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Television Media

A PVR For Two Straight Weeks Of Video 225

Posted by timothy from the feet-on-ottoman dept.
Rob G. writes: "Story from Variety on Y! News this morning about a monster PVR that can store 320 hours of tv; price is $1999. You could tape full seasons of a dozen shows and watch 'em in the summer instead of BB2." There are some other cool features promised here, including free programming service for broadband users. Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.
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A PVR For Two Straight Weeks Of Video More

A PVR For Two Straight Weeks Of Video

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  • .. also send all your TV viewing habits to a server ?

  • Well then... (Score:5, Funny)

    by spagma ( 514837 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:04AM (#2221572) Homepage
    Sure it is enough room to store entire seasons of multiple shows, but is it enough to store a full Kevin Costner film?

  • Homebrew PVR (Score:4, Funny)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:06AM (#2221577) Journal
    Given a BIOS that lets you Boot A PIII System In .8 Seconds [slashdot.org] and the Hauppage WinTV PVR [hauppauge.com] card ($249) you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000.
    • that Hauppage card looks really nice. How well is it supported in linux? I've found a project that was started on sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pvr/), but there hasn't been much work on it. Does anyone have more info on it?
      ---
      • So it's probably not supported. I don't know what chipset it's on, though some of the other Hauppage cards use the bttv set, which is supported, unofficially, under Linux and, IIRC, FreeBSD. The cool thing about it is the hardware mpeg2 encoder. All the others I've seen under $500 are software encoders, requiring a GHZ processor for realtime work. Now I can finally put all those episodes of Buffy on VCD ;^)

    • Re:Homebrew PVR (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mosch ( 204 )
      yeah, assuming of course that you want really awful picture quality compared to what these dedicated PVRs put out.

      Try examining the output of Hauppauge->VGA->NTSC sometime and compare it to what you get out of a TiVo. It's like comparing apples to horseshit.

      • A lot of us don't use NTSC/PAL TV for output, we just use a VGA for our viewing. DVD's look great on a projector swiped from the office, as most DVD software does line doubling quite well now days.

        • Except that the issue here is the Hauppauge card - I use it to record programs using vcr [stack.nl] to compress to divx ;) and whilst the quality isn't bad, it's nowhere near a proper PVR.

          The ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon has pretty damn great TV capture, although I don't know if there are any Linux drivers for it (I can't afford one, so I daren't look :)), and could quite concievably be used to roll-your-own PVR.

          Of course, if I had a capture card with DVI input, and a digital TV service, one could pipe it straight into that and get amazing quality...

      • Hm. Are there any reasonably low cost capture systems that have high quality S-Video replay? I was thinking about doing this sort of thing for archival purposes. I have a TiVo, which I love, but it is a 2 drive 30 hour model, and I don't want to screw it up attempting and upgrade.

        I already have scads of unused drive space, I just need the capture card, but I want one that has S-Video in and out at high quality. I couldn't care less about VGA.

        IIRC, the TiVo uses an MPEG chipset designed to go with the PowerPC CPU they use, and it isn't available as a consumer board.

        Also, how easy/hard is it to cut a mpeg video, say, to remove commercials? It seems to me that roughly every 5th frame is uncompressed, so you ought to be able to slice it on those boundaries.
        • Also, how easy/hard is it to cut a mpeg video, say, to remove commercials?
          If it's MPEG-1, you can load it into VirtualDub directly. If it's MPEG-2 (which it would be if it comes from a DVD or a TiVo), VFAPI can frameserve into VirtualDub. In either case, VirtualDub can frameserve into TMPGEnc for (re)encoding to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2.
          It seems to me that roughly every 5th frame is uncompressed, so you ought to be able to slice it on those boundaries.
          If you're recompressing the video (which will probably be needed to fit it onto VCD or SVCD, if that's what you want to do with it), you can slice the video on any frame boundary. If you're trying to slice the video without recompressing, it depends on the GOP setting used to create the video. Most video created with TMPGEnc gets created at that program's default GOP setting of 1-5-2-1, which produces one I-frame for every 18 frames. (I-frames are still compressed; they just don't depend on neighboring frames for decoding.)
    • "...you could roll your own! Probably for lots less than $1000".

      Not quite. Pricewatch has 80gb drives going for $164. You would need three of these which comes to about $500. Add in a Duron 850 (don't want to drop frames) and a mb for $100, 128mb, ram, and other minutia for $100. Now you are up to $950 when one adds in the Hauppage card. This is also just a straight PC. You don't have an IR remote or any other features that I am sure their system will come with. On the other hand, it would be quite cool to roll it yourself!

