Some reasons and other comments given for the scheduled discontinuence, copied from the forum, copied from the mailing list:
Continued use of the service to support commercial products, in violation of the agreement.
Commercial products continued to grow despite previous appeals that this activity stop.
There are significant changes to the supporting data structure forthcoming and we could not devote resources to the continued upkeep and enhancements of the service.
Maintenance of the service is impacting our resource pool for other projects.
We sought alternative options but were unable to find a solution.
We recognize the hardship this creates for the user community. We are open to alternative solutions and would consider proposals that met the needs of the user community and our company.
We looked into options to turn this into a paid service however we do not have the infrastructure at this time.
(NB: Emphasis mine)
Basically, what they're saying is that they will be changing their database structure, and can't be bothered to re-code the Labs.Zap2It part. They'd rather spend the time on other things, like increasing ad revenue.
Bear in mind that TMS charges each station (Somewhere in the region of $75/day) to collect their data, and charges their commercial end-users (somewhere in the region of $500/market/month) to provide the data. Quite a lucrative trade, wouldn't you say? Add to that advertising revenue from their site, and subtract bandwidth fees, and they still make a tidy profit.
It has been theorised that the main reason labs.zap2it was set up was to save bandwidth costs after XMLTV scrapers started hitting their public site. As the data was served up in chunks in the midst of a sea of other information (Links, advertisements, commentary, navigation etc) it cost considerably more in bandwidth, so it made more fiscal sense to offer the data for free, so they could track who was using it and where, along with only having to serve the data itself, with compression and selectivity. This is only a theory, mind, but considering how the Myth community (On it's own, without any of the other projects that were/are using Zap2It feeds) has grown, I think removing this option will drastically increase Zap2It's bandwidth bills without adding any ad revenue back into the pot (A scraper doesn't see ads, and doesn't care about them).
In other words, this could be a costly mistake for TMS. Here's hoping they see sense, and work out a way to work with MythTV and others.
The Amiga also didn't run a TCP stack AmiTCP, TermiteTCP, MiamiTCP, GENESiS...
Wireless connectivity drivers Like prism2.device?
and software or a whole raft of other features that are expected to be standard nowadays. Like VoIP (Not SIP, but considering it was made back in '96 that's hardly surprising), Fax/Voice/Voicemail, Photography, Games (Where to start with links there), Applications...
Just because the Amiga could live up to low low expectations of the past don't mean shit. Live up to? At the time, the Amiga exceeded all expectations.In it's day, the Amiga was the finest machine, for the price, bar none. It's just that Commodore couldn't market their way out of a paper bag, and "killed" the Amiga through neglect. Being passed from pillar to post afterwards really didn't help matters, either.
I believe that if you got the team who made the original Amiga, got them together today and gave them the kind of funding and creative freedom they needed, along with the current level of technology available, I'm sure they'd blow the market away, again.
Here's an idea. Have an on-board display that monitors the tank level. When it detects an increase in the level, it'll ask you how much you just paid for the gas you put in. Then the car can show you just how many $$'s you've burned each trip, and how much you're burning at any particular moment.
I think you'll find, if you start expressing things like MPG or KM/100L rates in terms of pure "Money spent" you'll find people taking a lot more notice of the amount of gas they're using, and demanding more efficiency from their cars. Something like a "Congratulations! This trip just cost you $2.40" would drive the point home more than "You just got 15MPG".
That, and people might start importing cars directly from China/Japan/Europe, where their MPG standards already outclass the US, in most cases, almost 4:1.
You forget that more shows are taking the movie route by slipping in not-so-subtle product placements. Not to mention direct references, such as that episode of Friends where they had a scene discussing Tivo. Look at "Casino Royale". Everywhere you looked there was a Sony logo. I mean, Blue-Ray CCTV system? Give me a break! Every phone was Sony-Ericsson! I also believe every PC was a Vaio, but that was a little more subtle. Why not just call the movie "Sony Royale sponsored by Sony", it was that blatant.
Disclaimer: I work for Disney and in the television group. Duly noted.
Why is this issue so important to you that will not watch Disney owned channels?
Is it the lack of control over the VOD stream, the ad itself, or something else? Yes. To all three.
