On Wednesday 10 April 2002 11:20 am, you wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 22:56, Paul M Foster wrote:
> > I've seen one major disadvantage of not letting Tivo phone home (the
> > Tivo service): clock drift. The Tivo is a little computer, and its time
> > will drift if it's not allowed to sync with the home office. I've also
> > noticed that, if you don't let it phone home, after a while, it will
> > lose future scheduled recording dates. However, cancelling and resetting
> > just one of them will reset the future schedules for them all. Peculiar
> > bug I haven't fully tracked down.
>
> You also won't be getting software upgrades. If you're running the 2.0
> version of the TiVo software, though, I'd recommend not upgrading. I
> liked it better than the 2.5 that is currently on my TiVo. That's one
> downside - I'd love to be able to tell the unit to downgrade itself to a
> previous version. I can understand why the service wouldn't want that
> though - support nightmares if everyone were running different versions.
>
> The biggest advantage, for me, of the TiVo *is* the service, though. I
> LOVE not having to dig through TV listings to find the shows I want to
> watch. I just click the "search by name" option, put the show title in,
> then click "record" and don't worry about when it's going to record it.
Many tv stations actually broadcast that information. I've seen a few
attempts at this. In the future of Digital TV many will be broadcasting
their schedule as part of the data stream. Right now they broadcast a code
with each show that identifies it and its episode for Nielsons ratings boxes.
This is sent in the verticle interval along with other stuff such as closed
captioning.
>
> That, and the ability to do "Season Passes" where the TiVo will find any
> time any channel a particular show is on and record it for you, are
> worth the $9.95/mo for me. Except that it's going up to $12.95/mo
> sometime soon. It's still worth it. (There's also the $100/yr and
> $200/lifetime options, but I've stuck with the monthly for now.)
>
> > Anyway, I'm interested in setting up a Tivo-like device on a regular
> > computer. If anyone does it, I'd like to know more about it. A couple of
> > unknowns I see are how you get the software to know what the channels
> > are and then change them on time. And how do you compare such a system
> > with a 19" - 36" television? Viewing programs on a 15" or 17" computer
> > screen seems like it wouldn't be a lot of fun. And how do you connect it
> > to a cable box or VCR, etc?
>
> I've been working on this on-and-off for a few months now, so I've got
> plenty of experience.
>
> If you're willing to choke down having a Windows box do all the hard
> work for you, there are two pieces of software out there: ShowShifter
> and SnapStream. ShowShifter looks and acts more like TiVo and you watch
> the shows directly inside of ShowShifter, where SnapStream has a goofy
> web-based interface to do the recording and need to use Media Player to
> watch anything. ShowShifter is still under active development where you
> download weekly (or so) beta versions to install over the version you
> are currently using, where SnapStream is more shrinkwrap with "clean"
> 1.0 and 2.0 releases. They're both awkward, but ShowShifter is a little
> more intuitive as a PVR application. Of course they're both commercial,
> and you're just about better off just buying a TiVo, since it'll work
> much better.
>
> There are many other half-assed attempts at PVR software under windows,
> usually stuff that gets bundled with video capture and tuner cards.
> Mostly they just act like an AVI/Windows Media recorder that you
> manually tune a channel and click the "record" button. ATI supposedly
> has some fancier PVR type application bundled with their new Radeon
> cards, and Happauge has a whole line of capture cards, including an
> MPEG-encoding box specifically designed to be PVR hardware (costs $300
> of course) with its own software. All of this stuff runs under Windows
> as well.
>
Another new one Digital STREAM Technology can receive NTSC as well as the
HDTV. It can also record and playback both of these formats. I spoke to
them on Tuesday will attending the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters)
convention in Vegas. I think he said it will sell for about $350 but I kind
of had a hard time understanding him. He gave me his card, it was in Korean
but then he turned it over and it was in English on the other side. It was
running on windows and he did not seem at all interested when I mentioned
Linux. Anyway his (not necessarily Linux friendly) website is:
www.dstreamtech.com
A large 3 foot tall stuffed penguin caught my eye in another booth. These
people write drivers and do various other projects. One of their programmers
is from Russia. Anyway check out their website at:
www.linuxmedialabs.com
They sell various cards including a tuner/capture card for about $100. They
also have various drivers available for downloading. Very Linux friendly
people.
Of course there was mostly high end stuff at the show. In IBM's booth
someone from aliaswavefront was running Maya on a very fast IBM computer
running Redhat 7.2. As mentioned before on this list, a trial version that
runs on windows or mac is available for demo-it has a watermark on it. The
guy told me I could contact him for a 30 day trial Linux version.
In HP's booth, someone from Dreamworks was doing a demo on Toonshooter, neat
program, not for sale though. I at least scored 4 HP penguins though.