    • Sure, you can build a device to record shows. But the great thing about these PVRs (I own 2 TiVos) is the integration they provide. It's not like having a seperate box to do these things. It fits in very nicely with an existing AV setup and soon you forget it's even there. The interface is great. It will be a while before you can build something as seamless and nice.
  • The artilce mentions 'DVR', not 'PVR'.

    I know what a DVR is, but what is a PVR?
    • I guess 'p' stands for 'personal', so it would be a _p_ersonal _v_ideo _r_ecorder ???

    • Re:PVR? (Score:2, Informative)

      by LordNimon ( 85072 )
      They're the same thing. Some people call it a Digital Video Recorder, others call it a Personal Video Recorder.


    • I have heard on TechTV, the difference is a PVR comes with a service or requires a service to work properly. the service helps you track shows to record and makes guesses about shows you might like based on what it knows about your viewing habits. A DVR is nothing more than a VCR that does not require Video Tapes, recording shows require manually setting record times.


  • The Oregon-based company may once again fuel controversy among advertisers with a function that automatically eliminates commercials during the recording of programs.

    I've got a pretty good record pause/unpause trigger finger for the VCR, but I'm curious as to how a DVR/PVR can detect the end of show / beginning of a commercial / end of a commercial / beginning of show sequence. Is there some sort of signal that can be detected?

    • Re:Eliminate ads (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, the first frame of a commercial will be drastically different from what is on screen you you're looking at a large block of data being replaced. Also volume is pummped. Surround sound is also enabled in a few commercials. There is also a signal that is broadcast when you're getting a feed over statalite that is rebroad cast. It is not present in commercials overlayed by your local station. I Don't think this will be 100% accurate, but even if it skips a few, I'll be happy.
      • I wonder what would happen in a scene change. Say from indoors to outdoors. I wonder if you'll get a recording with the quality of the Nixon tapes.

    • Re:Eliminate ads (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Here's an interesting thing to consider. The various network execs are claiming that no matter what Replay does to detect commercials during a broadcast (i.e. the markers embedded in the signal), the networks will be able to get around this. From the article:
      For example, some officials believe the networks will be able to outwit Replay's anti-commercial device.

      ``There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable,'' one senior network exec said.

      This strongly implies that no matter what the recorder does, engineers at the networks will be able to reverse-engineer it and modify their codes.

      The question is, what happens if Replay wraps the firmware within their box with a thin layer of encryption? Trying to get around that would almost certainly run afoul of the DMCA, no?

      • the DMCA says very little about breaking encryption. Rather it speaks about circumventing copyright protection devices. I don't see what copyright the studios would be breaking if they reverse engineer the replay heuristics.

        On the contrary; All studios need to do is to create a licence that their programming is licenced for viewing as a whole. Any attempt to select parts of the programming could be argued to be an attempt to circumvent licencing, and hence by extension copyright.

        Not a watertight case in either direction, but it seems that the DMCA would once again play into the big studios hand if it has any bearing at all.

        what a surprise

      • The question is, what happens if Replay wraps the firmware within their box with a thin layer of encryption? Trying to get around that would almost certainly run afoul of the DMCA, no?

        It doesn't sound like DMCA would apply. DMCA outlaws circumvention of technological measures that effective control access to a copyrighted work. In your hypothetical scenario: What is the technological measure that is effective controlling access to something? What is the "something" to which access is being controlled?

    • This is mentioned in the article.

    • Re:Eliminate ads (Score:2, Funny)

      by agdv ( 457752 )
      I'm curious as to how a DVR/PVR can detect the end of show / beginning of a commercial


      It has speech recognition and a library of common commercial phrases ("not-so-fresh feeling", "order now and get an extra...", etc) as well as voice recgnition (can tell the kid from the Gateway commercial from the characters of your favorite show).

      • You wouldn't need speech recognition, you could use closed captioning.
      • "can tell the kid from the Gateway commercial from the characters of your favorite show"

        My favorite show would be the one where the kid from the Gateway commercial suffers horribly for the entire episode, every episode, all season long. :-)

        Okay, not really, but you know what I mean.

    • Another thing that it said it can do is just fast forward by 30 second slices, which would be nice, and there really isnt' a way to get around that..

