Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Matt over at PVRBlog sheds some light for those of us who use TiVo, DirecTV Satellite, and TiVo. Basically, there’s no easy way to have all three. When I bought my HDTV almost a year ago, I considered buying a satellite receiver that was both a DVR as well as an HD receiver. The only such one at the time had just come out and was selling for $1000. This was not that much less than my TV, which was already was taking some real financial courage (or stupidity) to buy. I had to hold off. A year later, that hasn’t really changed. You would have thought the prices for such items would come down, as they have for HDTV’s themselves, but this isn’t the case.

Another issue that I’ve had is with receiving local channels. If I want to get local channels in HD, I have to use an antenna. I called DirecTV about this last year and they said that I could petition for a waver. They did this for me and I got a note in my mail 6 weeks later saying all but Fox had denied my waver. The problem with this is that I have to switch the TV off of the satellite and use an antennae, and guess what, the antennae, despite being one that gets some extra power from AC, and has lots of ways to adjust it’s position, doesn’t work very well. In fact, the only network I’ve been able to receive is CBS, but it’s really a crapshoot whether I will be able to receive it on any given day. Occasionally I will be able to receive PBS signals, but like CBS, it’s a crapshoot. NBC, ABC, and Fox, forget about it. Meanwhile these channels are available in HD from local cable channels. As much as I hate the cable conglomerate that serves my area, if watching network shows in HD were critical to me, I would have to go with them as my only option.

Then again, I can’t get a Cable DVR that records in HD, so what’s the point? I would basically have to create my own DVR, which while fun, but probably wouldn’t cost all that much less than DirecTV’s $1000 unit.

Then there’s the issue of content portability. Even if there was an HD DVR available through DirecTV, Dish, or a cable provider, it wouldn’t provide content portability. What I mean by this is the ability to take the content that you are recording and archive it to DVD or transfer it to another device like your computer or personal media player. These companies are very nervous about letting the consumer have this kind of power because they are afraid that it will enable them to share recordings just as music recordings have been shared over the internet.

I’m often amazed at the ease my own solution has allowed for content portability, albeit not one that allows me to record in HD. The TiVo I own is a Humax DRT-800 which I reviewed a couple of months ago. It is one of the few out there that allow you to burn your TiVo recordings to DVD. By doing so, you can then take the DVD’s and create any open form of media file using one of the many encoding tools out there, like Dr. Divx. I did this as a test for a half-hour show which I was able to load onto a memory card on my Treo 650 phone. Because of the small screen size I was able to shrink the file size down to a puny (for video) 90MB and watch the whole show wherever I went. While it took me a while to get this working, I would guess that once I got the hang of it, I could do it in about 30-45 minutes – most of that time just being the encoding/decoding/burning processes during which I can do other things.

HD content is still something that I think most people don’t care about – besides us early adopters. Add to this the much larger bandwidth required and the ability for content providers to gum up the works by tricking legislators into thinking that HD is somehow different from other media types and so deserves some special protections. What you get is an environment that is killing the enthusiasm for HD by the very people (early adopters) who would trumpet it and encourage all their friends to become the next generation adopters. But the way that HD has been doled out as some precious commodity has only made people balk at the price they have to pay for a technology that while certain eye-catching, is simply not worth the hassle in many cases because it doesn’t offer the flexibility that standard definition does…