At Realplayers booth they were running realplayer on various devices
including ipac's and a PS2.
At Compacs booth the guy I talked to said they will be selling ipacs
preloaded with Linux soon.
At Sharps booth they only had display products-no Zaurus. They said this was
the 'professional' division and to check out their website if I wanted to see
it.
I tried to bum a free copy of Staroffice 6 from Suns booth, but they didn't
have it there.
I would say Apple stole the show with its huge booths and Final Cut Pro 3 and
dvd authoring. It blew away systems costing 10 times more-like in the Avid
booth next to it.
www.apple.com/finalcutpro/
And, of course, microsoft was trying to show off its latest version of media
player code name 'corona'. I walked around that booth, not thru it.
A company called Ai (formerly Acrodyne) was selling a television transmitter
running on Redhat 7.2 .
I ended up sitting next to someone from Sonicblue on one of the shuttle
busses and had about a 20 minute conversation with him. He said they don't
like his company's product skipping commercials. I talked with him about
DeCSS. He talked about what a pain in the ... it is for them (and a waste of
time) to have to write their software to include this type of stuff. I think
he mentioned macrovision and also the name of the website that had the hack
for one of their products. He pointed out that his company had nothing to do
with this, but that they didn't care. They did their legal obligation by
putting the stupid stuff into their device.
There was lots of other really neat stuff there, but its getting late.
later
Jim
> As far as anything that runs under Linux, there are not many options.
> There is a piece of software called 'vcr' that more or less works, but,
> like everything else along these lines under Linux, requires a lot of
> bleeding-edge libraries. I've been able to get vcr to work on occasion,
> but mostly it has problems recording or, it will record something, but
> then the format it's decided on its own to record is something I can't
> play. (it uses the avifile stuff, which is a linux layer on top of
> windows AVI DLLs, so is flaky at best.)
>
> The closest thing I've been able to get working is the "mjpeg-tools"
> that are built to work with the BTTV drivers. If you're lucky enough to
> have a supported card with MJPEG in the hardware, you can use the tools
> to change channels and record things and encode with MJPEG hardware
> support. If you just have a normal TV tuner card with no hardware, you
> can do software MJPEG, but expect to need something in the neighborhood
> of a 1Ghz Athlon to get 30fps at 1/2 TV resolution. Playback of MJPEG
> compressed files can be done with Heroine Virtual's "xmovie" software.
>
> Then there's the Linux DVR stuff that was announced on Slashdot the
> other day. Unfortunately, it ONLY works with a specific chipset of
> digital tuner card that is mostly used in Europe and a very few places
> in North America, so is almost entirely useless for us Yanks. I imagine
> with some Slashdot exposure, though, someone will probably hack into it
> to make it support a wider range of cards.
>
> The biggest problem under Linux is that full Broadcast Quality recording
> (30fps, ~640x480) REQUIRES hardware compression. I've tried various
> software encoders on my 1.33Ghz Athlon at home and the best I've been
> able to do is about 60% CPU utilization at 1/2 broadcast resolution,
> 30fps, or about 8-12fps at broadcast resolution with 100% CPU
> utilization. But when those 2.6Ghz Athlons are available, then maybe
> software-only encoders will be feasable.
>
> And of course, there are very few hardware encoding boards that are
> supported under Linux. The Happauge WinPVR card has someone attempting
> to write drivers for it but at the moment, all he has working is the TV
> tuner part, not any of the encoding stuff. The Iomega Buz and related
> cards that use the same chipset have a driver and are supported with the
> mjpeg-tools, but lack a TV tuner - they're only video-in cards.
>
> Unfortunately, in the current regime of DMCA and SSSCA and the RIAA and
> MPAA suing the pants off of anyone and everyone who looks like they
> might have something to do with possibly allowing the end-users to do
> anything other than what the studios absolutely demand be allowed for
> broadcast media, it's unlikely that anyone is going to make a PVR type
> card with available Linux drivers. It's too close to saying "This card
> can be programmed to do whatever you want, therefore it can be seen as
> violating the DMCA as a 'circumvention device'" and they'll get sued
> into oblivion. So for now, you'll probably only ever see Windows-based
> hardware that supports all the crappy Windows Media rights control stuff
> that keeps you from doing what you wanted the thing to do in the first
> place.
>
> Personally, I'd seriously consider the Sonicblue ReplayTV. The new 4000
> series has the ability to stream programs from one unit to another, and
> the protocol used has been reverse-engineered, so there is software out
> there that will let you stream a program from a ReplayTV unit into a
> local MPEG player on your computer, which is really the main reason *I*
> would want a computer-based PVR - so I can archive the shows I really
> enjoy.
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