Why should I, as an end-user, be prevented from watching a show how I choose to? I don't have a problem with the DVDs with the unskippable commercials at the beginnig, as my DVD player (XBMC) ignores the "Do not skip" flag. But if I, as a viewer, want to watch the show and not the ads, or even want to skip the 10-minute "Previously on" recap, isn't that my right to do so?
Second, ads do serve a useful purpose. They bring product's capabilities and advantages to a customer's attention. However, most ads these days seem not to be doing that any more. For example: The ads for ED products on the TV. No mention of what they do or what they're for, just an annoying jingle/tune and the product name. Or, dare I mention it, "Head-On". That's got to be up in the top 5 for most annoying advert of all time.
And finally, it's the start of a slippery slope. First there's no fast-forwarding, then there's no timeshifting at all, then there's no fair use. And all we're left with is 24-hour re-runs of old programming, non-stop "Reality" TV, and Jerry Springer.
Ad companies have to face facts. Intersitial ads in programming are a dying breed, like Popup ads on the net. The only people who watch them are people who don't know better (A decreasing number), or people who's ad-skipping/blocking/removing system is not working. And to be honest, there's really no need for ads in television. Look at the BBC. Funded solely by a £20/year licence fee, they manage to make 5+ channels of totally "Free" and ad-free television that are free to all, the largest news website on the planet, 7 free and ad-free radio stations, interactive services, Digital High-Def TV systems (Coming soon), best-of-breed programming... The list goes on.
As someone involved, I'd like to hear what's important to you. Top quality programming, good value for money (Both for my cable subscription dollar and my time spent in front of the box), and having MY interests (Not advertiser's interests) at heart.
It's a socialist crap hole. You must be yanking my plonker. TV in the states is so much freeer. Way to mangle the language there.
Why don't you just let the government mandate everything and run your entire life since you seem so confident of letting a mobocracy dictate everything to you. BBC != Government.
In fact, in recent years the BBC has been a lot more critical of the British Government than most other news sources
Here in the US the governent sponsors one channel here in the US and multiple radio stations. Guess what - NO ONE LISTENS TO THEM AND NO ONE WATCHES THEM. See above. The BBC is NOT Government sponsored. It is publicly funded, but not government controlled.
Does BBC get some good programs? Sure - but if you are a talented producer in the UK, where are you going to go? Where else can you go other than Big Brother? How about the three other FTA channels in the UK (ITV, Channel 4, Five)? Or one of the cable/satellite channels (of which there are many)? If you're a UK producer, you don't HAVE to work for the BBC.
So, how about getting your facts even a little straight before spouting your incorrect and inaccurate vitriol here again.
Incidentally, I moved from the UK to Canada 2 years ago, and I find I miss a lot of the quality programming the BBC produced.Let me put it this way: The BBC would never have canceled Drive, or Firefly. Look at Red Dwarf, after all, or the Original Radio Play "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Now a Major motion picture!)
Yes. We still exist. (The only other option here is Satellite with high latency and less bandwidth than I have with dialup due to FAP.)
Does anyone know of a how-to for MythTV setup for dial-up users? I have Ubuntu 7.04 and I'm downloading the alternate-install now. (Only another day or two.;) I haven't been able to find anything on it and would appreciate any help or linkage anyone has to offer.
Thanks! I don't know of a howto personally, but as you can tell MythTV what command it is to use to update listings, you could write a simple wrapper script that does:
ifup ppp0 mythfilldatabase ifdown ppp0
Obviously with changes depending on your dial-up interface.
The rest isn't so important (Don't compile/install MythWeather, as that uses the 'net, and don't use the IMDB lookup in MythVideo for obvious reasons), but that'll get the basics working just fine.
Odd. To register a.co.uk costs £10 for me (A UK resident): http://www.freeparking.co.uk/. And I didn't have to jump through any hoops to get it (Create Username/Password/Address/UK Credit Card).
In comparison, a.com costs around £30.
If you want a difficult one, how about a.ca? You have to submit a (valid) Canadian Social Security Number to get one of those.
Or a.ac (Which cost a fortune - £90 last time I tried, which was back in 2001 when I got 240v.ac (And let lapse - I had more domains than you could shake a stick at back then).
