TiVo Plans More Functionality Reductions 521
TiVo has been in the news recently with a couple of plans to make their service less useful than it could be: first, TiVos will now auto-delete pay-per-view and video-on-demand movies, and second, TiVo is making sure that you can't use a TiVo to view NFL games outside the specified market area. TiVo's lawyer explains.
Makes me glad. (Score:1, Informative)
yes, I bought a discontinued product.
but I dont get the company messing around in my property and I get to archive off shows effortlessly.
tell me why again why I want a Tivo instead of a replayTV????
Build your own... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Build your own... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Glad I have myth (Score:2, Informative)
should do the trick
(myth supports both)
Re:Build your own... (Score:5, Informative)
I went down that road, I built a mythbox and a freevo. I fought with them monthly. Then the service provider in the US dries up and forces you to register with them every 3 months with looming promises of having to pay for the right to access it.
I gave up, sold all the equipment and bought a refurbed ReplayTV for $100.00 and have not looked back cince. I can easily get shows off the replay to a computer for burning to DVD or simply having a media server with lots of content. It always works and is worth the $12.95 a month to keep me from fighting with another change in XMLTV packages or other failure,change or waiting for the listing provider to change their mind again.
for 99% of the people out there making your own PVR is not an option. hell for most techno-geeks
it still is not an option.
Re:accelerating their own death (Score:5, Informative)
I hope that is not the case. Since my experience with the cable service DVR is extremely poor. Even though the Cable one can record HD channels and has Dual Tuners, its user interface is down right awful to the point of being almost unuseable. It is slow to react, trying to FF through commericals is almost more painful than watching the commercials. Its conflict management is just plain dumb. If one episode of a show you have as a favorite conflicts with a movie you want to watch you tell it to record the movie and not the favorite show, well it stops recording ALL future shows of that favorite TOO.
If you start watching a recorded show that is not done recording it starts you at LIVE time, not the beginning of the show. If you rewind to the beginning which is what you have to do, and the show finishes recording before you finish watching the show it JUMPS you forward to LIVE TV. And it does not remember where you were in the show when you go back to watch it.
Trying to find something to record is damn near impossible. The only search ability is by Title FIRST LETTER, so for say Simpson you have to weed through all of the shows that begin with "S". It has Genre search but is equally useless.
And for recorded duplicate shows, even if you tell only get first runs, it records every airing of a show. This also make the poor conflict management even worse since it wants to records shows that have repeat showings in a week too.
I will be dropping this POS, as soon as I get my money together to build a HTPC.
Its only saving grace is price. However that is big for alot of people and means we will soon see more crappy PVRs in the future.
Re:daily updates (Score:2, Informative)
Some kind soul pretty regularly posts The Daily Show in alt.binaries.multimedia every week.
I've lived in Europe for two years and have seen nearly all of them within days of them airing in the US.
Thank you Mr. Poster!!! Please keep them coming.
Oh am I going to cry when they finally shut USENET down.
Re:Glad I have myth (Score:5, Informative)
The IR blaster will be controlled by your mythbox... the ir blaster will simulate your digital cable boxes remote control presses to change teh channel at the appropriate times to record the shows you want... you just pipe the output via svideo or composite into your capture/tuner card =)
e.
Re:Glad I have myth (Score:5, Informative)
1) Back- and front-end architecture. I have one backend that records, and two front-end lightweight machines that can view content.
2) Free (not counting computer hardware costs, however).
3) Can use external channel changer like TiVo (I have a satellite box, so I need an IR transmitter to change channels on it).
4) More than just TV! I have my entire music collection on there, along with DVDs, games, weather, images...
5) Need more recording space? Just stick in another hard drive (I know you can do this with TiVO, but your warranty is then void). I currently can record up to 160 hours on my box.
6) Different themes available.
7) Auto commercial detection.
8) Can edit and cut out parts of a video recording so you can burn to DVD without commercials, etc.
The list goes on... I've used it for well over a year and just love it. The WAF is also quite high (skipping commercials is huge).
Re:Stupid. (Score:3, Informative)
*shrug* FWIW there are other "off the shelf" commercial (and free) 3rd party PVR/htpc software solutions out there... although they are on the *gasp* windows platform *ducks*... I liked SageTV... BeyondTV has been getting good reviews... and GBPVR [gbpvr.com] is very full featured, FREE as in beer (not source), and is pretty cool overall. There's a lesser known HTPC solution that's open source for windoze Media Portal [sourceforge.net]... I've got a growing list of PVR/HTPC links here [byopvr.com]
Also there are other linux based OSS pvr solutions besides myth/knoppmyth... like freevo, dave and dina multimedia project, and a few others I can't recall...