    • Yes. There's a signal of some sort that can be detected by some VCR's. The signal allows a distinction between normal television and commercials. I've seen only a small handful (okay- just one) of VCRs capable of this feature. During playback of a recorded show, it would show a blank screen while FF'WD through commercials.

      More common out there is a button on VCR remotes that FF'WD through 30 seconds of video upon each press of the button. The button is typically labeled 'Zap' or 'Flash', depending on brand and such. I've found that you need 2-6 presses of that button per commercial break, as most commercials are 30 seconds long, and networks put at least 2 per break, but sometimes as many 6 for popular shows (like the Wizard of Oz, Ten Commandments, etc). On average though the number is 4 commercials per break.

      Unfortunately, I dont remember what VCR's can do what I talk about. The one with 30 sec skip broke, and the auto-skip was my uncle's. :-/
      • Actually, It might not have broken. In my girlfriends version of this (with her RCA VR647HF 4 head stereo vcr), after she had taped over the same tape many times, the VCR was no longer able to write the markers it used to tell where the commercials started and ended.

        Using a new tape enabled the features again!

        I was overjoyed, as you can imagine, because watching General Hospital is torture for me, but watching General Hospital with commercials is like even longer torture with breaks for maxi-pad and laundry cleaner information. *gag*

    • Re:Eliminate ads (Score:2, Informative)

      by Astoundo ( 316129 )
      Here [adlenterprises.com] is a release from ADLE describing their commercial skipping technology, called "commercial advance." They claim to have licensed it to most of the major VCR makers, with the notable exception of Sony. From the release:

      During recording, the television broadcast is monitored for certain video and audio events -- such as black frames and low sound energy -- which occur at the beginning and end of each commercial. The locations of these events, according to the VCR's tape counter, are temporarily stored in memory for processing at the completion of recording. Events are analyzed in relation to each other using a proprietary software algorithm to identify which ones mark the actual beginning and end points of each commercial break.

      • To really do it right, requires strong AI.

        I wouldn't trust any non-intelligence to keep from filtering out "fake" commercials such as the Psi Corp Commercial in And Now For a Word [midwinter.com], The Simpson's "Canyonero", Saturday Night Live's "Colon Blo", etc. It would requires contextual understanding, appreciation of humor, and other qualities.

    • The thing that sets this device appart from VCRs is that it can record the entire commercial and not incurr a penalty for fastforwarding through it. So the PVR has the luxury of only needing to decide whether that was a commercial, not whether this is one.

      The way I would implement it is to record everything and use a user-tunable heuristic to mark blocks as likely commercials which are then skipped during playback. If you get it wrong, the user can view the block w/o skipping it. For example, commercials tend to be a bit louder than average programming. You know that there will be a big change (got that from another post) in picture before and after the block, AND you know that it will be a multiple of 30 seconds.

      The first and last of these criteria, in conjunction with post-facto marking rather than the pre-commercial guessing makes the PVR much better suited to the task of identifying commercials than VCRs.

      Only digital product placement is likely to be able to foil these sorts of heuristics, esp if the user is able to write their own rules and assign levels of certainty to them.

  • Only one barrier left to Full TV Viewing Pleasure! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by YIAAL ( 129110 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:13AM (#2221608) Homepage
    Coming up with a dozen shows good enough to be worth taping a whole season's worth!

    Why is it that as TV viewing technology gets better, TV seems to be getting worse?
  • ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.


    Oh, that's just super.

    "I send you this episode in order to have your advice"

    On a serious note, that feature is going to kick ass, and is much cooler than a couple (hundred) extra hours of storage. Imagine:

    - Your favorite team makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip

    - You're flipping channels and come across a show that you really like. So you download every previous episode.

    - (I know these things are supposed to come in threes, but that's all i can think of, so use your imagination)
    • - Your favorite team makes an incredible play, but you miss the game. So you hop onto IRC and someone mails you a 60-second clip

      Does this thing do clips, or do you have to mail the whole freaking game? One day, the whole game might be the better choice. You know, you just had to be there...

      Video over the net does not make me happy yet. This stuff is going to clog up the world. Imagine your email having to compete against a sea of this shit. It's bad enough that the warez crowd hoggs up the net swaping around comercial movies, songs, M$ software and other trash. Encouraging Everyone to do this is irresponsible. Keep broadcast junk where it belongs. Leave the net to original content until it can handle much more.

      If you absolutly must share that golden clip with your friend, host it on a web site! Email the link and let your friends decide on their own if they want to look at it. Cramming this into email is just rude.

      You've got spam!