Voila! One PCI-Express HDMI capture card. And no, it doesn't do HDCP (Yet), but considering how fast AACS has been bypassed, how long will it be before someone makes a Linux driver for this that decodes/bypasses the HDCP encryption?
Oh, and if you're worried about processing time, now you know what those AMD 4x4 boards (With dual quad processors when they come out, and stacks of RAM) are for. Capture to a high-speed RAID0 buffer (At a guess - SATA for 1080i, U320 SCSI for 720p, or fibre channel for 1080p), then have your 8 CPU cores using a multi-threaded codec to compress into MPEG/XviD/H.264/Your-choice-of-codec-here and store the completed file on a big RAID5 (750Gb drives, anyone?)
How long before MythTV has been upgraded for this kind of thing? It's exactly Myth's remit, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, what they're saying is that they will be changing their database structure, and can't be bothered to re-code the Labs.Zap2It part. They'd rather spend the time on other things, like increasing ad revenue.
Bear in mind that TMS charges each station (Somewhere in the region of $75/day) to collect their data, and charges their commercial end-users (somewhere in the region of $500/market/month) to provide the data. Quite a lucrative trade, wouldn't you say? Add to that advertising revenue from their site, and subtract bandwidth fees, and they still make a tidy profit.
It has been theorised that the main reason labs.zap2it was set up was to save bandwidth costs after XMLTV scrapers started hitting their public site. As the data was served up in chunks in the midst of a sea of other information (Links, advertisements, commentary, navigation etc) it cost considerably more in bandwidth, so it made more fiscal sense to offer the data for free, so they could track who was using it and where, along with only having to serve the data itself, with compression and selectivity. This is only a theory, mind, but considering how the Myth community (On it's own, without any of the other projects that were/are using Zap2It feeds) has grown, I think removing this option will drastically increase Zap2It's bandwidth bills without adding any ad revenue back into the pot (A scraper doesn't see ads, and doesn't care about them).
In other words, this could be a costly mistake for TMS. Here's hoping they see sense, and work out a way to work with MythTV and others.
I believe that if you got the team who made the original Amiga, got them together today and gave them the kind of funding and creative freedom they needed, along with the current level of technology available, I'm sure they'd blow the market away, again.
Here's an idea. Have an on-board display that monitors the tank level. When it detects an increase in the level, it'll ask you how much you just paid for the gas you put in. Then the car can show you just how many $$'s you've burned each trip, and how much you're burning at any particular moment.
I think you'll find, if you start expressing things like MPG or KM/100L rates in terms of pure "Money spent" you'll find people taking a lot more notice of the amount of gas they're using, and demanding more efficiency from their cars. Something like a "Congratulations! This trip just cost you $2.40" would drive the point home more than "You just got 15MPG".
That, and people might start importing cars directly from China/Japan/Europe, where their MPG standards already outclass the US, in most cases, almost 4:1.
Is it the lack of control over the VOD stream, the ad itself, or something else? Yes. To all three.
Why should I, as an end-user, be prevented from watching a show how I choose to? I don't have a problem with the DVDs with the unskippable commercials at the beginnig, as my DVD player (XBMC) ignores the "Do not skip" flag. But if I, as a viewer, want to watch the show and not the ads, or even want to skip the 10-minute "Previously on" recap, isn't that my right to do so?
Second, ads do serve a useful purpose. They bring product's capabilities and advantages to a customer's attention. However, most ads these days seem not to be doing that any more. For example: The ads for ED products on the TV. No mention of what they do or what they're for, just an annoying jingle/tune and the product name. Or, dare I mention it, "Head-On". That's got to be up in the top 5 for most annoying advert of all time.
And finally, it's the start of a slippery slope. First there's no fast-forwarding, then there's no timeshifting at all, then there's no fair use. And all we're left with is 24-hour re-runs of old programming, non-stop "Reality" TV, and Jerry Springer.
