TiVo to Aim for PC Desktop

Dave writes "Ars Technica has reported on TiVo's fourth quarter earnings call, and I was interested to see that the company is looking at providing some kind of desktop service for computers." The details are pretty sparse, so it'll be intriguing to see what they've got planned.

What are they after?

[Gentlewhisper]

Currently I own this nice piece of kit.. a Nebular electronics digitv PCI card..

Will TiVo bring (Tivo) to our desktops in the form of a PCI card too? If that's the case, I'm sure many will have case to cream their pants!

for this to actually work...

[teksno]

for this to actually work for Joe "i own a dell" Enduser, it would more then likely have to have a USB interface....and frankly, USB capture cards are way system intensive and typically crap... besides, why would any one who has have a brain just not use myth TV, or even M$ media center edition? unless its jsut a way to interface you curent TIVO box with your pc, like say for archiving shows and keeping the TIVO drive clear.......i have a feeling this may just not work

How can a computer help me watch TV?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean they are great for plowing through a whole bunch of information in powerful ways. But what is there about PVR's that can utilize my desktop/laptop/pda?

I have a TV and a place to watch it(recliner), I have a desk and a computer to do information processing... How can I use these to best advantage?

Dr Dobbs

[Anonymous Coward]

Dobbs has an article about a Home Media Engine that can be activated in all the Series 2 Tivo's that allow you to build you own applications to run on the Tivo. I, of course, didn't read the article completely yet, but it sounds like they deliver a SDK for you to develop Java applications . You have to buy the mag, but the following is a link to the article.

http://www.ddj.com/articles/2005/0503/

Building on TiVo
Arthur van Hoff, Adam Doppelt
The Home Media Engine lets you build TiVo applications that integrate seamlessly with the familiar TiVo user experience.

Re:Could it be, downloadable TV??

[garcia]

Why would we promote a middle man with a monthly subscription fee? We already have that in Cable and Sat. TV. We want shows that are cheap, ala carte, and don't require a subscription.

What do I want to see out of Tivo? Nothing. It works the way I expect it to. What would I like to see out of Tivo2Go? No DRM and faster transfer rates. That's not going to happen so blah.

Re:Could it be, downloadable TV??

[interiot]

And what's the probability that TiVo would go the way of mp3.com at that point? The INSTANT that somebody thought about letting people download CDs legally, The Industry jumped all over them, no matter how legal the plan was.

Yes, we have iTunes now. But the important thing is that The Industry needs to prove it has balls. The first one to dare stand up to The Industry MUST be responded to in a powerful way, even if The Industry gives in to the exact same plan 12 months later.

Re:How can a computer help me watch TV?

[Billy the Mountain]

The approach I've used is go to IRC groups that specialize in TV-related bittorents. Grab the shows I want to watch and burn them to CD. I was suprised to find out a while back that my consumer-oriented DVD player hooked up to my TV could recognize CDs. So simply by burning the program in the appropriate format, I could plop it in the DVD player in the living room and watch a fairly decent quality show.

Re:Why?

[kabz]

Well, one of my boxes, and it's 17" panel are about to migrate to my coffee table.

This setup runs pchdtvr, which spools OTA HDTV so I can record any network shows I want and watch them in glorious 10 MByte sec quality high def whenever I want.

A 17" panel about 4 feet away is not far off the same effect as a 27" TV 8 feet away. And in this case, the picture is wayyyyyy better than cable or satellite, unless you already have high def.

A 200 Gig drive holds about 20 hours which should be plenty for as much TV as I watch. Just think, news, Alias, Lost, Jay Leno, all in high def, whenever you want. Sounds good to me.

I use the PCHDTV [pchdtv.com] 3000 card which absolutely kicks ass once you get the drivers working.

TiVo should be a hardware provider.

[BiggRanger]

The best thing TiVo could do is saturate the market with their hardware, TiVo boxes, TiVo PC cards... And then open source all the software, broadcasting to the public the software is open source, can be modified, and do what you want with. They can still sell their subscription service for scheduling, because most people will not tweak their boxes. This will take content/media management responsibilities and legalities away from TiVo allowing the user to determine how and what to do with the media.

The most logical service...Ultimate Share-A-Show.

[Alpha_Traveller]

The most logical service at this point in terms of what to add, that would be a leapfrog over just about everyone, would definitely be a distribution service based on something TIVO's already mentioned with the outside world.

Share-a-show Technology.