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Well, it looks like NEC has been reading my blog, because they just created the exact device I was ranting about wanting back a couple of weeks ago. According to Gizmodo, who was able to translate their press release (I cannot currently read Japanese), they have just come out with a technology that converts analog signals to digital and transfers them at a lightning fast 1Gbps. That’s about 20 times the speed of 802.11G and apparently fast enough to transmit the large data demands of HDTV. That’s what HDTV is suggesting. I’m not sure exactly what they are suggesting in this regard, though? Are they suggesting that this product would enable an HD receiver and monitor to communicate wirelessly? If so, so what? First of all, you could just build the receiver INTO the monitor, but even if that’s not the case, you still have so many components in a hope theater that rely on all these wired connections, having one component’s connection to another be wireless seems a little pointless. What my idea was initially seems much more apropos – use this to communicate between your computer(s) and your Entertainment system. This way whatever you can play on your computer, no matter what format, can be piped to your stereo wirelessly and played at the same quality level, not the crappy FM modulation quality. Also, you could play video files you’ve downloaded onto your computer on your TV, or you could play HDTV on your computer, although I’m not sure why you would want to. I guess what you might be able to do is build your own HDTV DVR on the cheap with a PC solution, and then simply pipe the signal over to your TV, although I wonder whether the conversion to back and forth between digital and analog would degrade the quality enough to where the signal would look like standard definition? Who knows, but it seems like at least one company is thinking in the right direction.

Also, I wonder how this transmission technology would work as another Wifi technology? What’s the range? Gizmodo mentions a 60Ghz transmissions band, so this won’t be interfering with the currently way overused 2.4Ghz band.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

First, let me apologize for the lack of content here recently. I was traveling for the holidays, developed a cold that made doing anything a real pain, then came back and have been trying to catch up on reading all the gadget news. With CES just ending, it’s been a landslide of content. I just figure it’s still going to be a while, so I want to start writing something. I thought I’d give you a few quick items that I’m planning on writing about in more depth in come days. I figure posting a little bit about them now will give you at least something and it will keep me honest! The theme is definitely content overload, as you will see:

I happened across a program/service that is supposed to act like TiVo but for your radio. If you are a big talk-radio fan, or just a radio fan in general, this might prove really useful. I’m a big NPR addict myself, but I just don’t get the time to listen to the shows I want to all the time. I get busy and it’s really a shame they haven’t come out with something like this already, it would be a lot easier than a TiVo because you don’t have to deal with video and my sense is that scheduling is much more regular for radio. It does this by listening to streaming Internet radio broadcasts and recording these as mp3 files. It will even send them to iTunes so if you have an iPod all the better. The application is called Replay Radio and they have a demo version if you want to try it out. I am probably going to purchase the full version and give a more detailed piece about soon.

Speaking of TiVo, there’s a lot of TiVo news recently, most notably about the newest feature called TiVo ToGo, which will enable people who can use this service to download their TiVo content to their laptop, portable media player, or even to DVD. However, there are some inherent problems that I see with the implementation, which in my mind make it more trouble then it’s worth.

As I think I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve only recently started using TiVo myself, but I purchased a TiVo unit that also records to DVD. In fact, it does so much more easily than via TiVo ToGo. The unit is the Humax DRT-800. I’ve only seen one review of this unit, but I figured I would write a review myself that concentrates on the dvd writing part of the picture and the other things that separate this unit from your average TiVo.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

There’s an interesting post by Eric McErlain over at Off Wing Opinion about TiVo and broadcasting networks intentionally trying to defeat TiVo’s recording technology. Like so many companies (especially content producers) faced with obsolescence due to technological changes, the networks seemingly have only defensive answers – restrict progress.

Networks have had to share more and more of their audience with cable/satellite channels, and are deathly afraid that their primary source of income from commercials will dry up due to decreased viewership and companies not wanting to pay them for shows that people are just TiVo’ing and skipping over the commercials. In some ways it’s a lose-lose situation for these Networks because this is how the whole structure of broadcast networks was built. Unlike in the U.K. where all TV is pay, broadcast networks must provide their signal free of charge. The only way to get funding is through advertising. Unlike public television (PBS), there are no public funds nor are there donation drives. While most cable channels have commercials as well, they are also subsidized to some extent by the cable and satellite companies, so they have at least some net to fall into.

Eric mentions product placements as one solution – instead of actual commercials, one would see products put into the shows themselves. While this might help, it seems like it’s an intrusion on the show’s content and the writer’s creativity to force it to include specific products. What I fear we may see in the long run are a type of “banner ad” included in the program’s signal that would pop something up by TiVo itself, which when clicked on would bring the user to a screen of more info. We’ve already seen something like this in a less interactive form by all the preview graphics that pop up on the bottom of the screen on many prime-time network shows, advertising an upcoming episode of another show.