Ad companies have to face facts. Intersitial ads in programming are a dying breed, like Popup ads on the net. The only people who watch them are people who don't know better (A decreasing number), or people who's ad-skipping/blocking/removing system is not working. And to be honest, there's really no need for ads in television. Look at the BBC. Funded solely by a £20/year licence fee, they manage to make 5+ channels of totally "Free" and ad-free television that are free to all, the largest news website on the planet, 7 free and ad-free radio stations, interactive services, Digital High-Def TV systems (Coming soon), best-of-breed programming... The list goes on. As someone involved, I'd like to hear what's important to you. Top quality programming, good value for money (Both for my cable subscription dollar and my time spent in front of the box), and having MY interests (Not advertiser's interests) at heart.
In fact, in recent years the BBC has been a lot more critical of the British Government than most other news sources
Here in the US the governent sponsors one channel here in the US and multiple radio stations. Guess what - NO ONE LISTENS TO THEM AND NO ONE WATCHES THEM. See above. The BBC is NOT Government sponsored. It is publicly funded, but not government controlled. Does BBC get some good programs? Sure - but if you are a talented producer in the UK, where are you going to go? Where else can you go other than Big Brother? How about the three other FTA channels in the UK (ITV, Channel 4, Five)? Or one of the cable/satellite channels (of which there are many)? If you're a UK producer, you don't HAVE to work for the BBC.
So, how about getting your facts even a little straight before spouting your incorrect and inaccurate vitriol here again.
Incidentally, I moved from the UK to Canada 2 years ago, and I find I miss a lot of the quality programming the BBC produced.Let me put it this way: The BBC would never have canceled Drive, or Firefly. Look at Red Dwarf, after all, or the Original Radio Play "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Now a Major motion picture!)
Does anyone know of a how-to for MythTV setup for dial-up users? I have Ubuntu 7.04 and I'm downloading the alternate-install now. (Only another day or two.
Thanks! I don't know of a howto personally, but as you can tell MythTV what command it is to use to update listings, you could write a simple wrapper script that does: Obviously with changes depending on your dial-up interface. The rest isn't so important (Don't compile/install MythWeather, as that uses the 'net, and don't use the IMDB lookup in MythVideo for obvious reasons), but that'll get the basics working just fine.
Odd. To register a .co.uk costs £10 for me (A UK resident): http://www.freeparking.co.uk/. And I didn't have to jump through any hoops to get it (Create Username/Password/Address/UK Credit Card).
In comparison, a .com costs around £30.
If you want a difficult one, how about a .ca? You have to submit a (valid) Canadian Social Security Number to get one of those.
Or a .ac (Which cost a fortune - £90 last time I tried, which was back in 2001 when I got 240v.ac (And let lapse - I had more domains than you could shake a stick at back then).
The sun does blink. At around 1.15740*10^-5 Hz (If I got my math right).
...They want their technology back: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wc_summ.htm (or http://web.archive.org/web/19971211230117/www.haup pauge.com/html/wincast.htm for the first occurrance of the proper hauppauge site in the web archive)
Where's my "+1 Colbert" option? Pornography? A great threat to our children, or the greatest threat to our children?
Sure you can. And if you're going to say that you can't pipe HDMI into a computer, you'd be wrong there, too
t y/
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensi
Voila! One PCI-Express HDMI capture card. And no, it doesn't do HDCP (Yet), but considering how fast AACS has been bypassed, how long will it be before someone makes a Linux driver for this that decodes/bypasses the HDCP encryption?
Oh, and if you're worried about processing time, now you know what those AMD 4x4 boards (With dual quad processors when they come out, and stacks of RAM) are for. Capture to a high-speed RAID0 buffer (At a guess - SATA for 1080i, U320 SCSI for 720p, or fibre channel for 1080p), then have your 8 CPU cores using a multi-threaded codec to compress into MPEG/XviD/H.264/Your-choice-of-codec-here and store the completed file on a big RAID5 (750Gb drives, anyone?)
How long before MythTV has been upgraded for this kind of thing? It's exactly Myth's remit, after all.
Erm... Excuse me parent, but is starting to support recording from Firewire in OSX, and it DOES support FreeBSD. RTFA, and look at the release notes (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Note s_-_0.20). It's all in there:
Added beginnings of firewire capture support for MacOS
and
Fixed FreeBSD compilation