Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I purchased the Humax DRT-800 combination TiVo and DVD player/burner a little under 3 months ago and have been using the unit constantly since then. I have intended on writing a review for a while now, so I’m finally getting around to that, sorry for the hold up!

I’ve only read one other comprehensive review of the Humax DRT-800, and most of it talked about TiVo features that are on all TiVo units. In this review, I thought I’d talk mostly about the additional features that the DRT-800 has over and above all regular TiVo units, although I will touch briefly on the DRT-800’s support for normal TiVo functionality for those who aren’t as familiar with it.

TiVo, as most know by now, records programs off of TV like a VCR, but it records the digital bits of a show as a file onto a hard drive inside the unit as opposed to an analog tape. TiVo’s are basically computers running the Linux operating system with a video capture card and a hard drive. Special software provides the TiVo interface that allows you to record shows automatically based on preferences you set manually and/or the unit learns based on what you record. You can record whole seasons of shows and if it changes its schedule (permanently or temporarily) the TiVo will know, and change its recording schedule accordingly. It does this by continually downloading a schedule of upcoming programs over a phone line or an Internet connection. The DRT-800 contains TiVo with all the functionality that a stand-alone series 2 TiVo has, although no TiVo ToGo yet (which I’ll cover later).

As for the TiVo functionality of the DRT-800, I’ve only had one issue with recording regular programs. I’ve noticed a number of times that while watching a recorded show, the screen would go blank (actually grey) for an instant, and then come back on. This might happen once or twice during a show, or not at all. I thought perhaps my unit was defective, so I called Humax and they suggested a reboot. This seemed to solve the problem but then I noticed it again a few days later. My wife determined that it corresponds to turning my TV on and off. I haven’t confirmed this yet, and I’ve not seen anyone else yet to report a similar issue, so it may just be an odd combination of my particular TV and perhaps a DRT-800 with a special issue… Others online have talked about having problems with “crushed blacks” (no detail in shadows) and lots of digital artifacts even at the highest recording quality setting. But some of this may be the fault of the output connection. Using an S-Video cable instead of a composite seems to clean up a lot of problems. I myself haven’t noticed anything terrible, but I am using S-Video and this is also my first TiVo, so I can’t really compare it to anything other than live TV. The picture quality is undoubtedly worse than live TV, but then I have a very nice 34″ high definition Sony CRT with a DirectTV satellite receiver, so even at standard definition, my picture is extremely good. Taking this signal and converting it to analog and back to digital is going to wreak at least some havoc!

DVD Player

The DRT-800 has a DVD player/burner in it, and you can use it to play all your regular movie DVD’s. It has progressive scan for those with high-definition displays, and a high-quality component output for your TV. Because it doubles as a DVD player, this means you can save space and wires that would normally be devoted to a completely separate DVD player unit. There are, however, a couple of disadvantages to using the DRT-800 as your DVD player. One minor one is that in order to play a DVD, you need to go through the TiVo environment, instead of just being able to plop it in and hit play (or just letting it play by default). A more annoying issue, though, is the fact that the remote that comes with the TiVo, does not have a lot of the buttons that you would find on a stand-alone DVD player. It has an angle button and a menu and top menu button, but no subtitle button, nor an audio button, and it’s track forward and back functions are unintuitively assigned to the channel up/down button. This is not a HUGE deal, but it still would have been nice to have a full compliment of buttons for the DVD player function.

DVD Burner

The DVD drive in the DRT-800 functions not only to PLAY DVD’s, but also to BURN them, and this is where the unit really earns it’s extra value. The main thing that people will use this feature for is to burn programs that they’ve recorded with the TiVo itself, but there are other things you can burn as well, as I will explain.

Before talking about the actual process of burning a program to DVD, I thought I’d write a little about DVD formats that are used by the DRT-800 and what this means in a practical sense to the user. The DRT-800 can burn DVD “recordables” (write can only be written to once and never erased) and DVD “rewritables” (which you can write to and erase from much like a VHS tape or floppy disk). You can’t just by any recordable or rewritable format. For recordables, you have to use discs labeled DVD-R, and for rewritabled, it’s DVD-RW. You can pick up DVD-R’s for as cheap as $.25 per DVD on sale, but DVD-RW’s are often much more expensive – maybe $1.50 per disc at the cheapest? So why would you even bother with DVD-RW’s? I wouldn’t myself, except that I’ve found that it’s nice to have some on hand to record stuff that you know you only need for a short period of time. And the reason you might want some temporary storage space? Well, the DRT-800 comes with an 80GB hard drive that is rated at “80 hours” of playback. But like all TiVo’s, this 80 hours is a somewhat disengenous claim, because it is only valid when using the TiVo’s poorest quality level. At the best quality level, it’s closer to 18 hours for the DRT-800. You’d be surprised at how fast this can fill up if you record even a handful of shows each week at the best quality level. Get busy for several days and the hard drive gets so full that your programs start being deleted in order to make room for new ones! One solution is to upgrade your hard drive through one of the services that either do this themselves or will sell you a kit, like Weaknees or ptvupgrade. But this can cost an additional $200 or more over the already $400 you probably spent on the DRT-800. So, getting ten DVD-RW discs automatically expands your effective capacity from 18 hours at best quality to 28 hours, as you are able to offload some of the programs onto disc.

Ok, so how exactly does recording to DVD work? In order to burn a program on the TiVo to disc, you can do it a couple of ways. You choose the dvd recorder from the main TiVo menu, click on Save Programs to DVD, at which point you are presented with a convenient list of all your programs and how much space they will take up on the DVD.

You can check these off, but once the disc has programs assigned to it, the ones others on your TiVo that are too big to fit on the DVD get an X next to them and you can no longer choose them. The other way to do it is simply to go into your “Now Playing” program listing, pick one of the progams, and choose “Save to DVD or VCR” after which you have the option to pick additional programs if you choose.

How do the programs look once they are on DVD? TiVo units actually have slightly different recording qualities depending on which unit you buy. DirectTV units (which are satellite receivers with a TiVo built in), actually record the original digital signal from the satellite. There is no conversion from analog to digital and/or visa versa. It is a digital stream that is recorded digitally to the hard drive, so there’s no loss of quality. So-called “stand-alone” TiVo’s get fed an analog signal (that was either converted by a digital satellite receiver or a digital cable box, or was never digital to begin with) which it then has to convert or even reconvert into digital. With each conversion, there is additional chances for degradation of quality when compared to the source. Finally, with the DRT-800, there is yet another difference. The DRT-800 records shows in a format that’s a little different from other TiVo’s, a format that’s compatible with DVD’s. This type of recording, like the regular TiVo recording, “compresses” the original video source so that it will fit in a smaller space. In essence, the conversion makes shortcuts by creating equations that estimate colors and movement. One can set these shortcuts to be more aggressive and end up with a program that takes up less capacity on the hard drive of the unit, but by being more aggressive, the recording cannot be as accurate in some circumstances (such has subtle color shifts or lots of motion) and so you get “artifacts” (typical signs of digital compression) that make the quality of the image seem poorer. The DRT-800’s recording format looks to many like it is a bit poorer in quality still than a stand-alone TiVo’s, at least for the lower-quality settings. For the best quality, it seems more or less equivalent.

