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ReplayTV fraud allegation

Slashdot links to a discussion on FatWallet, AVS Forum, and InfoWorld about a new discount on ReplayTV units that was rescinded by the company on December 17th. It seems as if many retailers and many customers were led to believe that the units were to be dropped to $150 and that 3 years of service was to be free. In fact, documentation concerning the 3 years of free service was even in the boxes with the hardware.

Whether this was an honest mistake or not, the corporate reaction by DNNA is a lesson in how NOT to treat your customers when one is a struggling manufacturer in a very competitive marketplace.

December 25, 2003 in ReplayTV | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Dish DVR-921 Review

Over at dbstalk.com, there is an extensive review of the Dish Network's DVR-921, a PVR that can record regular satellite signals as well as both satellite HDTV and OTA HDTV signals on one box. It's a long review, about 8 pages and around 70 screenshots are posted of the interface, setup, and on-screen samples from the unit. Looks like an impressive unit that packs a lot of features.

It looks a bit pricey, at around a thousand dollars, but I'm impressed that it can record over the air HDTV broadcasts and those delivered on satellite HDTV pay channels like HBO-HD. It'll be interesting to see if the HDTV-Tivo does that whenever that finally comes out.

December 25, 2003 in Product Reviews | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBack

Dead TiVos and demand for new ones

Matt Hinrich's story of The Day the Plip Plops Stopped, about his dead standalone TiVo mentions a point that has been making the rounds recently. DirecTV has sold so many new DirecTiVo units for the $99 promotion that they can't meet demand.

I've had regular cable + a TiVo for about two years and a DirecTiVo with satellite for almost two years and there's no comparison. DirecTiVo offers features like two tuners that make program conflicts rare (and you can watch something live while something else is being recorded), the direct storage of satellite feeds means few compression artifacts and a near-DVD quality picture, and put simply, the only way to effectively manage hundreds of channels of content displaying at all hours of the day and night.

I'm hopeful DirecTV sees this demand as a great way to get new customers and keep current ones happy, and keeps the $99 promotion after the new year (when it was supposed to run out).

December 22, 2003 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack

JavaHMO

Jake over at blahstuff alerted me to the JavaHMO I had heard about a few weeks ago. Check out the screenshots to see what new functions this open source, free piece of software adds to your Series 2 TiVo. I imagine it's a rewrite of the HMO server that exploits features in the developer API and lets set up schedules to download images of weather and movie data from the web.

Jake also said it was a cinch to install and configure. Hopefully TiVo takes notice and rolls similar features in (and doesn't send the JHMO guy a cease and desist :). Looks like it's linux and windows only for now.

December 15, 2003 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Low-Budget TiVo Substitute

Slashdot has a bunch of comments from folks who have build their own digital video recorders. Some of the software that has been used and recommended include:
- Freevo
- MythTV
- KnoppMyth
- XMLTV
If you have built your own DVR with open source software, we'd love to hear more about it. It's clear that this is still the domain of pretty determined folks, but it is impressive to see the growth in this area.

Slashdot | Building A Low-Budget TiVo Substitute?

December 10, 2003 in How-To | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Andy Richter on TiVo

In this snippet of an interview with Believer Magazine, Andy Richter shares his undying love of TiVo:

It's fantastic. If anything, your TV viewing is shortened into its hardest, crystalline, purest form.

Sounds like my favorite way of describing TiVo. [thanks andy]

December 10, 2003 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

TiVo Goes After Sites Hosting Image Backups

There have always been a couple of public FTP servers you could get backups of someone's original TiVo hard drive files. Typically, you'd go to it if your TiVo hard drive died. You could buy a new drive, restore the original files from the backups, plop it in your TiVo, and use it.

It's always been kind of shady -- while you couldn't steal service or anything, it was hosting a copy of the complete TiVo software for anyone to grab. People have been pretty hush-hush about it for the most part, but according to Slashdot, people hosting backups are now being sent cease and desist letters (here's a copy of the letter's text).

I've watched the TiVo hacking community for a while, and I think the real tipping point on TiVo suddenly caring about backups might be the recent hacking work done to get the 4.0 OS on series 2 DirecTiVos. Thanks to these freely available backups, people could grab the 4.0 OS from a standalone TiVo, and restore it on a DirecTiVo system. People have also been trading hacked backups of series 2 DirecTiVo OSes with the USB ports and networking added. This is my best guess, but I'm betting DirecTV raised a stink about it and forced TiVo to do something about these previously innocuous backups. [thanks Mary and Andy]

December 10, 2003 in News | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack

Xbox hacks = DVR

I've been having a hard time find good articles that Matt hasn't already found and posted but I think this one is worth your time. CNet has an article on hacking gaming consoles so that they can act like a DVR. It also touches upon Sony's PSX game console/DVR/DVD-RW platform.