*shrug*
e.
Re:Glad I have myth (Score:3, Informative)
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
DVB-C is for cable, and is Europe-only. US cable uses QAM modulation also, but the coding scheme and other minor details about the signal differ, so DVB-C cards do not work with U.S. cable.
There ARE QAM-capable tuner cards for US cable on the market now, but since almost all U.S. cable channels are encrypted, they're not very useful.
PC-based DVB-S receivers won't work in the U.S. except for getting Dish Network's preview channel, as Dish's encryption scheme is modified enough from standard Nagravision that the Nagra access cards compatible with PC-based DVB-S receivers won't work with Dish.
Amen! (Score:2, Informative)
This is a nothing story by someone who doesn't have a Tivo, is envious of it and wants to make it seem less valuable to others. Bunch of Phewy!
Re:Glad I have Snapstream (Score:3, Informative)
1. install fedora 2. install atrpms apt 3. apt-get install mythtv-suite.
I guess for the Debian smart-asses it's only 2
Myth has been doing multiple tuners for quite a while now. If you do want to upgrade to Myth but the install and set up seems daunting first check out the website called "Fedora Mythology". If you still need help, feel free to contact me personally and I'll give any assistance I can.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Informative)
Downloading listings is way faster now too. There is no way I would ever subscribe to Tivo or any other commercial PVR service. Long live open source.
Re:Glad I have myth (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too Many KneeJerk Responses (Score:1, Informative)
The biggest part of this is allowing DirctTV to pay $400 million to get exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket. I understand why both sides did the deal, but the result is a vast majority of football fans, who have the $200 in hand, who can't watch good football on Sundays.
They don't show any games opposite the home team game, so when that game is 30-6 at halftime, you're stuck watching a snoozer of a second half while three other games go down to the last drive.
Local stations have this concept of "regional interest" where they're carry a game between two losing teams that happen to be in your home team's division while a great matchup of top teams is going on somewhere far away.
The next step is allowing ESPN and ABC to pick the Sunday night and monday games a few weeks prior, rather than before the season starts. I have watched so many late season MNF games between two teams that were predicted to have big years, but currently suck, while the good games that decide the division titles are played at 1pm on Sunday.
I just searched for when the exclusive Sunday Ticket contract expires. There is hope! The contract expires after next season and Comcast may have the inside track to get it.
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA452428.ht
-B
Re:That seals the deal for me..... (Score:5, Informative)
MythTv [mythtv.org]
PVR Hardware Database [goldfish.org]
RedHat install guide [wilsonet.com]
Gentoo Install Guide [comcast.net](I went this route)
Knoppix Myth [mysettopbox.tv]
Re:daily updates (Score:2, Informative)
They just seem like an easy target and I'm sure it would be easy to prove that 99% of their traffic is stolen IP. There are free speech issues involved, of course, but but I'll media companies will work their way around them.
I don't think USENET will really be completely shut down but I do think that things will inevitably occur to make the mass trading of IP via nntp difficult and impractical.
Re:Too Many KneeJerk Responses (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PPV (Score:4, Informative)
Since then, there are a number of factors that have improved to ours, the consumers, advantage. No quality loss (digital copies), easy commercial skips but the base non-infringing use has been the same - time-shifting.
If you take away the time-shifting argument by making content available at any time (on-demand) or close to (say, every hour), that argument is withering. You may argue that you want the movie to start at exactly 19.43, but it would be a much weaker argument.
Should the specific case of a tool only capable of time-shifting PPV content ever reach the Supreme court, don't be too surprised if the verdict is against you. As for a common TiVo box, the non-infringing use would be all the standard fixed broadcasts, the PPV use merely collateral.
That being said, there is a much more important case being brought before the Supreme court now, that of P2P applications and their liability for copyright infringement. It is far more fundamental than the Betamax case, because it will shape the future of all digital devices and software, as a sequence of 0s and 1s can be copyrighted. Digital PVRs would be just one small subset of devices whose fate depend on that outcome.
Kjella
Re:PPV (Score:3, Informative)
In the U.S. they can, as long as they give a minimum 24 hour notice.