this new Macs quality is better than the eMac's lousy record.
Give me the entire game as a free download (or nominal charge to ship it), with a couple days of free access. Then, once I'm hooked, I'll start paying.
That's how they do it in Korea and especially China, the largest MMOG market in the world. China manages to support several dozen huge online games that dwarf anything available in the US, and manages this even without much of a credit card infrastructure, relying on point-of-sale prepaid time cards.
US-derived MMOGs are really quite niche. The largest MMOG company in the world, Shanda, regularly gets ~1m concurrent players for some of its games... and it hosts several. Shanda's MMOGs currently peak at around ~1.4m concurrent each, with around ~900K average.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Zona, an MMOG middleware company that was purchased by Shanda. You want to scale over a million concurrent players comfortably with no server dropout and speedy player updates, you're gonna need something like Terazona.
I don't know much about DiVX
I have a 1TB media server RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array.
Anyway, one advantage I have noticed about DIVX over DVD is reduced bandwidth. You can get very respectable video quality from 1.5Mbps DIVX, versus ~4-5 times that DVD. Either of these is acceptable over wired connections, but 802.11a barely allows acceptable DIVX, and even 802.11g struggles to support more than a few DVD streams. But it manages several DIVX streams handily. There's also the issue of multiple seeks and STR rates on the RAID-array. So if you are in a family/group situation and you anticipate multiple simultaneous wireless access, recompressing to DIVX/XVID is a good option to reduce contention.
Also, if you're setting up a media server, then Media Center is a good choice. Its ability to do on-the-fly codec transcoding and bandwidth downsampling based on client profiles is a godsend, as is its ability to control Tivo and uPNP media hardware devices on the network. Technical info here.
just in case you had to switch HDDs wonder how long it'll take to back up 1TB
I have a 1TB RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array. Using ntbackup with write-verify it takes 2 days for the backup, and 1 day for the verify.
XXCopy is quicker - takes around 1 day for write+verify.
These times would be cut to around a fifth if the data travelled over a faster bus than regular PCI and FW.
Tivo is better for consumers, more dumbed down than ReplayTV.
I've always wondered about this, about people who say Tivo is so much "easier" than RTV. I've used both Tivo and ReplayTV (have several RTVs) and honestly, the remote is a piece of piss. If someone *can't* figure out the "record" and "play" and "select" buttons then they are in trouble. Multiple networked RTVs passed the wife test *instantly*.
Tivo finally has everything that made replay special
Really? When Tivo has auto commercial advance, show sharing, Poopli, and something Java-based platform-agnostic like DVArchive then I might get interested. But I doubt it. Someone I know attended a TV industry conference where the Tivo CEO was a guest speaker. She said he was shilling for the media companies. He basically made nice with all the companies, told them they had nothing to fear, and looked forward to delivering "quality eyeballs" during pause breaks and fast-forwards.
here are my options
The simplest and most platform-agnostic solution is to buy ReplayTV with autoconfig'd built-in ethernet. The Java-based DVArchive UI lets you control/stream/move shows between any LAN/WAN connected ReplayTVs or Java-enabled platform. It's uPNP-based so you can rig up some nice scripting. Think of each RTV as a loosely coupled scriptable capture device with significant on-device storage.
You use something like the ReVue UI to convert the RTV MPEGs to vanilla MPEGs, and burn to DVD or convert to MPEG-4 and burn/store/stream as required. Because ReplayTV recordings are unemcumbered by DRM and have a 4-year headstart on Tivo in sharing shows, you can go to online sites like Poopli and browse/download tens of thousands of shows stored on the networks of other ReplayTV owners. If you buy the right RTV model you also get automatic commercial advance - which when it works is like magic!
Media Center 11 has an elegant-but-beta Library Server that does realtime transcoding of bitrates and formats between its server and attached clients, across LAN or WAN. You can couple this with its "Media Scheduler" module to record internet radio streams and then serve them up in whatever format and bitrate a client specifies. What's nice is that you can also stream video and photos to clients. MC will also do bitrate transcoding while streaming from attached Tivo HMOs.
MC also has a beta uPNP module that lets you control attached media streaming devices and offload the transcoding duties to them.
And oh yeah, SlimServer is GPL'd. You can script this to do on-the-fly custom transcoding. It's more flexible than pre-rolled, but less friendly.