Phil seldom bothers with his entertainment center anymore when he wants to watch a movie or enjoy part of his digital music collection. Instead, the Utah-based software engineer switches on his Microsoft game machine and fires up the Xbox Media Center, an unauthorized piece of software that he helped write and that allows a modified console to play most popular digital movie and audio formats.

"It's a convenience thing," said Phil, whose hacking hobbies discourage him from divulging his full name. "All of my movies are organized into categories, and it's very easy to navigate through the menus to find exactly what I want to watch. I have a PC in the basement of my house which stores all of my music and movies, and the Xbox makes it extremely convenient to use them."

Next year will offer us so many more choices for products and services, it will be be increasingly hard for consumers to decide what to purchase. A gaming console with DVR functionality? A DVR with DVD writing? A computer with a TV card and media controlling software? We will be inundated with options and hopefully we can share our experiences here to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Strategy: Outside the box | CNET News.com

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the video on the CNET article of the "law student" Steven (funny, eh ;) who shows us how he modded his Xbox.

December 9, 2003 in Gaming Consoles | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack

TV's rise of the machines and TiVo's blunders

Couple interesting articles found today: TV's rise of the machines is a story in response to a recent report that DVR adoption will soon skyrocket and harm existing advertising-based business models at most TV networks. It's not all doom and gloom, the networks can read the writing on the wall, but no one knows for sure what their next steps will be after the DVR revolution takes over. A good quote:

"Once half of all TV homes have a DVR, a TV station is really just a big stick in the ground, since the only revenue stream is advertising," says WB network co-chair Garth Ancier.

The other interesting article is from marketingprofs.com: How to Ignore Your Best Customers, the TiVo Way and talks about TiVo's inability to leverage their rabid fanbase in the way that other successful brands like Krispy Kreme have.

They come up with the following six steps to steer TiVo back on track, customer-wise (Create a Cause, Create Community, Customer Plus-Delta, Napsterize Your Knowledge, Create Bite-Size Chunks, and Build the Buzz).

December 9, 2003 in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Will TiVo Get Betamaxed?

My favorite stocks gurus at the Motley Fool are asking the question "Will TiVo Get Betamaxed?"

Competing DVR products from a company like Comcast, easily accessible with service fees bundled onto a bill that already comes every month, could stunt TiVo's growth. However, right now it seems there's no need to panic; TiVo's got a whole lot of people evangelizing it, and the DirecTV deal provides a great deal of comfort. It still brings millions of potential subscribers to the table, who may very well all talk up the power of TiVo.

Perhaps its not time to sell those TiVo, Inc. stocks yet.

December 9, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Dish Network's HD DVR

Via Gizmodo comes word that The Dish Network is about to release an HDTV-recording DVR that has dual tuners and what I'm guessing is about 200Gb of hard drive space. Impressive specs and the rumor is these will drop in just a couple weeks, which should beat out DirecTiVo's HD recorder by at least a few months (which is set for Q1 2004 after being pushed back a couple times).

With Comcast on the cable front and The Dish network on the satellite side of things, TiVo is being beaten (badly) to market by their competitors. I know half of the posts on this site end with "and this looks like another nail in TiVo's coffin" but it's increasingly looking to be the truth.

December 5, 2003 in News | Permalink | Comments (54) | TrackBack

Comcast set to roll out HDTV/DVR box

We've previously noted that Comcast was testing the PVR waters, but it looks like the rollout will soon be going full-force.

Comcast is saying that 90% of their customers (millions of people) will have access to this Motorola box by the end of next year, and this device will serve both HDTV and DVR functionality. The box looks like it can pause, rewind, and fast forward both regular TV and HDTV siganls, though recording appears to be confined to an analog MPEG encoder and I would assume DVR functionality will be limited to regular TV, not HDTV. The box has more outputs than I think anyone knows what to do with, so it'll be interesting to see how the hacking community takes to this box. It only has one tuner and records at one set compression level, so hopefully it'll be able to store signals digitally instead of having to recompress everything.