(This is actually a TiVo program that has been saved to DVD and is playing back on the DRT-800)

I keep mentioning space and capacity, and that is always on the mind of TiVo owners unless they have some mammoth 700-hour TiVo that they’ve custom built. Luckily the DRT-800 has what is effectively an unlimited storage capacity limited only by how many blank DVD’s you can affort to buy. Storing TiVo programs on DVD, though, can sometimes be a little tricky in terms of the space needed – which also depends on the quality setting that you used to record the given program. If you record programs in “Best” quality, then you will only be able to record an hour’s worth of programming per DVD. So movies will generally require at least two DVD’s, and sometimes three or even more! This is one reason why I generally don’t record movies onto DVD. It takes up too many discs at a decent quality level, and this makes it inconvenient to have to switch DVD’s in the middle of playback. The other reason I don’t record movies is because I have been spoiled by movies on actual commercial DVD’s. Not only do you not get the nice menu, the various special features like commentary tracks, etc., but also the quality of recordings on the DRT-800 even at the best level isn’t nearly as good as a DVD, at least if you are viewing one enahced for widescreen TV’s on a wisdescreen TV. I happen to have a widescreen TV, and while not humongous at 34″, it is still large enough to see a big difference in quality. One of my biggest issues with the DRT-800 is how it records movies that are in widescreen. Let me explain:

Aspect ratio (ie picture view dimensions) for TV’s is either 4:3 (the old standard) or 16:9 (The newer “widescreen”) Widescreen conforms more to what aspect ratios movies are filemed (or recorded) in. Widescreen TV’s are also invariably high-definition. When a DVD comes out of a movie and is available in “Widescreen” – this refers only to hwo it is formatted on the screen. In order to actually take advantage of the added resolution of Widescreen TV’s, it needs to say “enhanced for Widescreen TV’s” on it. If it doesn’t, it is simply “letterbox.” Letterbox refers to the bars on the top and bottom of the screen that one sees when watching a widescreen movie on a regular TV. That wide image doesn’t conform to the dimensions of the TV, so in order to fit the entire image, it needs to shrink it enough and doing so produces those bars. However, with a Widescreen TV, you SHOULD be able to see the entire image and have it cover the entire screen. But if it is not “enhanced” it simply shows the same letterboxed image formatted for a regular TV, and because you are viewing the image on a widescreen TV, not only do you get the bars on the top and bottom, but also on the sides! Now, Widescreen TV’s do have a way to compensate this. It let’s you “zoom” in on the image that takes up just a part of your screen so that it takes up the entire screen. However, this zooming doesn’t really do anything to the inherent QUALITY of the picture. It just magnifies it, and in doing so you still are working with the same smaller image but just blown up more so that imperfections are more visible. With a truly enhanced for widescreen DVD, the image takes full advantage of the wider aspect ration of the image, producing a higher-resolution image that is MUCH better than the alternative.

I’m not sure how regular TiVo’s record widescreen (high-def) programming. With the DRT-800, though, you can make such recordings. Of course, they will not be recorded IN high-definition, BUT, they ARE recorded in widescreen format. I’m fairly certain that this format is more or less equivalent to a DVD that has been “enhanced for Widescreen TV’s” because the quality is quite high, almost has high as a DVD, but not quite. The problem comes in when you want to take that recording on the DRT-800’s hard drive and transfer it onto a DVD. You would think this would support such widescreen formats, but it does not. When recording to a DVD, the DRT-800 takes that widescreen image and squeezes it into a standard 4:3 window that a non-widescreen TV would use. The result? That same image that DVD’s that aren’t enhanced for widescreen TV’s produces – black bars framing the entire image. I’ve contacted Humax about this issue and while they didn’t seem to understand the problem initially, they eventually just said that at the moment there’s no solution for the problem. Let’s hope that this changes, but somehow I think we might need to wait for a high-definition version of the DRT-800 for a real resolution.

Of course, recording regular non-HD, non-widescreen shows off of TV works fine, and since most shows are an hour or even a half hour, you can easily fit one or two shows at the best quality rating on each DVD. Unfortunately, you cannot span multiple programs onto multiple discs. So say for example that you have three 40-minute shows that you want to group together onto as few discs as possible. The DRT-800 cannot take those three shows and record them onto two DVD’s. The only way you can span something onto multiple discs is if it is just one program that takes up over an hour. This lack of flexibility is a bit of an annoyance because it means you may be forced to waste a lot of disc space that could otherwise be saved. But, lets say you don’t really care about the quality so much as wanting to capture as many shows on one DVD that you’re going to be taking with you on a trip. Well, in this case, you can get as much as 6 hours of programming on one DVD by setting the quality level down to the lowest “basic.” If you can’t stand the quality at that level, you can also fit a couple of hours on the second-to-highest “high” quality, or 4 hours at the next to lowest “medium” quality.

The DRT-800 can record at speeds up to 4X. This speed rating is based on how much data can be written per second. DVD-R’s or DVD-RW’s that are rated at higher speeds than 4X won’t do you any good – the recording will still be made at 4X speed. A Best quality recording that takes up 1-hour theoretically should record in ¼ of “real” time, or 15 minutes. In my tests, though, it’s less – as little as 9-10 minutes. Since I don’t record at lower recording levels, I can’t say whether lower quality recordings differ, but logically it would seem that it should be the same to record a full DVD of best quality recordings as a full DVD of lowest quality. Of course the lowest quality DVD as I said would contain six hours of programming as opposed to one for the best quality, so you could view this as being able to record 10 minutes per hour as opposed to less than two minutes per hour depending on the quality setting.

(As you can see, when first starting to record, it looks like the process will take 60 minutes)

(However, very quickly the system corrects itself and modifies this estimate to be much more accurate)

The other nice thing about recording DVD’s is that you can do this in the background. Regular TiVo’s have a certain ability of multitasking already – you can watch a recorded show a the same time that another show is being recorded. And with dual-tuner units (so far these are only available in DirectTV Tivo’s) you can do the same thing that VCR users have been able to do for years – watch one channel live while you record another – or something that a single VCR has never been able to do – record two channels simultaneously. But like regular stand-alone TiVo’s, the DRT-800 only has one tuner. But at least you can record shows to DVD, record a live show, and watch a recorded show all at the same time, and in my book that’s pretty darn good!

Recording from other sources: one thing about the DRT-800 which I think is underated is its ability to record from any input source. Yes, other TiVo’s can record from a VCR via composite inputs, but the DRT-800 adds additional functionality to this by also offering S-Video and even Digital Video (via 1394 AKA Firewire) inputs as well.