      • You could never fit a show inside the message size limits most email has. However, if I have Broadband and you have broadband, then I could send you a somewhat secure URL that points to my net-enabled PVR where you could stream it from.

        I'd imagine that the URL is all you are emailing.

        Of course, this feature alone is going to keep the lawyers busy busy. And for once, I kinda see their point.
  • $2000 freakin dollars?! I'm sorry, but for that kind of money I can go to ebay and buy an HDTV projector that can put a 300" screen on my wall if I want it. I can also take the extra $500 I'll have after buying that and buy a few 60 GB harddrives and make my own 320 hour DVR using Linux tools that already exist and a simple $40 TV card.

  • 130 hour Tivo (Score:3, Informative)

    by glinden ( 56181 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:18AM (#2221623) Homepage Journal
    You can already get 130 hours (basic quality, about equal to VHS) on a TiVo easily by just adding an 80G drive to a 30 hour TiVo. See the TiVo Hack FAQ [tivofaq.com].


    130 hours an incredible amount of TV. You can sit and watch TV for every waking hour (16 hours/day) for over 8 days with a 130 hour TiVo. Switch to the high quality setting and you can still store 10 full length movies permanently on your TiVo and still have enough room left over to watch TV every waking hour for three days. Even on the highest quality setting, a 130 hour TiVo records 40 hours of TV, enough even for the most dedicated of couch potatoes. How much more do you need?

    • I've heard of hacks that can upgrade the primary harddrive AND add a secondary to provide OVER 200 hours on a single TiVo. And I'm sure it'll cost less than two grand, and that's if you make a mistake and roast everything and have to buy ANOTHER TiVo and two new harddrives.
      • I've had a 200 hour (198h, 34m) tivo for almost a year... two 80G maxtors. There's a guy that did the same thing with two 100G drives for a total of 234hrs or something like that. My attention is now on building a tower of firewire drives *grin*

        Note: I don't recommend doing that with the tivo versions around now. With 1.3 it's fine, with 2.0+ the tivo never deletes anything until it has to (nobody made the "undelete" menu?) which creates some very expensive calculations everytime it wants to record something. I lose the first 30seconds or so of everything. (And it started stuttering like a mother****** once both drives filled up -- of course, that was during the 2.0 beta so I didn't say that.)
    • Basic quality is more certainly not equal to VHS. In my experience, High quality is roughly equal to, maybe a little better than VHS EP.

      Basic quality isn't just jerky, it distorts the colors. Even low frame rate animation looks bad. Useless.

      I do most of my recording at High Quality. Some animation is OK at medium quality.

      A "30 hour" TIVO records about hours of 15 hours at High Quality on a 36GB disk. So a good rule of thumb is 2GB/hour of usable quality.

  • If only I could download a whole series of say
    X-files rather than Pv-r I'd glady keep the commercials in them.

    ;-)
  • Hmmm....

    1. Record entire season
    2. Remove HD -- place in PC
    3. Burn MPEG-4 of entire season to DVD-RAMs/VCDs
    4. Replace HD
    5. Share with friends (*NOT* the TV show)
    6. Repeat
    • 7. Realize you've wasted an entire season*3 just to impress your "friends."
      8. Discover your "friends" disappeared when they hadn't heard from you in a season*3 worth of time.
      9. Get new friends and new life that isn't based solely on the consumption of passive entertainment.
      10. Live happily ever after.

  • Two words: Cost Prohibitive. (Score:4, Funny)

    by boinger ( 4618 ) <.boinger. .at. .fuck-you.org.> on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:22AM (#2221647) Homepage
    two grand? Give me a break - if that's not an obscure niche market, I don't know what is. Most consumers aren't even aware of DVRs existing. I'm very talkative about how great TiVo is and it's rare that I don't have to explain what it is.

    So, now, a unit that's over 6 and a half times the cost of my Sony SVR2000 (i.e. an expensive model of TiVo) is supposed to revolutionize TV viewing? My ass. Sure, I plan on putting another larger drive in my TiVo, but I'm not whining about lack of space - it'll just be a nice cushion for when I'm away for the weekend.

    btw, 8 times my current capacity isn't a whole season. It's maybe two months. Three tops. And I'm not particularly psycho about my TiVoing.

    • How many years ago was it that an 80 gig hard drive would cost $2000? It is becoming likely that everyone will have these one day, since I don't see random storage devices cheaper/better than hard drives coming out any time soon. Unless of course you count the internet as a random storage device... That *might* win (if the phone company ever got its act together).

