TiVo on steroids

According to an article in The Globe and Mail entitled "DivX is ready for its sequel. Is Hollywood?", DivXNetworks may be making a comeback.

DivX is still only a little way along the road to media redemption, however, and could yet falter. But the company is beginning to tout some successes, having recently inked a deal with consumer-electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics for a DivX-certified DVD player, now available in Europe. It has also partnered with News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox to encode films for a newly launched airline movie-rental service.

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Using a DivX-compatible DVD player, consumers can play back files stored on their PCs, either through discs burned from computer files or by way of a direct connection such as an Ethernet port. That means hundreds of hours of programming could be stored and retrieved from a computer at will by consumers, creating a TiVo-like digital video recorder on steroids.

I am personally waiting for the day that TiVos and other PVRs start using variable bit encoding and better codecs a la DivX (MPEG-4). Right now, the amount of space a television show takes up on your TiVo is set by the quality you set the recording to be (unless you are a DirecTiVo owner, at which point you have no choice) -- by using variable bit encoding, higher motion sequences could use higher bitrates, and lower motion sequences use lower bitrates and therefore space. On average, you probably would then be able to record more "stuff" on your PVR.

update @ 6 Oct 2003 10.25am : One correction -- the TiVo does use VBR when you turn on the "save disk space" option (thanks to paul for correcting me on an obvious mistake). However, it would be interesting to see DivX become more ubiquitous and have TiVos move from MPEG-2 to DivX. Argueably for the same quality recording, a DivX file would take about half of the disk space freeing your PVR to record more, allowing companies to advertise more space in their recorders, etc. Just need a hardware DivX encoder, or a better CPU in all our boxes.

Comments

[paul]

Actually, the existing TiVos support VBR-- that's what the "save disk space" option is for. Unfortunately, doing real-time VBR is hard, and their encoder isn't all that good; multi-pass VBR encoders (as found in most PC-based MPEG tools) do a much better job.

[divx]

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