(front inputs from left to right - DV (1394), compsite video, composite audio, S-Video)

The Digital Video input is the most important as it allows for a direct digital to digital recordings. As an added convenience the DRT-800 offers these inputs on the front of the unit as well as the back. I don’t have a digital video camera myself yet, so I could not test out this type of recording, which I assume would happen at a very rapid speed. What I have done, though, is hooked my VCR up to the composite inputs and recorded some old home videos. You can specify how long the recording will be, and I found it’s best to overestimate because then you can manually hit the stop recording button at exactly the right end point. Once you have made the recordings onto the hard drive, of course, that’s where it would end for a normal TiVo. But with the DRT-800, this functionality really proves itself useful because you can then go the extra step and record it onto DVD. For old VHS recordings, this is a real lifesaver. As analog tapes are played each time they degrade a little, and there’s also some degradation over time whether tapes are actually played or not. So it is vitally important if you want to hold onto these memories without such degradation of quality, that they get recorded onto a more permanent digital medium. How long DVD’s themselves will last is up for debate, but probably by the time they do start to fail, there will be much more advanced digital media formats that allow for both more capacity as well as longevity. The one catch to recording from an external source that’s not your TV is that for some reason TiVo can’t handle doing anything else during the process. So if are going to record your old two-hour VHS tapes, you basically will have to go use another TV if you want to watch something during this time. Not particularly convenient!

When playing back shows you have recorded onto DVD, you actually get a standard menu interface that looks very much like the TiVo environment. This makes things very easy on the one hand, but on the other hand some will find it a bit limiting to not be able to customize the disc very much. One can actually rename any program so that it shows up that way in the menu, but once you “drill down” you are still presented with the program title and description as you would on the TiVo. The other annoyance is that when you are recording an episode of a series, the default name given to the DVD is the name of the series itself, rather than the name of the series followed by the episode name. Having the episode name would be more useful, but frankly the added effort to enter that into the title is too much of a hassle for me to want to do for every recording I make. When you are recording old home videos, the impulse is to take advantage of the menu capability and to record different parts of a video as different “chapters” within the DVD. This doesn’t really work like DVD chapters per say, because they show up as completely separate programs. They don’t just play one after another. Once one is done playing, you have to manually navigate to the next to have it play. I’m sure things are infinitely easier with a digital video camera that one can simply transfer the video to a computer and index it at the appropriate points or even cut it up into separate files before finally burning it to a DVD.

(As you can see, the DRT-800 provides a default name for recording a DVD, which is convenient, but could be better - only the series name is provided, not the individual episode name)

(of course you can add additional text, but it’s not as easy as typing on a computer, so especially for a longer episode title, it’s just not worth the bother if you record a lot)

(once you record the DVD, it’s title will show up in the main TiVo menu, and as you see here only the title of the show is visible)

(once you actually go into the DVD, you see the full show and episode title)

(just as in the regular TiVo interface, the menuing on the DVD provides synopsis of the episode, and information on when it was recorded, how long it is, etc.)

Conclusion:

I bought the DRT-800 for a number of reasons. The ability to archive TV shows without having to worry about running out of room on the hard drive of the unit was one factor – and doing this without having to deal with upgrade kits and added expense was very convenient. In addition, the ability to save old videos to DVD’s for me was key. I have a PC laptop and it does not have video inputs that would allow me to record from video sources and then make these digital files that I could later burn onto a DVD. The simplicity of this solution is great, even for someone who is used to this sort of technology because it just means that you don’t have to spend as much time. It’s of course not as flexible as other solutions, but for people with busy lives and not extremely demanding requirements for video editing, it’s ideal. For those who need high-definition quality, as well, the DRT-800 will not get you there. There are TiVo’s that do HD, but they are all around $1000 and none come with a DVD player/burner built-in like the DRT-800, although eventually this will all change of course.

Epilogue –TiVo ToGo: You may have heard of this new feature that TiVo unveiled just a few weeks ago called TiVo ToGo. It allows those with TiVo to transfer their recordings to a computer. The one question you might have is, does this new feature make a unit like the DRT-800 obsolete? In my opinion the answer is no. When I bought the DRT-800, I knew I was kind of taking a gamble. At that point, there had been talk of TiVo ToGo for a good 10 or 11 months. I felt like I couldn’t count on this feature showing up any time soon given the fact that it had been talked about for so long but not delivered. Now that it is here, I still feel like I made the right decision and here’s why: While TiVo ToGo does allow you to record TiVo programs to your computer, the process is not nearly as fast as recording a DVD on the DRT-800. One has to transfer the file over a USB 1.1 connection, which means a considerable length of time. Even once it’s transferred, it still is sitting on your computer and not on a DVD. Unless that computer is a laptop, you haven’t made that recording much more portable than it was on your TiVo. If you want to then burn it to DVD, you have to purchase an additional application from Sonic and this will still mean additional time to burn the DVD. In addition, the transferring and/or burning takes a lot of processing power from your computer, which is a hassle if you want to be doing other things with it as well. The one gotcha about TiVo ToGo as it relates to the DRT-800 is that TiVo is not offering it for models with DVD burners until some time in the future that’s not been determined. This does make some sense because for those with TiVo’s with DVD Burners, the need for TiVo ToGo itself is not really there – it’s redundant. The problem is not so much with TiVo ToGo itself, but rather with the other features that come along with the version of the system software that enable TiVo ToGo. Namely there is the so called “Home Media Engine” or “HME”, a system for third-party developers to create all manner of applications to work with TiVo’s. These applications can be installed simply by the user without any hacking or serious technical expertise, unlike the applications that have been developed in the past but required some serious hacking of TiVo hardware and software. None of these HME applications are available to DRT-800 users until TiVo deems it time to update the system software for TiVo’s with DVD Burners. Hopefully that will not take months and months, but who really knows?

On January 3rd, just as CES 2005 was getting under way, TiVo announced TiVo ToGo, a service they’ve been talking about for around a year now. As many of you know, this service will allow you to transfer your TiVo programs or movies to a computer, a portable media player, and eventually to a DVD. At least that’s the theory. In practice, things may be a little more complex. TiVo ToGo has an inherent problem, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is speed, both figuratively and literally:

Firstly, this feature has taken forever to get to TiVo owners. Ostensibly this was because TiVo had to allay the fears of the movie industry, TV networks, etc., by creating a DRM system whereby the content could not be easily copied and distributed. To do this, TiVo employs a code or “access key” that you type in when playing the content outside of the the TiVo box. This code is specific to you and your TiVo. If you then distribute that content on the internet, it has a signature pointing right back at you. While I appreciate that TiVo is trying to work with content providers to come up with a compromise that will help both their customers and the content providers, I think in the end this is crippling them, as TiVo ToGo was in development for at least year.

Now that TiVo ToGo has been announced, it is still going to take weeks before all TiVo boxes have the service. Some types of TiVo’s (ones that record to DVD), will not see the capability for what will probably be months. And DirecTV Tivo boxes simply will not offer the service, just as they have not offered TiVo’s home networking features.