    • It's maybe two months. Three tops

      How long is a TV season? Last I paid attention, they followed the calender seasons. What are you comparing? Some shows run every day for a half hour, some run once or twice a week for a half or full hour.

    • TV dramas typically have 25 unique episodes per season and a 1-hour duration. That's 25 hours/season.

      Or if it's a 1 hour show on every day except Sunday, that's about 313 days. Again, 313 hours/season. But I think only news programming is close to that.

      And of course, if it's on every day of the year, that's up to 366 hours/season.

      And if you sleep 8 hours a day and watch TV the rest of the time, that's 20 straight days of TV.

  • Tivos can come close now (Score:4, Informative)

    by .@. ( 21735 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:24AM (#2221658) Homepage
    With Tivos (which run Linux), you can add hard drives as large as you like (though nobody's tried to break the IDE 128GB limit yet). Current owners can put in two 100GB drives, for well over 200 hours of recording capability.
    • 246 hours with 200GB on mine as of last Friday. Did it myself too - very easy given even less than a rudimentary level of Linux knowledge and the ability to read FAQs.

      Given the ability to connect Tivo to ethernet (www.9thtee.com) and a bit more Linux knowledge someone could probably build a script to archive and restore shows at will, effectively making the storage infinite -

      • Nope, they haven't figured out the file format yet. But I'm thinking (gotta check if their guide works in Canada, otherwise I'd have a tivo by now) about getting a Hauppage WinTV PVR [hauppauge.com] which has the ability to archive recorded stuff onto CD-RW in VideoCD format for playback in your average DVD player.
  • No more late-night fights over what programs to keep: public access yoga vs. Doctor Who. If I had a spine, it would always be sci-fi over metaphysical crap, but apparently in a "relationship" you have to make "comprimises". 320 hours means no more comprimises over my precious PVR space! Woohoo!

  • This is a rumor gone out of control... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:26AM (#2221668)
    ReplayTV recently sent out email questionaires about a speculative product that matched this one. Typically these questionaires ask about a product that isn't even close to existing and may not ever exist, because the whole point of the questionaire is to find out what products the company should bother to spend money developing. Note that while the article mentioned $10/mo for dialup and free broadband, others were asked about $10/mo for dialup and $5/mo for broadband so the specs and prices aren't set in stone, even if the machine is anywhere near production. Someone decided to take their version of the questionaire and misrepresent it as a product announcement.

    http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum1/HTML/0083 04 .html
    http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/005596. ht ml
  • If i'm taping/pvr'n something, I'm going to bleep out the commercials. The feature I can't wait for is the ability to email programs.


    Think about it. How many times have you seen on big newsgroups for sci-fi programs someone missing something and wanting someone to mail them a VCR tape. If you could email a copy of a show you missed, that feature alone is worth the cost for us die-hard Farscape & Trek fans.

  • Friends (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As al bundy said:

    Friends, don't have em, don't want em, and danmn sure don't want to watch em.

  • Two Weeks of Everything (Score:5)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:29AM (#2221679) Homepage Journal
    The next big step for a PVR will be when it can record two weeks of everything on every channel. I find there is plenty of space on my Tivo for everything I think I might want to watch in advance. The problem comes when there are two or more things you want to watch that are airing at the same time. Also, every once in a great while I will realize that I don't have anything on the Tivo worth watching. At that point, I would like to have a two week archive of everything to browse.

  • Sounds great... Take notice, TiVo! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:29AM (#2221682)
    Well, they're looking to fill the market that TiVo is refusing to touch... that is, the transfer of programs between TiVo units. And if it is able to transfer video, you can almost bet that it has an ethernet connector, and doesn't just do it over dialup. Good for them. Competition is going to make the PVR market better.

    Regarding the 320 hours, that's going to be in low quality. I'm assuming that the ReplayTV has a two-drive limit. Either they are banking on future technology (2 x 128gb drives) or some additional compression, or both. (Additional compression is still possible, using existing methods. Anyone remember the TiVo bug where vertical resolution was lost, but was only noticable on SVideo units?)

    In any case, I'm glad they're taking a stand on the sharing issue. That alone might be enough to make me switch.

  • security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:30AM (#2221690) Homepage Journal
    Has something like this been used to record security camera footage, for archival purposes? Sounds like it would be perfect for that.
  • i like to see devices like these. ihave a tivo and love it, except for the $hitty modem they put in it.
  • I don't necessarily want a PVR that can store 300+ hours of video - I watch too much TV as it is on my 30 hour unit. But, anything that raises public awareness of TiVo, and PVRs in general, is a good thing in my eyes.