This could be another huge setback for TiVo's financial future, but the c|net article also mentions that Time Warner claims that video on demand will soon outpace what is possible with a DVR. While seeing a pay-per-view movie any time you want is nice, it stills seems silly to think people will prefer that over taping anything they want so they can watch later. [thanks pb]

update: David pointed out it does in fact record HDTV, though only a few hours can fit on its 80Gb drive. Here are the recording capacity specs:

Analog: 25 hrs
Digital TV: 30-60 hrs
HDTV: 8-10 hrs

another update: Time Warner is ready to release their own digital cable/HDTV box with DVR functionality.

yet another update: reports that shares of TiVo's stock fell several percentage points after Comcast's announcement.

December 3, 2003 in News | Permalink | Comments (485) | TrackBack

Wait Until Next Year to Buy That Flat Panel TV

As if consumers didn't already have enough to worry about (480i vs 720i vs 1080i vs HD-ready vs HDTV vs EDTV vs plasma vs LCD vs projection), Reuters analysts are suggesting you hold off until next year to buy a flat screen tv. I've been doing a lot of research into it and considering a purchase of a lower-end model, but I'm finding this Reuters report is spot-on.

Flat panel TVs are evolving much like PCs, with prices dropping with every significant technology advancement or manufacturing upgrade. What costs $5000 today will cost $2500 a year from now, and as reports come in that gas plasma screens loose their contrast and luster over the course of a couple years, dropping six grand on something that will be useless in three years and cost half as much next year doesn't look like the best idea. Personally, as much as I'd like to get something HDTV aware in my home to start playing with this technology, I'm probably going to wait until the end of 2004 when I can hopefully get a 42-50" LCD HDTV for 2-3 grand. [via dangerousmeta]

December 3, 2003 in News | Permalink | Comments (29) | TrackBack

New TiVo 4.01a updates

Nathan over at bumppo.net has learned that TiVo is rolling out a new minor update to support USB wifi adapters in the series 2 boxes. They only certified that a couple models worked and unfortunately the companies that made them updated the versions and many TiVo users have been left with useless adapthers.

There's a special priority page you need to use to request the update, but if you've got a Linksys WUSB11 adapter newer than version 2.6 or one of the many other adapters, hopefully this update will get your TiVo on the network. [thanks, Nathan]

December 3, 2003 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Build Your Own TiVo

The folks at Extreme Tech have been publishing great guides to building your own home theater PC for the past year, and their latest article "Build Your Own TiVo" has been picked up and syndicated on Yahoo News. Lots of great basic tips on building a capable HTPC.

December 2, 2003 in How-To | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Gateway Connected DVD player Review

About a month ago I started looking for a networked media device to join my home theater setup. I loved the Home Media Option in my Series 2 TiVo, espeically for playing music downstairs in my home theater system, but I switched to a DirecTiVo system recently that lacked HMO support.

I started my search by combing the landscape. My wishlist called for music, photo, and movie streaming on my wireless network and good audio and video connections to my home theater. After checking out what was available, I eventually settled on either the KiSS DVD with ethernet or the Gateway Connected DVD. When I found out the Gateway had recently added DivX streaming support, I decided to buy one (it was also about half the price of a KiSS DVD player).

First off, I started out by using a tip someone once told me. If you ever see a coupon code box in a checkout page, do a quick google search for "company name coupon code." Using this method, I found a "$20 off every purchase $199 or more" code, making my Gateway DVD player $179 at checkout.

Setup and Hardware

The unit showed up days later and consisted of a short, wide player in silver and chrome, with a remote and a laptop wireless card that slid into the appropriate slot on the back.

The Gateway DVD player, sitting below my DSR7000 DirecTiVo unit

I installed it with S-video and optical audio connections to my home theater receiver. It also offers progressive scan connections if you've got the equipment for it.

The Gateway controller

The controller is OK, offering a pretty simple point and select pad in the middle that was easy to use without having to look down. The network functions all reside along a column on the upper left side, which is fine but the main "connect" button is the only way to access network features and is buried in the next middle row. Since I use the connect button more than the DVD features, I wish it was bigger and located in a more prominent location. Another unfortunate design choice was making the forward/reverse seek buttons the same size as the forward/reverse chapter buttons, and putting them next to each other. This means if I want to jump back ten seconds I have to look down to find the correct rewind button. It would have been nice if they were special shapes and different in size so one could use the buttons by feel.

The Network setup screen

Since I run an open wireless network at home, setup was a snap. I started the unit up, checked the network setup and noticed it found my wireless access point upstairs and joined it. If I had a WEP password, this is the screen I would have entered it. Unfortunately, the Gateway doesn't support typing network names in directly, so if you're not broadcasting your access point ID, the gateway won't be able to find it (this is how I had my wireless network setup, security through obscurity).