Finally, the issue of speed is inherent in the actual functionality of TiVo ToGo. Even at the lowest quality of recording, an hour of TiVo programming takes up about 1 GB of storage. How do you get your content from your TiVo to your computer? You have to go through the USB port on the TiVo. You can either hook a wireless or wired Ethernet adapter to it, or potentially even hook it directly to a laptop. The problem, though, is that no matter what it’s hooked to, it is still a USB 1.1 port, the older type which was superseded with the ten times faster USB 2.0 around three years ago. This bottleneck means that no TiVo content can travel faster than about 4Mbps (bursts go up to 12Mbps, but average transfer speed is much slower), or about 1.8GB per hour. So, with this speed you can transfer a 2-hour movie in a little over an hour AT THE WORST QUALITY. Most people will want to record at least some content at the best quality level, which is about 4GB per hour, and this will take a whopping 2+ hours to transfer per hour of show, or somewhere close to 4 hours for an average movie. Maybe I’m spoiled, but this seems like an inordinate amount of time, and during this transfer, your computer will slow down to the speed of your computer from 10 years ago - so slow you will have to set transfers before going to sleep at night. Now if you’re transferring this to a laptop that you’re bringing with you, you can just wake up the next morning, throw the laptop in its bag and head out the door. But what if you don’t have a laptop and instead want to send your programs to a portable media player or to DVD? Well, you’re now looking at more time. Maybe another 10-15 minutes per hour of video to send to a DVD, or another 3-5 minutes per hour of video if you can transfer your files to your portable media player via USB 2.0 or Firewire. In any case, this starts to become a real hassle at some point unless you’re just transferring a couple of programs at a time. For a portable media players, you will probably also want to decrease the quality of the program even further in order to fit more onto what could be only 20GB of hard drive space, which means an additional conversion factor. TiVo does have plans to upgrade their USB to the significantly faster USB 2.0, but there is no immediate timeline, which probably means we shouldn’t expect anything until at least next year.

I happen to own one of those TiVo’s with a DVD recorder - the Humax DRT-800. I can record shows directly from the TiVo to DVD-R or DVD-RW and it takes all of 15 minutes for an hour’s show at the highest quality setting. This unit costs a bit more than an similarly sized TiVo and of course the discs cost money too, but at least the DVD-RW’s can be reused and I have much more portability (due to increased speed) than TiVo ToGo. Perhaps this is why TiVo has decided to not push their updates yet to those who own DVD recorders like the Humax.

If TiVo were to upgrade their USB functionality to 2.0, then this would become much faster and easier. However, it seems that the easier you make it to copy content, the more nervous content creators get. I think there’s actually an inherent conflict of interest between the attitudes of content creators and their customers. These companies want to be able to parcel out their content in a way that generates the most revenue as possible, and they see this being done only through commercial-filled programming, or through selling recordings on DVD or CD, or via subscription-based pipelines where part of that subscription fee is funneled back to them. Likewise, they would like for you to have to buy their content multiple times. Paying your satellite or cable company, or just paying more for products which are advertised during a program’s airing is only the first payment. If you also want to hold onto that show on a DVD, you get to pay all over again! Because the DVD format was created in order to prevent copying (albeit the scheme was subsequently defeated), you have to jump through some hoops if you want to then transfer that same content onto something that doesn’t play dvds themselves, but can play the dvd video files - like portable media players.

Music companies want you to pay for the song you hear on the radio by charging the radio network, which then compensates by getting advertisers to buy ads which in turn drives up prices for their products. Even if there are no ads, like with satellite radio, you are still paying a monthly fee, which is in part going to back to these content providers. Then if you want to have that recording at your disposal to play any time at a good quality, you need to pay an additional fee to buy it on CD, or more recently on the internet. But if you pay for it on the internet, say via iTunes, you then can only play it on a limited number of devices. Finally, if you want to hear the song as a ringtone on your phone, you are charged yet again for this same content.

TiVo’s CEO, Michael Ramsy, has finally “left” TiVo, although he is still remains as Chairman of the Board. Some believe he was pushed to leave due to the poor performance of TiVo’s stock. I’m no expert in the stock market, but I can certainly understand why TiVo’s stock has diminished in value, even with the advent of TiVo ToGo and an increased TiVo subscriber base. TiVo, it seems, took the road of trying to placate content providers and potential competitors as opposed to just going it alone. Alas, in business, or in particular in the entertainment business, this seems not to work. Instead of full cooperation for its trying not to step on any toes, the only thing it’s gotten is a lack of actual litigation. On the other hand, you have companies like NBC trying to defeat TiVo’s functionality by starting and ending shows differently then their schedules indicate. Other channels, like Comedy Central in particular, refuse to code their programs as repeats or first run, making the process of recoding a series that much more difficult. Even partners like DirectTV seem to be backstabbing TiVo. TiVo partnered with DirctTV so that they could build combo TiVo/DirecTV receivers (DirecTiVo’s as they are called) that would work in an integrated way. But now it looks like DirectTV may not be a TiVo partner in the long run as they are coming out with their own DVR that will compete not only against the TiVo hadware, but the TiVo subscription service as well.

I’m worried about TiVo’s future. That’s why I’ve refused to buy their lifetime subscription. I have no idea whether TiVo will be around in two years, when such a subscription starts to pay off, but more importantly I don’t know if TiVo will have lowered their prices or morphed into something else, or whether other options will become available that make TiVo not the best choice for me. I want TiVo to succeed, I really do, but I think that there needs to be some radical shifts in TiVo’s way of doing business:

1. First thing, as I’ve noted, is to stop kissing up so much to all the content companies. TiVo tried being nice and it hasn’t gotten them very much at all. It’s time to say “screw it!” and not try to get permission for everything they do. This has slowed down their development considerably, and caused them to fall behind some other hardware and service providers so they are no longer on the cutting edge.
2. “Placeshifting” - in other words portability - is the new key. TiVo was revolutionary in letting people “timeshift” in order to watch what they wanted when they wanted. Five or so years later, though, technology has progressed to a point where video has become more and more portable. Portable Media Devices are an up and coming device category (when Apple finally releases one, they will truly be mainstream), laptops are ubiquitous, portable DVD players have gotten incredibly cheap, and PDA’s, and even smartphones have become powerful enough to handle video. Part of making a functionality “easy” for people to use it, is to make it practicle, and speed is a big part of this. The fact that a driver update could make a USB 1.1 port into a USB 2.0 port and thus provide 10 times the speed or more, should mean that this update should be getting priority over most other projects. During this entire year between TiVo ToGo’s first being mentioned and it’s finally being released, why wasn’t part of TiVo’s resources put to updating this and if they were, what on earth could be taking so long?
3. Placeshifting in reverse - just as people want to take their TiVo’d programs with them on the road, there’s a definite need expressed to take content we get elsewhere and send it back to our TiVo so that we can play it on the larger screens in our living rooms. Already third parties have come in to allow for this kind of functionality. I see more and more of these “wireless multimedia boxes” that allow for bi-directional communication between a TV and a computer over a wirless network (using the faster 802.11G) or more direct connection. What would you send back to a TiVo? How about video clips you find on the internet that you want to share with the whole family, or content licensed in Creative Commons or Public Domain? A home video that you like to watch and share with friends a bunch of times without having to risk wearing the tape out? There are tons of reasons.
   4) Work more with hackers and third-party software developers and open functionality up to all users - TiVo has been more friendly to hackers than most companies, I’ll admit. TiVo’s are built with the Linux operating system, a favorite of hackers, and with hardware that can be removed and tinkered with fairly easily. This is great for hackers and tech-savvy people, and hackers have created programs that greatly expand the functionality of your TiVo. For example, one can basically operate one’s TiVo remotely over the internet with one such program. But just installing such programs requires some computer hardware and software skills that that probably a vast majority of TiVo owners don’t have and won’t bother to learn. TiVo needs to take these great applications and make them available as real parts of the TiVo system to all users. Maybe part of the reluctance in the past was that these programs were developed in an open-source environment that would not want TiVo to charge for them. When TiVo introducted it’s Home Networking feature, it charged for it and only after some time realized that it was not going to get enough people to pay an additional fee over TiVo’s original fee (which some people object to anyway) and until last. Maybe now that TiVo realizes they aren’t going to be able to charge additional fees for added functionality, they will offer gratis something which they are getting for very low development costs (since third-parties are developing these programs) to all their customers.

Microsoft recently started providing a version of Windows called Windows XP for Media Center Edition that provides DVR functionality, and many other companies are coming out with DVR’s, multimedia boxes, or even pumped up portable hard drives that all provide functionality that TiVo doesn’t. TiVo really needs to catch up, or they will eventually be relegated to AOL status - marketed to a diminishing pool of completely non-technical people who don’t mind paying a premium for an interface that dumbs down everything for them. I don’t think AOL is doing all that well these days. Then again neither is TiVo, or at least not according to their stock price!

The latest new feature we’ve heard about from TiVo is an high definition-capable TiVo, but apparently this won’t be available until 2006. What I want to know is what the point of such an announcement is if the product won’t be release for a year or more? Take a lesson from Apple and surprise people with new products instead of telling customers how long they will have to wait as well as notifying competitors way in advance of your plans so that they can come along and trump you - which it seems is becoming increasingly easy due to how slowly TiVo introduces new products and functionality. I personally have an HDTV and at this point my only hope is that another company like Humax will come out with an HD-compatible TiVo, preferably one with DVD-writable capability. Whether TiVo creates this or a third-party partner I guess doesn’t matter that much if customers are still going to buy a TiVo subscription. Who knows, maybe TiVo’s real purpose in announcing this so long before it becomes a reality is to actually motivate current or partners to develop their own HDTiVo’s?

What is so frustrating about all of this is that TiVo was the first out there with set-top DVR technology and so basically revolutionized how we watch TV. They’ve provided at least somewhat of a lightening rod for content companies, allowing us to just sit back and record things the way we wanted to (although this may be starting to change). Whether they go all out the way I wish they would, or simply continue to play the middle-man between the end user and the content providers, they are a major force that is at least trying to provide as much content in as flexible a way as possible to as many people as possible. If they get usurped by individual cable companies and satellite companies, this flexibility will be constrained even further since these many cable and satellite providers are also owners of much of content themselves. Microsoft, on the other hand, so far is not a major owner of content. Because of its size, it could wield real influence and be able to handle whatever litigation content companies throw at it, but it is unlikely to wage those kinds of battles. With its own music stores, DRM support, and history of monopolistic practices, it would be a shame if they were to replace TiVo as the dominant player in the DVR market.

In the end, TiVo may need to really do some radical things. It seems like they may be starting to go in this direction based on some reporting from PVRBlog about a Home Media Engine that will be in a future system update. It will theoretically provide the third-party development I talk about above. Getting this kind of software functionality added as well as providing USB 2.0, enhanced wireless speeds (802.11G or even 802.11N when it is standardized), and even some new hardware features or options (Ethernet ports, firewire, more types of audio and video input and output, more USB/Firewire ports for hot-swappable external storage, etc), will be key in keeping TiVo from becoming a has-been. TiVo should also upgrade its hardware in general which is beginning to really feel its age not being as fast to get things done as it could. TiVo has become a familiar name and even a new verb in the language, but it can’t just rely solely on this reputation and rest on its laurels.

Luminous Landscapes just did a review of the Epson P-2000 Picture Viewer and it seems to be a real winner. I’ve been covering the P-2000 since we first started hearing about it a couple months back because it’s been one of those devices that I think has some real promise in appealing to a broader cross-section of users.

Epson’s main business is in printing and imaging, and so it’s pretty predictable that such a device is geared toward the photographic industry – especially now that digital has taken over all but some of the higher end medium and large format ranges as well as the ultra-cheap instamatic and disposable end of the spectrum.

Ever since digital cameras came out, there’s been a continual effort at figuring out storage solutions. Various types of memory cards have served primarily, although Sony in particular has done a lot with more static optical media. But very early on, there were third-party companies (for some reason I never saw a camera company come out with one, although Nikon finally did just last month) selling devices that became known as “digital wallets.” There was an actual product name called “digital wallet” (you can still read a review of it on Steve’s Digicams), but like so many of these companies, they eventually went out of business. Other such companies and products have come and gone, and some had real promise but for whatever reason could not get their product into mainstream consumer electronics retail outlets, and this lack of availability and lack of confidence in the staying power of the company motivated most photographers, amateur and professional alike, to switch to a solution that many of them have at their disposal anyway – a laptop. Certainly laptops are not as portable as these digital wallets are, but you can carry them around to most locations, or at least have them at your hotel room ready to dump image files onto from your memory cards at the end of each day.

So, why I believe that the P-2000 could shake things up here is for a few reasons. One is that Epson is a big, respected name brand. They are not some company that you’ve never heard of that only produces one product. Secondly, it looks like with the P-2000, they’ve gotten everything right. While it could be slightly smaller, the P-2000 has pretty much everything you would want in device for storing images, but more importantly it has capabilities that will appeal to non-photographers. It’s ability to play audio, but more importantly video files, makes it into a true “Portable Media Player” device.

There are a number of companies that are competing in the PMP market, including Archos, VTec, iRiver, Vosonic, Smartdisk, Creative, Nikon, etc. As you can see, most of these are not big names. Also, there seems to be a divide between the brands geared toward Photographers (Nikon, Vosonic, Smartdisk and others) which have the ability to read memory cards directly, and the ones geared more to the general user who wants to listen to music, LOOK at images, and watch video (all the others). It’s not very well known by the general populace that the photo-oriented PMP’s ALSO do a lot of what the non-oriened ones do – they will play many audio and video formats in addition to being a temporary or permanent storage hold for your digital images. It’s unfortunate that these players aren’t being marketed more broadly (I’ve never seen them in a Best Buy or Circuit City for example). Part of the issue may be their relatively larger size than many of the non-photo-oriented PMP’s, but I still think that small amount of additional size is made up for in terms of their utility as a great supplement to the increasingly ubiquitous digital camera. Until most digital camera’s start coming with their own large hard drive’s built in instead of memory cards, the photo-oriented features are only going to increase in value.

The P-2000, it seems, is following many of these other photo-oriented PMP’s in that it is being marketed mainly to photographers and not as a general consumer electronics device. Maybe the quality of the product and the Epson name will finally create a standard bearer in this product category, like the iPod is with MP3 players, but I would have liked it if Epson would have marketed it to everyone, because it really has just as much appeal as any of those other PMP’s, plus the added value to people who take a lot of digital photos. Maybe Epson would rather be the big fish in a little pond, but I for one think they are selling themselves short.

You hear about “convergence” a lot these days, but I think it’s one of those over-hyped concepts which because of that loses some of its meaning. When people talk about convergence, they are talking about creating devices that serve multiple purposes. So far the big ones out there in my mind are smartphones that have the functions of a PDA, a phone, and an internet device, among others, but also PMP’s, which can play music, videos, show pictures, or just serve as portable hard drive. Why does this have an allure? Well, there’s the obvious issue of portability. No one wants to have to carry a whole bag of gadgets with them wherever they go, or for that matter put a device in all your pants and jacket pockets. The other issue is convenience. Why not have your PDA with all your contacts in the same casing as your phone so that you can call anyone or email them without having to go look on your computer or another portable device? Or for that matter take pictures and email them with the same device? Yet another issue but one that’s maybe not discussed as much is price. It really does help when you can fit a bunch of products into one, even it costs $500. If you tried to buy these things separately you could easily go over this price, but companies know that they can only go so high even with this kind of device before people will simply balk because they don’t want to spend such a large chunk of cash on something they will be taking everywhere with them (and consequently will be more at risk for breakage or being stolen). As technology improves, such devices will only start converging more and these individual product categories will go away. You’ll have an all-in-one device, but it may not even need to have a “cell phone” within, but rather a software application that can allow for audible communication over the Internet ala Voice Over IP. Cellular networks of the future will probably merge with wide-area internetworking hotspots that use technologies like Wimax or the even more advanced Mobile-Fi to provide a similar ubiquitous connection as current cellular networks do. We probably won’t see this for at least three or four years, but I’m convinced it will happen in less than ten years. Then, thankfully, we can just deal with one device category and no niche markets per se. You won’t have to go to one type of store to buy a device that has one feature and to another for another. Some will say that having devices dedicated to a single purpose allows for that device to perfect functionality, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. The problem is that this is a tradeoff that most people have decided is worth having if they can save a lot of money and space and have something that meets 98% of their needs and does so with a quality level that for most is perfectly fine. The “snobs” or “philes” or whatever you might call them may still go for the component design that perfects the experience at large financial cost, but as with current audio and video markets, these users will be a small minority.

I just got some additional info from Epson about the P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (AKA PhotoFine). I’ve written before about the P-2000, which to me looks like one of the best Personal Media Players out there because it not only caters to the general consumer, but to the high-end amateur, or even professional photographer. Here are a few new things that I hadn’t seen before:

• Ultra fine high precision processing for close positioning and alignment of pixels, thereby increasing pixel count to 256 per square inch for better resolution and detail (I can only imagine this will look very nice, and viewing a dvd video capture at full resolution on such a small screen should be quite impressive!)

• View images from memory card without downloading to the hard drive (I can see this being useful for some digital photographers. For example, say you don’t have the time to transfer all your images, but just want a quick way to view them (and show others) on the road. Instead of compromising your camera’s battery by having them view the images on the camera, simply transfer the memory card over to the P-2000 and view them on a much larger screen)

• NTSC or PAL (this is a nice feature so that one can hook the P-2000 up to TV’s and not have to worry about the compatibility with different TV signal standards in different parts of the world)

• Speaker: Dynamic (symbol) 28 x 1 (Mono) (I’m not really sure what this means except that maybe the P-2000 has a mono speaker on it, presumably for listening to sound files or the audio that accompanies the video files. While Stereo would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference coming out of a small speaker. Let’s face it, most of the time, you would probably use headphones for this purpose, but it’s nice to know that you can actually share the audio without having to go out and buy accessories like a portable speaker system.)

• 5.8” x 3.3” x 1.2” in. (W x H x D) Weight: 415 g or 1 lb. with battery (So, here we can finally compare it to other players. Let’s use the iPod Photo as an example. The iPod Photo measures 4.1 x 2.4 x .75 and weighs 6.4 oz. So, we’re talking about something almost twice as thick, almost 50% wider, and almost 50% longer. This isn’t a big shocker to me, because around 2/3 of the real-estate on the front is the screen. The screen measures 3.8 inches on the diagonal. Compare that to half that – 2 inches – for the iPod Photo, which takes up only about ¼ of the front. You also get 640 x 480 pixels, almost ten times the number of pixels as the 220 x 176 on the Photo iPod. So yes, it’s not going to fit nearly as well in your pocket as an iPod, and at twice the weight it will weight you down a bit more, but if your priority is actually viewing images on the device and not just using it as a portable hard drive or something to plug into a larger display like a TV, there’s just no question about which is the superior device).

This product category seems to be getting more and more filled with new devices, and I’ll be trying to cover some of the others as they emerge as well. I would love to do a hands on review of the P-2000, but unfortunately I’m still not mass-market enough for companies to be sending me loaners units and I don’t have lots of disposable income lying around to buy new gadgets left and right. I’ll have to see how much access I can get to some of these devices at a local retail establishment and take a few furtive pictures with my camera phone!

When I first heard about the new Epson P-2000, I thought it would be the perfect convergence media device. It has a hard drive and plays a bunch of different audio and video formats, and, given Epson’s reputation in the photographic print business, it provides some features not seen on other such devices, like ports for different memory sizes and support for numerous digital photo RAW file formats. With its huge 3.8” LCD and profusion of features, I suspected it would be at least as much as its predecessor, the P-1000, but Epson has actually dropped the price to $500! And it will be out next month here in the U.S.! Considering it has a 40GB hard drive, the same as the iPod’s current top-of-the line, plus has a huge amount of additional functionality, I can’t see why someone would pick the iPod instead.

Oh I suppose there is the user interface to consider. It’s hard to beat Apple in that area. But the UI on the P-2000 would have to be mighty clunky to opt for an iPod. Also, what about Apple’s online digital music store iTunes? For those who have downloaded a bunch of songs or hope to in the future, will this device be able to? It’s unclear. It is supposed to support AAC files, which is the format Apple uses with iTunes, but it’s not clear if that automatically means it can support iTunes specific DRM. I’m sure Apple controls which devices can and can’t access their DRM’d files and so far there’s been no mention from any camp. There is one more issue which probably is not a big one for most but is for me, and that is that I use the iPod primarily to listen to audio books that I download from Audible.com. These also have a proprietary DRM and while they can be played on an iPod, that also doesn’t mean by extension that they can be played by any device that can play an AAC file. I’ve been attempting to get answers to these questions from the various parties and I will post any information as soon as I get it.

Link to Gizmodo

Vosonic, a British company that’s been making portable hard drive solutions for digital photographers for a while now, recently introduced a couple of devices that are seeking, like the Epson P-2000, to converge the photography-oriented device with a more general-consumer Portable Media Player (PMP) device.

The MMV VP6300 comes with a 20GB hard drive, lets you play MP3’s, WMA’s, Mpeg-1, and Motion Jpeg on its 2-inch color LCD. It looks a whole lot like an iPod to me, and I think the only reason why this device is still being displayed on Vosonic’s page is that it’s not yet sold officially in the U.S., and so Apple probably can’t bully them legally over the pond quite as quickly and effectively. The device also takes most memory formats, you can plug it to your TV to watch/listen to its content, and even has a remote control. Sadly, it seems not to have any U.S. distributors, so if you live in the U.S. you will have to buy it either directly from Vosonic (if that’s even possible), or more likely through third unofficial parties through eBay.

The XS-DRIVE Super VP6210 comes in various sizes ranging from 20GB up to a whopping 80GB, but is a bit larger than the MMV VP6300. Its LCD, while it looks smaller, is only smaller in comparison to the larger size of the unit as a whole – it is the same 2 inches as the VP6300. In addition to the formats of the VP6300, the XS-Drive also plays AVI, and “MOD” which I think may be a typo meaning “MOV” or QuickTime. Everything else looks to be about the same as the VP6300.

The one problem I see for both of these is that they apparently can only show Jpeg images. This will be fine for the vast majority of folks, but for the serious photographer who takes images in RAW format, at least part of the time, it’s a serious limitation. The other issue I see is that for those who want to buy albums on Apple’s iTunes music store, these devices don’t support the AAC format like the Epson P-200. Then again, they do support WMA, which is Microsoft’s format that has DRM (copy protection scheme), so when MS’s music store gets off the ground, there will be an alternative. While these are pretty nice-looking devices, the much larger screen of the P-2000 and its support for RAW format files so far for me still give it the edge. And of course the fact that it comes from a large, well-respected company like Epson and is being officially sold in the U.S. through the normal distribution channels. These devices could be spectacular, but I, and I’m sure a lot of other people, would feel nervous about buying something from a relatively small, little-known company. What kind of support is going to be available if a unit I buy stops working? Will I have to send it overseas and wait weeks before I get a replacement or the unit fixed?

Previously I mentioned a new Epson photo viewer slash personal media player (PMP) called the Photo Fine Player P-2000. The device has finally been officially announced, but I cannot find anything on Epson’s site or anywhere besides PhotographyBlog. It looks like most of the previous rumors were accurate. Additionally it has a pretty large 3.8 screen that can display images in VGA (640×480) resolution. Still no word on the AAC format and whether it could conceivably support Apple’s iTunes store for music purchases, or even Audible.com .aa format audio book files, but that does bring us to a relates story.

There have been rumors over the past few years about Apple coming out with a new iPod with a color screen that can display photos as well as do all the other iPod stuff. Well, it seems as if this rumor has popped up again and the sites commenting about it seem somewhat convinced that it is likely to be true. The new iPod is rumored to have a 60GB hard drive (which is supposed to hold upwards of 20,000 songs or 25,000 images), and a color screen that is the same size as current iPod screens. If this proves to be true, I’m glad that Apple is finally getting into the PMP market, since it will just add to overall competition that is good for consumers.

According to the rumor, the new iPod has something that most PMP’s don’t, the ability to take memory cards. The article lists “memory stick slots.” What I take this to mean is that it has more than one memory card slot. I think the author was using “memory stick” to mean the general memory card rather than what memory sticks are – the specific format that only Sony devices use. Otherwise, the usefulness of the slot would be relegated to Sony digital cameras, no doubt a sizeable chunk of the digicam market, but still a minority of that market as a whole. No word on the iPod being able to play video formats. If it did, my guess is that it would probably only support Quicktime video, another Apple format.

The rumors about the new iPod make it out to be more of a way to view pictures, but with the screen being pretty small, its more likely to be something that you hook up to a TV at a friend’s house rather than doing a lot of viewing on the device itself. The P-2000 on the other hand seems to be trying to merge the more consumer-oriented PMP market with one that might be more geared to serious photographers. Although prices for memory cards have been sliding at an ever-faster rate, the higher-capacity cards (2GB and up) are still pretty pricey, especially if you compare them to the capacities of these PMP’s of 20GB to now possibly 60GB. With file sizes increasing due to higher resolution capabilities and some people using RAW formats that take up more space than jpeg, cards can get filled up pretty quickly. This is especially true when you’re on travel, or filming a big event like a wedding. You can always take a laptop with you to dump your pictures onto the hard drive so that you can reuse the card for taking more pictures, but laptops aren’t nearly as portable as something the size of a PMP, and are usually a lot more expensive. But add the capacity of direct print, being able to view multiple RAW format files, and you can see that the P-2000 is geared a bit more toward the photographer rather than the general consumer. But the P-2000 also has MPEG-4, MP3, and AAC support, so it’s certainly attractive to the general consumer as well.

Of course, we don’t really know enough about the new iPod - even if it exists! – to say whether it how well or poorly it will compete, but I’m sure it will do well if for no other reason than it is an iPod. The large userbase of those who are familiar with the platform will motivate a lot of sales, in addition to it inevitably synching with iPhoto, a very popular image-cataloging program for Macs. Simply the Apple name will probably give it a lot of clout, as there are few big names in the PMP arena. Sure Epson is a big name in printers, but not in other consumer electronics. Archos is well known among those who follow the portable music or media markets, but that’s it. So many people may use the respected brand name of Apple to finally get into this product category.

By way of Gizmodo, there’s news of a new portable device by Epson that can display pictures, download them from Compact Flash or SD cards, and possibly play music and videos. The only information available right now is in Japanese, so I’m not even sure when or if this will make it to market outside of Japan, but it looks pretty exciting as a kind of convergence media device. Also, because this is in Japanese, I can’t really be sure of what the device is supposed to offer. What’s included below is just guesswork based on the few non-Japanese words and the pictures, so take what’s below with a grain of salt! And if anyone reading this knows Japanese and do a bit of translating, that would be great help!

The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images. It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around, as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it. Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed. It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.

As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on. There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.

The device also plays audio. MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC. AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates. The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files. However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.

While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards. The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards. Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.

A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when. First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit. Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability. The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures. This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it. Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded. Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster.

Then there’s the little question of price. If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people. Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body. But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.

I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them. One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image. The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds. Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk. But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show. Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere. This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems. The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.

By way of Vastly Important News, here’s a piece by Newsfactor about a rumor of two popular consumer media technologies teaming up together – Tivo and Netflix.

Media content companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age. Part of this was a concern that people would illegally copy content and share it with friends, thus killing the huge profit margins that these companies use to stay big and keep getting bigger. Napster and others arose mainly because these companies could not get it through their head that the vast majority of people who buy music want to buy it in a legitimate way, but if you make it not only a lot cheaper, but a easier to obtain, many of those people will simply opt for that way, whatever the legal implications. Apple’s iTunes finally started to erase this wrong thinking by offering individual songs legally for download via a copy-protected file format, and surprise, surprise, they’ve had some great success!

Movies are a slightly different animal because one can’t separate a movie into scenes and sell these separately. DVD’s changed the way movie companies distributed movies perhaps because these companies were nervous that the new technology would flop with consumers like Laserdisc unless they were given other advantages. Instead of charging $80 for the first three months so that only video stores or true aficionados would invest in a movie initially, the prices were set at a much more reasonable level. While some single DVD’s still are released for $30 or $40 or even more, the majority now seem to be going for well under $20, and if you walk into any electronics chain, or even grocery store at this point, one can easily find a sizable collection of DVD’s for under $10.

Despite massive decreases in profits, the music industry still is having a hard time learning a lesson from video. While iTunes and now similar services from Wal-Mart, Sony (no longer available), and soon Microsoft are starting to make some headway, it still will cost you $10 or more to buy an album. You would think the music folks would cut the consumer a break and take a bit more off for the saved expense of creating the CD itself, plus all the packaging and shipping.

So, if this rumor pans out, it could allow video to eclipse music yet again. Netflix and Tivo have already developed huge fan bases around them, and have changed the way Americans consume their video content – both movies and TV. Tivo has made filtering all the junk on TV to a person’s preferences making watching TV actually LESS time-consuming. You don’t have to wait for something to come on or even study a schedule anymore, because if your TIVO knows your preferences, whether by guessing or by you programming it, a backlog of programs of interest to you will simply be on your TIVO when you next check. Similarly Netflix satisfies the urge in many of us to watch movies that we’ve always wanted to see, but missed for whatever reason. It’s use of lists to do this is great because any time one hears of a movie one wants to see, it goes on the list and you don’t have to think about it after that – it will come to you as part of your subscription. Whether it happens in two days or two months depends on where you rank it on your list. The subscription model has worked well for both Netflix and Tivo, although with Tivo you never have to give your content “back” if you don’t want to, you simply need to get it off of your Tivo (either by deleting or by saving to some external source) in order to make room for more if you fill up your Tivo’s entire hard drive. With hard drive’s getting bigger and cheaper, though, this becomes less and less an issue as time goes by.

Combining these two technologies may be a very successful consumer product, but it does have some drawbacks with the current state of technology. The main issue is that the vast majority of Tivos out there record in standard definition 4:3 non-widescreen. There are Tivo’s just starting to come out this year that allow for high-definition recording that would be necessary to due true justice to DVD, but these devices are still priced upwards of $1000. Maybe this, as with the case of most new technologies, will come down significantly over the next year or two and no longer be an issue, but what about all the older Tivo boxes? Will they be upgradeable? Probably not. Then there are all the special features of a DVD. Tivo can simply record a video stream; it can’t translate a DVD menu system as far as I know, so these features, if included, would have to be just tacked onto the end of the stream. What about commentary tracks? Does Tivo have the ability to record multiple audio tracks with one video stream?

I don’t have all the answers, but part of that is because while being a fan of these technologies, I don’t use them myself. What? The gadget guy doesn’t use this stuff? What kind of hypocrite is he? Yes, I admit it. I do intend to eventually adopt these technologies, but since I recently purchased a high-definition TV with HD satellite service, I did not want to pay yet another $1000 for the only Tivo option that would have allowed me to record shows in HD. As far as Netflix, I did try them out about 6 years ago when they were first starting and they didn’t have the lists and monthly subscription they do now. It was all ala carte. But as some of you may know, I also manage a DVD website, and as part of that receive quite a few DVD’s for review on that site. I would say well over half of the upwards of 400 DVD’s I own I haven’t watched! So for me to start renting more DVD’s would be ludicrous.

In a year or two HD DVD’s (or Blue Light depending on which format you think will win the new format war), and cable systems have started showing movies “on demand” and of course there is always pay per view. Eventually everything should be on demand, that is one can download it and watch it as soon as desired. Just like the web works. You want to see a web page, you enter the address and go to it. Such stream-of-consciousness viewing is something people want, even if not all of them quite know that yet. The mindset of the web, especially on a higher-speed connection, will seep into other forms of content. There are some big hurdles to get over before this becomes reality, such as storage and bandwidth issues, but if there’s any guarantee it’s that if people want it, they will build it. Technology marches forward. A lot depends on the innovation, inventions and discoveries that are still unknown to the general public, or haven’t even taken place, but eventually bandwidth and storage will cease to be of any issue – until the next level of content begins arriving in a decade or two that involve the tactile and olfactory senses too!

Just picked up a new Sony TV this weekend. I did some research on the net and decided that this would be a good set for us. It’s gotten great reviews, can do high-definition with an additional receiver, and is not so huge at 34 inches that it’s going to visually take over our entire living room. Oh, it’s widescreen too, so I can now look at DVD’s in their full aspect ratio. So far we don’t have it hooked to anything but a normal antennae and so the reception is pretty horrible, but we’ll be getting DirectTV installed soon. I have watched a couple of DVD’s on it, though, and I must say that it brings a whole new dimension to watching them - especially animated stuff like Monster’s Inc. or Finding Nemo. There is just so much textural detail that I never noticed even on a 27″ Sony with good (but standard) resolution.

Now, although I should know this stuff already, I am learning that I will need to calibrate the thing properly in order to get the best picture. It is hard to understand this when it already looks so amazing, and I suppose being slightly color-blind doesn’t help either! I have ordered the Avia Guide to Home Theater Home theater information and setup DVD which I read was the best for those not already serious home-theater geeks. It helps you calibrate all the stuff you need plus gives you a lot of good information about the concepts. The one thing that has me a little confused is whether I’ll need access to some special “service menu” that I have no idea how to get into. The TV menu has some basic settings like color, brightness, tint, color temp, etc., but I got the impression from a little bit of reading at The Home Theater Forum that there’s a whole lot more.

I’ll try to post follow-ups to this with more information as I get more educated about it. Oh yeah, I got it from Circuit City, but I think you can order it from Amazon.com and pick it up from a local Circuit City. I don’t know why you would do this though. The thing is seriously heavy, and very bulky to boot! It weighs in at 201 lbs, which, even if I were to share that with another person I could manage for maybe ten seconds at best! I thankfully had it delivered for an extra $45. The guys who delivered it were extremely curteous and also hooked the unit up to my dvd player and satellite receiver and actually preconfigured the tv and the dvd player. Not a bad deal for avoiding a hernia! I had them put it on my current Ikea TV hutch, or whatever you call it, but we are getting a new one from Storehouse that will match the bookcases that are right next to it in the living room, so I will have to move the damn thing, if only sliding it a couple of feet. But still something I’m not looking forward to!