    TiVo is a great product, the problem is that the public just doesn't understand them yet. I've pretty much given up explaining them to people, as they invariably respond with: "my VCR can do that."

    I just hope TiVo can hold on long enough for the critical mass of TV viewers to catch on. And things like this with a big "gee whiz" factor can only help.

    • TiVo is a great product, the problem is that the public just doesn't understand them yet. I've pretty much given up explaining them to people, as they invariably respond with: "my VCR can do that."

      Count me as one of those public. What is so great about TiVo?

      Is it the TV-guide integration? Certainly that would make things convenient, but I really only regularly watch about 3 shows a week anyway so it's not difficult to keep track of things.

      I can see how TiVo's suggestions might be useful -- kind of like Amazon's recommendations which I have found to be very useful. However, why do I need that in a recording box? Why not just surf to some sort of on-line guide? I realize that this is how TiVo makes money but I'm looking at this from the consumer side.

      Ideally I'd like to see the hardware, schedule and recommendations separate entities so you can mix-and-match. I realize this will never happen unless there is some sort of community effort because it's tough to make money off of them individually (except maybe the hardware).

      • Count me as one of those public. What is so great about TiVo?

        Okay, let me establish the major capabilities of a TiVo.

        • TV guide - This shows you exactly what channel and show you are watching, how long it is, what it's about, and who is in it. It can show you all of that for every channel for the next two weeks.
        • Automated recording - The killer app for TiVo. You tell TiVo to record "South Park" and it will do it indefinitely. Your VCR can do this too, but TiVo can do it for dozens of shows, 24 hours a day. Each is labeled and available for viewing whenever you feel like it. Fast forwarding through commercials is a breeze.
        • Pause live TV / Instant replay - Watching live TV and the phone rings, no problem. Just pause it and you can jabber on the phone for up to 30 minutes, when you get off the phone you just un-pause it and continue. You can even fast forward through commercials to catch up with the broadcast. The instant replay feature comes in handy if you missed something (e.g. dialog, action).

        Those are the features that I really enjoy. The TiVo suggestions feature, although neat, isn't really that handy for me. If I wanted to watch a particular show I would already have a Season Pass for it.

        Anyway, I guess you have to try it to really be hooked on it. But, I can assure you that if something happened to my TiVo, I would buy a replacement within days.

        • Pause live TV / Instant replay

          I can see how this would be very nice to have, but for me it just doesn't justify the cost. The other features I can really do without. I just set my VCR weekly timer and that's it. Why does it make a difference whether I specify a show by name or by date and time? I do admit that the programming capacity of most VCR's is pathetic.

          I suppose it is one of those things you just have to try before you get hooked. Strange that I have not seen much advertising for these things on TV.

          • I suppose it is one of those things you just have to try before you get hooked.

            Find a friend that has one and check it out. No written explanation can do it justice.

            They really are as cool as the owners say they are. Unless you just don't like TV, that is.


      • but I really only regularly watch about 3 shows a week



        Tivo is definitly not for everyone, if you only watch between 1.5 to 3 hours of TV a week, I'd say a $99 VCR suits you just fine, I would not waste the $299 + service fee on a Tivo. This is especially true if you hate TV as it is. Remember though, back in the mid 70's, not everyone needed a VCR or for that matter in the 50's not everyone even needed a TV.


  • Now I can record a whole season of bigbrother and watch it over and over.
  • You could tape full seasons of a dozen shows and watch 'em in the summer instead of BB2.
    What?!? And miss the Summer of SciFi with all-new episodes of the fabulous Farscape [scifi.com] ?

    Or do I record those and watch 'em in the winter? :)

    BTW, Mon-Thurs showings of Farscape on SciFi start tonight at 8pm Eastern/Pacific. Watch it from the beginning!

  • Vaporware - Check these links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Otto ( 17870 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:43AM (#2221746) Homepage Journal
    It's pretty much agreed among all PVR geeks that this is likely vaporware. The "source" for this info was a survey that Replay sent out asking "Would you pay this much for this feature in a future product?", and then whoever came up with the story took all those features, and decided it was a product announcement. Don't expect to buy one anytime soon.