Screenshot of the server application running on my PC

The server software installed easily on my Windows XP box and let me direct it where to find my music, video, and image files. At first I was surprised to see it ignored all my DivX movies, but I later found out my unit shipped with the latest firmware on the DVD player, but the server software was out of date. If you want to be safe, download the server software from this Gateway Support Page (which required quite a bit of digging on their site to find, as it's not listed under support files for the device). Once I had the new software my DivX movies were all added to the list. I set a schedule to do a nightly re-index, but I did find it a drag that it couldn't keep track of my music directory automatically. If I ripped a new CD, I'd have to tell the software to re-index my collection to see the new files.

Music

Once all my mp3s were indexed, I started listening to music whenever I was downstairs doing chores (making dinner, doing dishes) or relaxing without the TV on.

Surfing the musicians list on TV

Once you've got 3000 songs by hundreds of artists in a database, it's often a challenge to find and listen to music. The programs I typically use on my desktop, iTunes and Winamp, handle the problem in different ways but both do a good job of making and managing playlists and letting you listen to all music on random. Since the Gateway is limited in interface and controls over a PC, I found it to be a bit cumbersome to find certain artists or randomize large chunks of my collection. Near as I can tell it isn't possible to play all your songs randomly, so I usually would pick an artist and listen to all their music, or pick a genre and listen to all tracks within it. I found the next problem being if I wanted to hear "Pink Martini", I had to scroll through the 10-15 artists listed on each screen all the way down to number 370 of my 440 artist collection (that's where the P's started). The scrolling was quite slow and the only shortcut is to guess a number in the list that it should jump to.

Playing music from a playlist

Playlist files are supposed to be indexed but I didn't notice any in my library. The only playlists I could get to work were the ones I made with the Gateway server software, which was easy (it was very iTunes like, you name a new list then drag tracks to it), but lame that it ignored my existing lists. Once I had a few good playlists created for each mood I found myself using the playlist feature most of all.

Images

The number of images on my hard drive is about the same as my mp3 collection, with thousands of loosely organized (by directory name) images downloaded from digital cameras. I quickly found out the server software's scanner was a bit too good at finding images, and would grab any gif or jpg on the drives I pointed it to, including all the incidental little files within software applications.

Image playing in a slideshow

Once I weeded out all the photos except for my digital camera output, I still had the same problems negotiating thousands of items with a simple remote. It did have a nice feature where it automatically grouped photos found in a directory as unique, but playlists seemed the way to go when browsing a specific set of images. Slideshows were pretty basic though I didn't notice any controls for setting how long images show up, and although I didn't expect it, it would have been nice if I could listen to music and watch a slideshow.

Movies

The Gateway Connected DVD player supports MPEG 1 and 2 and offers some DivX support though it isn't certified (also, the divx support requires the latest version of the server software).

List of videos ready to play

I don't have that many movies stored on my PC, aside from a few DVD backups I made for plane flights. I set out to find content to test this player against and downloaded every movie and tv show I could find on underground networks. From playing around with a variety of sources, I found that almost anything played fine over the 802.11b network. About the only problem files were those with errors or truncated file headers (movies that could barely play on my PC).

MPEG video paused

I was amazed at the quality and that my network could handle it. I've got a 802.11g network in the house that I use for all computers (including my PC desktop). The access point is directly upstairs above the TV in the living room, and I was worried all those walls and the entertainment unit would affect network performance. The Gateway docs say it can handle up to 3Mb/sec video and I couldn't find a single file anywhere that was encoded at a higher bitrate.

The visual quality of downloaded movies did vary. While DivX did a great job making large movies small filesizes, the videos did usually show compression artifacts (blockiness like a jpeg) that reminded me of TiVo's lowest quality recordings. Higher bitrate MPEGs looked fantastic, with some approaching DVD quality. For research purposes (heh), I went in search of every hollywood blockbuster I could find, to see if the experience of watching movies at home was better than going to a theater. For the films that were ripped from screener DVDs, the quality was great and the experience close to DVD. For shaking camcorder recordings done inside a theater, the experience was mostly crap, with overexposed images and lousy sound.

I was kind of bummed to see that it didn't support quicktime video, since that's what my digital camera records and everything I make in iMovie outputs as quicktime. It would have been nice if it supported that.