Basically under the concept of 'networking' and community. It's already been established that with Tivo-To-Go, it's expected you'll share shows with your family and friends.

NOW -- Take that a step farther. Suppose I get 50 people who all like Trek. Each person can share a particular trek episode with 6 people. So, you decide how many of the six 'burned' copies of Trek Episode 5 you're going to want to distribute among those 50 people who watch trek. If 9 people out of that 50 want to share, you've got more than enough copies of trek to go around. How do we get our very own copy to view? Well gee, I connect my tivo to the trek community. What do I get back? A list of every single Trek episode I can now download.

This beats HBO on demand when you don't have HBO. Of course it might be restricted by what you're subscribed to via your cable/satellite company but you'd basically be able to download off broadband your favorite shows. Things your single tivo just couldn't get because you could only tape one or two things at a time. Your favorite shows, any show on demand just so long as their Tivo (or computer) was online, was on broadband and had some distribution tokens left.

Re:Why would you?

[FredThompson]

"MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer."

Aples and oranges? Clearer...how? There's only so much information which can fit on a TV screen. If you don't like the appearance created by the TiVo, load a custom skin.

"The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict."

Same issue. There's only so much text which will fit on a TV display. Displaying conflicts on a TV very quickly becomes overwhelmingly cumbersome.

If you want to do it via PC, use one of the flavors of DailyMail. DailyMail will let you manually tweak conflict resolution via email. If you want to do mass deletions, reorganize season passes, etc., use TivoWebPlus modules. It would be ludicrous to compare a handheld remote system to a PC interface.

"- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy."

Too slow for what? I have 3 DTiVos, each has 2 160G drives and the only time I see any speed issues are when 2 recordings are being made on a DTiVo, a stream is being extracted across the NIC and I'm trying to do something data9intensive like reorganize season passes. Use TWP to do mass jobs or stream to a PC, no biggie.

"- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the :30 hack on TiVo."

It takes less than 2 minutes to edit all the ads from a 1-hour recording after extracting to my PC. Any remote control method of skipping around is going to take longer than that.

You know you can push the left or right-facing triangle keys on a TiVo remote more than once, don't you?

"- MCE handles failure better."

Uh...no. MCE runs on Windoze which is far less stable than the Linux running on a TiVo.

" If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot."

Let's unpack that sentence.

The first part describes a TiVo season pass or wishlist for which you've enbled the options to record more than one showing. That's been in TiVo software from the beginning.

The second part of your statement is impossible in linear time. If a show is on once and your recorder fails, be it MCE, Myth, TiVo, DVDR, VCR, whatever, it is impossible to recover the signal which is no longer available.

"- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts."

Did you really think that as you typed? It is impossible for any tuner to record more than one channel at a time. Padding extends the recording of a channel beyond the match in the schedule data. MCE most certainly is NOT capable of somehow recording multiple channels per tuner concurrently, nor can it record linearly temporal broadcasts in a non-linear manner.

"- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus,"

Do you mean video overlay? It's not that difficult to inhibit playback of the looping backgrounds on a TiVo. That's been available for more than a year.

" and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history."

Why would that be useful? At some point, it's more efficient to re-enter from a top-level menu. If you're trying to do something which is inherently awkward with a remote control, use one of the web interfaces.

"Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised."

I might be pleasantly surprised by a few interface aspects but it's not something I'd chose. The more non-critical functionality packed into what is essentially a timed recorder, the greater the chance that recorder will fail its primary function. TiVos run Linux and are stable unless you're using a primitive hack to disable encryption. Mine have been running for more than a year, in one case 3 years, without reboots except when there were power outages. The only thing which I would find to be a major advantage would be if the TiVos suported wireless keyboards so searching by show name could be done quicker.

Re:Why would you?

[Kuj0317]

MCE is the biggest piece of bloatware. Despite the requirements of having a tv tuner that has hardware encoding, it can still bring an extremely powerful system to its knees. I dont know in what format it holds its program guide data, but however it does, it will kill any system with less than 512 megs of ram. And somehow this is a good piece of software? To top this all off, it will allow you to watch TV on your PC, not something all that revolutionary, or something that other (windows) software doesnt already do better, ie beyondTV. TIVO, on the other hand, is a fully functional PVR, that hooks up to your TV, and will allow you to control the media stream flow comfortably. Its remote is a piece of art, and the system is robust and responsive. The programming guide is easy and intuitive. TIVO rocks. MCE Sucks.