    See the following:
    Tivo forums discussion [avsforum.com]
    Replay forums discussion [avsforum.com]

  • Overkill (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:44AM (#2221747)

    About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV [sourceforge.net] to have 100 hours [maxtor.com] of record time. (I did the fast-n-easy swap out the old drive for a 100GB drive.) It's overkill, and there are some problems.

    First of all, the interface wasn't designed to cope with that much TV. To get down to the Simpsons (alphabetized by "The") I have to page through like 12 pages of other junk. Yuck.

    Second, that's a hell of a lot of TV; I don't want to let the thing fill up, because when will I possibly find the 100 hours to watch everything it records?

    Third, it does encourage you to watch more TV. There are shows I used to watch only when the opportunity arose, but now, since I'm recording EVERYTHING I might ever possibly watch, I end up watching all of them.

    The real problem I have now is not the amount of record time, but the fact that it only has one tuner.

    P.S. Do you know how long it takes to low-level format a 5400 rpm 100GB drive? About 15 hours!

    • About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV...

      I am not especially interested in an upgrade right now, but I am very interested in making a backup. Can the software you linked to let me image the boot partition so I can back it up?

      Is it possible to back up the "magic" part of the RTV drive onto a CD, or is it too big?

      I love my RTV and I want to keep it alive. If the drive croaks, I just want to pop in a new one - I don't want to be forced to upgrade to a Tivo (with fees), or whatever RTV is selling at the moment (which may be missing features or whatever, who knows).

      Right now it looks like RTV is definitely NOT getting in bed with the networks, what with their survey questions about commercial skipping. That's cool. But if things change, I want to run my RTV 3030 as-is until the end of time. :)

      • I am not especially interested in an upgrade right now, but I am very interested in making a backup. Can the software you linked to let me image the boot partition so I can back it up?

        Yes. You can read the detailed instructions here [sourceforge.net], but basically, they discuss backing up the 300MB "magic" partition in step 10. These instructions are actually the upgrade procedure, but the actual software lets you do the backup without having to do an upgrade. If you look at this image [sourceforge.net], you can see the "Copy System Partition" button that you would use. I assume the "Restore Target Drive" is what you would use to, well, restore a fuxored drive.

        These pages carry all sorts of warnings of possible problems, but for me, everything went exactly as the instructions described. (Then again, those warnings are there for a reason.)

        P.S. Why did I use the W2K software, and not the Linux? Because my Linux server is too important to bring down for a day. My W2K machine, on the other hand, is always rebooting, so it was no problem to have it disassembled for a while.

  • And while you're enjoying your price war..... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:47AM (#2221754) Homepage Journal
    Watch the hard-drive wars heat up on PVRs and smile at what that means for your time-shifting habits.

    ...also watch copyright content control features go into you hard drive and feel your stomach turn as the MPAA and RIAA reach into your computer.

  • NO! (Score:2)

    by twitter ( 104583 )
    From the Variety article:

    a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs.

    If you thought it was bad that people mail Power Point presentations around, just wait till they start clicking the send to so they can share their favorite sit com. ARGH! What kind of jerk would encourage this sort of thing?! No no no no!

  • Nothing special (Score:4, Informative)

    by RedX ( 71326 ) <redx@wideopCOBOL ... m minus language> on Monday August 27, 2001 @11:59AM (#2221809)
    For around $500, anyone with decent technical skills can grab a TiVo and 2 80GB harddrives and make their own 245 hour PVR. Toss in a TiVoNet kit for ~$75 and you've got your broadband-enabled PVR. Check the TiVo FAQ [tivofaq.com] for details. Of course you still have to include the service fee, but that hardly justifies the $1500 markup for the Replay device.

    This ReplayTV device doesn't stand a chance at the $1999 price, and the TV executives are quoted in the Yahoo article as saying they'll fight the commercial skipping and the ability to share the recordings.

  • is the SnapStream [snapstream.com] PVR software. The demo version is free, and the only practical limitation is a 2GB storage limit. But, if you move stuff out of it's directory, it doesn't know to add it into the 2GB quota. I've been using it for a few weeks now with a Hauppauge TV card, and it works great. My TV gets recorded, and I watch it whenever I want. The only bummer is that it currently only records in ASF. They once had an AVI recording feature in Beta, but I don't know what happened to that.

  • What options are out there nowadays for digital VCRs similar to TiVos that don't require a subscription? (and no, I don't care about the guide).

    • A TiVo box with a software version earlier than 2.0 can be found for $150-300 (depending on size) and will allow you to do manual recordings. Just don't plug in the phoneline and your software won't be upgraded (2.0 "mistakenly" disables manual recordings without the service, 2.5 is supposed to fix that "mistake"). Old ReplayTV boxes are normally a bit more since they include their service and guide in the price of the unit. A PC solution would also be viable, but you're probably looking at close to the price of the lower-end TiVo's once you figure the price of hard drive, TV card, etc.
  • still waiting for UPS to come and play santa, but i'm building a 320gb raid array for the purpose of PVR/emulators/MP3/Ogg/Video serving.. Any idea how much space I'd need for roughly 100 hours of space?
  • For two grand, it had better have:

    2 tuners (capable of NTSC and ATSC)
    40+ hours of HD / 100+ hrs high qual NTSC
    A DVD-R tray for archiving
    Commercial pruning for the DVD-R (even if manual)

    Otherwise, I'm not interested.
  • ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs. It may also allow users to copy photo files from a PC to the DVR.

    Great, now people can spam my TV!

  • Hey, ho,

    Isn't there a Linux project which does just that: recording scheduled TV and radio progs, maybe even remotely scheduled over the Net?

    What about recognition of a starting signal of a given TV program?

    Anyway, a Linux proj which would also offer writing TV hard disk recordings to CDR (e.g. in DiVX) sounds very sexy!

  • but hopefully much more reliable and portable drives. Think VCR tape: consumers are going to want VCR tape sized (or smaller, of course) hard drives which they can pop in and out of these devices. this will mean a lot of good eventually for those of us who dig hot-swap storage.
  • "There is no scheme to differentiate between programs and commercials that is not defeatable," one senior network exec said.

    Correct -- but there doesn't need to be. So long as commercials are fixed at 30 or 60 seconds, bypassing them is as easy as one or two presses of an instant 30-second-skip button. Four minutes' worth of advertising crap? How long does it take to press a button eight times?

    Take that, corporate bastards! [cue maniacal laughter]
  • I am glad that ReplaTV is staying in the game. It just goes to show that a great product does stand a chance in the market if you beleieve in it enough. Marketing and advertising dollars should not determine what makes it in the industry and what doesn't. I hope they are here to stay this time.
  • ... and send programs by email to other DVRs.

    Boy, if you hate SPAM now, I can just see it: come home from work, plop down in the recliner, and fire up the ol' mega-PVR.

    "You have mail! Downloading message 1 of 73 ..."

    Two hours later (after everyone in the neighborhood complains about using all their cable bandwidth), you find that the helpful folks with the "FREE PAGERS" have sent you 12 identical infomercials, several fly-by-night lenders sent feature films showing how they can refinance your [mortgage|debt], you have 17 MLM videos that all begin with, "This is NOT an MLM", and a dozen pr0n companies have sent you samples of their latest films (OK, so it's not all bad news).

    Meanwhile, Aunt Emma sent the latest home videos forwarded and re-forwarded from distant relatives you've never met ("Here's Johnny Applesmith's complete graduation ceremony. You can see him at about 2:50. Johnny is my neighbor's second cousin-in-law on his uncle's side, twice removed."), Uncle Joe sent a Norton infomercial (fowarded from a friend, etc.) that he wants you to see "RIGHT NOW" because of that "Good Times AV Virus" he heard about (acutally shreds your PVR drive into its component electrons, then melts everything in your freezer, or so he heard from his buddy Tom), and half-a-dozen old friends with way too much time on their hands forward all the latest compilations of stand-up routines snatched from Comedy Central (and each other, over and over again).

    Two thoughts:

    1. We're going to have to get a bigger Internet.

    2. Time to dig out my library card.

    (Come to think of it, the pr0n by itself would consume every Hz of available bandwidth. Death of the Intermet, film at 11!)

    Technology can be a wonderful thing. Just keep it away from Marketing.

  • Great. I can just see it. 5 years from now I am going to find an entire unwatched season of Six Feet Under on my DVR. Like the five year old issues of Wired that I never read. Avatars anyone? (Look, here's the 8/97 issue with the article "Linux: The Greatest OS that (n)ever was").

    The critical market acceptance question: Will we be able to sell old episodes on eBay?

  • Has there been any Open Source PVR projects started? Hey, if TiVO can do it on a Linux box, why can't the Open Source community do it better, faster, cheaper, and more customizable?



    Hey, at least then we wouldn't have to worry about them advertising to us, limiting what we can/can't record, disable sharing features, etc...



    I'd gladly help out with such a beast...



    MadCow.

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