I don’t know what the solution is really, except for these companies to downsize or figure out a different business model. Unlike other content companies their hands are more tied by the fact that they have to provide a service that’s free to the viewer. Many of these companies have branched into cable/satellite, and hopefully this will help them to diversify, but maybe that is just prolonging the wait before they are truly desperate enough to be forced into trying something that’s much more radical than the current practices which are just going to alienate more viewers. Those left who are forced to watch broadcast because they either choose not to buy into cable or satellite or because they can’t afford to, are not the big-spenders than their opposite demographic is, which just means even less advertising revenues for the networks. So if they want to get out of this death spiral, they will need to do something much more ingenious. What that is, I have no idea.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

eHomeUpgrade has this great piece on how to build your own 6-tuner “Medusa PVR.” In other words a home-made “Tivo” that can store 6 programs simultaneously. It will set you back $1,200 which is a bargain compared to the $4,000 Sony Vaio X. However, as listed, the unit only has a 40GB hard drive, which will store only abour 40 hours max of standard definition TV. The Vaio X has 1.3 Terrabytes of data, or 1,300 or so hours. So in order to get up to that, you might need to add another $800 or so, making it closer to $2K – but that’s still half the price, even if it may be more work to set up and not quite as pretty. Ok, who wants to contract me out to build one for them?

Via Gizmodo

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Sony has decided to come out with a competitor of sorts to Tivo, but at least for now it will just be available in Japan. Called “Vaio X,” Sony is calling the device “Tivo on Steroids” and that it is! It contains six TV tuners (only analog, but hey, can you really complain that much?) so that six shows can be recorded simultaneously. To provide storage for so much recording capability, the device includes a terabyte of storage, or optionally a higher 1.3TB. I think this equates to something like 1,300 hours worth of content, or about 81 days of straight watching – minus 8 hours per day for sleeping, eating, cleaning, brief walks to get circulation going again, and potty breaks. I suppose you could always cut the number down by using catheters and treadmills, but in any case, it’s enough to where you you’re not going to run out of space any time soon! This also doesn’t take into consideration the fact that 99% of people wouldn’t be able to get through half the number of hours of marathon TV watching without going insane.

The unit will go on sale next month for over $4K, so it’s not exactly in the same marketplace as Tivo or ReplayTV, but rather for avid, obsessive-compulsive, slightly insane, and/or fairly well-off TV enthusiast. My main question would be when are there ever six things on at the same time that I just really need to watch? I guess if you were a sports fan and wanted to watch most of the football games on in their entirety, this would be one way of doing it. Or if you were a writer wanting to cover an event and wanted to watch all the major cable and broadcast news networks for their individual takes on the event… I guess the other main thing would be for people sharing this one unit in a household and everyone in that household being able to program their own set of recordings and not worrying about what others are watching or recording at the time. The problem with this is that while it’s great to allow multiple people to record so much stuff for later viewing, if everyone’s sharing this one unit, how do you ever get time for everyone to then view all that they’ve recorded. I suppose one answer would be to pass that content off to computers as MPEG-4 files so that people could then watch on their individual computers or even Portable Media Players. This may actually work in Japan, but I can see why Sony isn’t talking about a U.S. version anytime soon, although I’m sure some gadget heads with money to burn will be trying to acquire one or even construct their own.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Just a quick note to update folks on the impending partnership between Tivo and Netflix, since I wrote about it earlier. According to this article, the companies have always had close ties. I know Tivo already teams up with cable companies and satellite companies to provide units that have both the DVR and receiver in one unit, but it will be interesting to see how these various forms of content delivery and storage systems meld and overlap with one another to create a method that is optimally convenient. Then again, maybe what would be most useful would be to have different forms of content delivery and storage, giving people more choices. There are obvious pros and cons to one over another, so why not have them all available?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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!

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!