DVD playback

It's easy to forget this thing plays DVDs too, and the DVDs in my collection all seemed to play fine. The controls seemed a bit sparse compared to my older DVD player this replaced, as I found I couldn't quickly swap audio tracks while a movie played (maybe I haven't found the exact keystroke for it yet). The fastforwarding for both DVDs and Video playback leave something to be desired, espeically if you've used a TiVo. There aren't easy ways to jump forward quickly aside from chapters in DVDs. My old player worked more like a TiVo, with three levels of fastforwarding and tick marks you could jump to.

Upsides

Overall, I really like this unit and it fills the void left by giving up the Home Media Option nicely, and adds video support to boot. I was really surprised to see the 802.11b card keep up with video playback through a couple walls and only found network problems on a couple occasions when I was also downloading large files in another room. If you've got a big mp3 collection on your computer and a good speaker system in your home theater, there are few better ways than this unit to hear your music at home. As for movies, this thing reminds me of how an ipod makes mp3s useful. I never saw the point of downloading movies if you had to watch them at your computer. With this setup, I could watch them how they were meant to be shown and I found a whole new appreciation for the underground world of TV and movie traders (while I waited a couple weeks to get my DirecTV setup, I got to catch missed episodes of the Simpsons and The Daily Show). Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America once called the VCR the "boston strangler" when he tried to kill the technology in the early 80s, and when his MPAA folks catch wind of devices like this, I have no doubt they will call them something like "Osama Bin Laden in a box" to their industry.

Downsides

The downsides aren't too numerous or too bad. Even though I already had an ok DVD player, this was a great replacement, and if you are in the market for a new progressive DVD player, this is a great option to have. The remote control could be improved and I found it somewhat limiting to scanning ahead in DVDs or jumping around among hundreds of listings in music. I thought 802.11b would be too slow for my needs, but it worked fine (and I hear you can drop a 802.11g card in and it'll work fine though I wish Gateway would explicitly support it). It seemed to work fine on all my mp3s, jpegs, mpegs, and divx files, though it isn't officially certified for DivX support (Joe from DivX pointed out the KiSS DVD player is certified).

It'd be nice if the unit could read more video formats though the ones it does support work great. Be sure you get the latest software and firmware when running the unit, so you get all the features you can out of it. One big downside is that there is zero mac support, as the software requires a PC running win2k, winxp, win98, or winme. Another missing feature was the ability to read media from networked or mapped drives on my PC. Since it didn't have mac support, I hoped it could see my mac's music and image folders that were mapped on my PC, but it could not, only seeing physical drives. It doesn't support streaming mp3 from radio stations as far as I can tell, and it doesn't support Apple's encrypted AAC files bought at the iTunes music store. The last lacking feature I can think of is the support for inputing access point names into the network settings. There's no reason why a quick firmware upgrade couldn't let people not broadcasting their SSID connect manually.

Conclusion

Overall, I'd rate this unit very highly as a capable network media device. With a simple setup and easy operation, it was painless to use all the files from my PC on my home entertainment center over the wireless network. I expect to keep using this unit for a long time and hope Gateway continues to refine the desktop server software and player firmware. After using this for week, I went out and bought a 250Gb hard drive to add to my PC, so that I could have all my files in one place for this unit to play, with plenty of room to grow.

Helpful links
Gateway Connected DVD order page
Search on Google for "Gateway coupon code"
Gateway software and firmware download page

December 1, 2003 in Product Reviews | Permalink | Comments (208) | TrackBack

Escape from TiVo

Fazal Majid, an experienced entrepreneur, businessman, and technologist I respect, writes about how he has given up his Tivo for a Panasonic DVR, mainly because he has lost trust in the company.

...the main reason for the upgrade was the fact I have for some time lost any vestigial trust for TiVo (the company). They spam you with advertising in the user interface (one of the items in the PVR main menu is a rotating ad), expropriate a portion of your precious hard drive space for the said spam, track your usage patterns behind your back, and have a nasty habit of disabling features in software releases.

Fazal Majid's low-intensity weblog: Escape from TiVo

December 1, 2003 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Pre-order a TiVo Cache Card

One of the most common annoyances for people running hacked TiVos (or even non-hacked ones), is that the TiVo takes forever to generate a list of all television shows or even schedule a recording. The problem is that the TiVo's database is huge and all read/writes go to the hard disk -- something which is incredibly slow.

9th tee (purveyors of the TurboNET, the Ethernet add-on to Series 1 TiVo's) has started pre-ordering for the TiVo CacheNET. This card is a combination Ethernet card, and a slot for a 512MB SDRAM stick -- with it installed you can hopefully keep the entire TiVo database in RAM (a lot faster than the hard disk), and still keep your network interface.

You know I'm ordering one right now.

December 1, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack