The DVR Debate

In the old days, DVRs needed hard drives...but if Cablevision has their way, nary a truck will roll out to your home to replace your ancient digital cable box with the latest and greatest DVR technology.

Cablevision (and I would imagine other cable companies) are planning to introduce "remote storage" DVRs. This will allow them to give cable TV subscribers DVR'ing goodness without ever sending a guy with all-too-low-slung jeans out to crouch behind your entertainment center and give your tube some new tech juice. Nope, they'll be able to do it with a flick of the switch (and a ka-ching to their pocket books since our droopy-jeaned cable guy will be stuck at home wondering if his fashion faux-paus caused his early retirement).

I've always kind of wondered about this. What if there was some large box in the sky that recorded everything and let you watch stuff when you wanted to? Well there is sort of. I had a friend back in the days of yore (well, I'm not THAT old) that worked at an operations center for a major cable company in Los Angeles. One evening, my buddies and I crashed the operations center with a box full of pizza and a ice cold beers to surprise our technically-entrenched friend. He gave us the grand tour and there it was. A computer the size of your kitchen. No, not your refrigerator, or your kitchen sink, but your ENTIRE kitchen. This bad boy ran some ancient version of Windows and held all of the TV shows for two whole weeks. He said the shows were delivered to this thing via sattelite and then doled out to some other gadgetry that turned them into dumb old analog signals for deliver to dumb old analog cable boxes and TVs. Think of it as a medieval Tivo in the sky, if you will.

With the advent of digial TV, there really is no excuse for not giving people whatever choice they want. I mean honestly, I pay my $20 per month for my two Tivos and my $40 for basic extended cable each month, why can't I watch what I want, when I want, where I want? Well it all comes down to the mighty and ever-persitent dollar. They'll make you believe that this technology is state of the art and will cost them more money than it would take to rebuild the sun and the moon if ever they fell out of the sky. In reality though, I've seen the kitchen-sized Tivo in the sky that held the key to all of this back when I was in college. I bet that thing is the size of a refrigerator now and costs less than your kid's college diploma to get going and load up with all of the world's TV shows. We could call it the TV fridge. I bet the guys publically crying about copyright and violation of terms of use are secretly patting each other on the back on how they're going to get a bigger slice of your paycheck, all because they can make you think that it's a really tough thing to make sure their TV fridge is plugged in and loaded up when in fact all it takes is a few college kids paid with late night pizza and ice cold beer.

Breaking Out In a Cold Sweat

My first after-market hard drive cost me about $250 and was 212 megabytes. I bought it to supplement the 40MB C drive in my 386. And yeah...I still have the drive (dead of course) sitting here at my desk to remind me of my technological roots.

Now I see this: Coming soon: The 8-terabyte desktop | CNET News.com.

VooDoo PC, a very high end PC maker is planning on dropping a 8-9 TB (terabyte)...(TERABYTE!!!) beast for around 8-9K...I don't know about you, but I'm about ready to sell my car to get one of these things. I'm been chomping at the bit for some new hardware as I'm still running on a crappy (yet venerable) old AMD 750Mhz box with a max'd out ram at 512MB. Yeah you heard me...talk about oldschool.

Anyhow...I just need to figure out how I can shoehorn a measly 12-grand out of my tight little budget (what you didn't think I was going to run this bad boy on an only monitor? I need a nice 30 inch flat panel of course!) and get myself on the waiting list for one of these things. Where'd I put my bank robbery plans again? Ah, here they are....

12 drive bays...and a partridge in a pear tree

While bumming around the net this morning, I noticed a really interesting looking case from a company called OrigenAE. This thing has 12 (holy cow!) drivebays, a 12" LCD touch screen that flips down to reveal the drive the DVD drive and what not.

I think if I would have attended CES 2006 and seen this thing I would have either:

1) Broken down and cried tears of joy
2) Got down on my knees and worshipped my new pagan idol
3) (Probably) both

I can't wait to see this thing in person...just hoping the price tag won't keep me away like a 50 foot restraining order on an episode of Cops.

See For Yourself.

SnapStream Goes Off the Deep End

Holy Cow...Snapstream, makers of the pretty cool Media Center alternative BeyondTV, bring to you Godzilla, the unholy 11 tuner beast PVR. This is THE one piece of hardware that you need to own if 11 of your favorite shows are on at the same time. 11...that's right 11 shows simultaneously. This is just frickin ridiculous (yet extremely cool in a totally unnecessary, Ferrari-stuck-in-traffic sort of way).

Now, all you have to do is find 11 pairs of eyeballs to watch 11 shows at the same time :)

See For Yourself. [via PVRBlog]

Oh TV, I love thee

Oh TV, how can I watch thee...let me count the ways:

1. Live TV in the living room (so 1983)
2. Tivo'd shows in the living room (goodbye commercials)
3. Media Center PC in the living room (Tivo + $1000 - $13/mo.)
4. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the Portable Media Center or Windows Mobile device (slow transcoding sucks)
5. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the PSP (via some series of
decryptng and transcoding)
6. Video Ipod ($1.99/show is mighty pricey and they look ugly on any screen bigger than credit card)
7. Some off brand portable running Linux or BSD straight out of Taiwan or Korea (LOTS of formats supported, but usually bad UI, and bad PC software)
8. Windows Media Center Online Spotlight - Comedy Central Motherload from your sofa with a remote control...'nuff said (man we need some folks to fix the naming of our products)
and so on and so forth, forever and ever

You get the point...there are a LOT of ways to get your daily fill of Days of our Lives and guess what, there are going to be a LOT more ways coming up.

Yahoo Go! links Web services to phones, TVs - Wireless World - MSNBC.com
Microsoft partners with Murdoch in video pact (I guess no one remembers how DirecTV screwed Microsoft in the heyday of UltimateTV...here we go again)
Google sets up the Video Lemonade Stand

And soooo much more. Yes folks, TV 2.0 is finally upon us. I, like you, have been waiting for this for a long time. Man, I'm kicking myself for missing CES this year...CES TV junkies, I envy you.

Beyond TV 4 does DivX

The boys and girls over at SnapStream released BeyondTV 4 a little while back and it looks to be a good alternative to Microsoft's Media Center. The little bits that I love are the ability to record in MPEG-2 (blah), WMV (ooooh), and DivX (aaaah). That's right, BeyondTV goes direct to DivX for hard drive space saving goodness. Not only that, but it has the ability to convert between the various formats...now that's a nice PVR.

[via ecoustics]

MediaPortal...the ultimate Windows Media Center clone

I've been using SageTV for some time now and I must admit that it's a nice piece of software. My two complaints are that it's ugly and is expensive. Now there is an opensource Media Center clone that is gorgeous (I haven't taken it for a spin yet, but look at this screenshot):

Anyway, it's called MediaPortal.
Download, install, contribute, enjoy.

[via Download Squad]

PVR Rundown

Are you confused by the current state of affairs in the PVR world? What is a PVR you ask (where have YOU been?)? A PVR is basically a time shifting device for TV content. Wha?? It records stuff so you can watch it later. "But isn't that what a VCR does?" you ask. Oh pishaw! Did you ever really learn how to figure out how to program your VCR? I mean, I could have figured out how to launch the Space Shuttle in the time it took me to figure out the various arcane interfaces to programming the VCR. Well think of the Tivo and other PVRs as devices that let you pick a show with an on screen program guide (like your old school TV Guide, except on the TV) and it will record it. No fuss, no muss.

While there are many free services out there, I pay for my Tivo service because it works extremely well and is unbelievably easy to use. My wife loves both of the Tivos we have because we can sling shows back and forth between them depending on where we are choosing to "relax" (I use the word relax in quotes because she's using doing her artwork while I work on this site or my other site). In the end, I may switch to SageTV or Windows Media Center, but I need to get a 21st century PC at home first. Yes, I still have an ancient Pentium 3 750Mhz at home. Pathetic, but that thing still runs fine (I don't play many PC games so it works just fine with the web and email).

Anyway, if you're interested in finding out more about the world of PVRs, check out PCWorld.com - TV Time Shifters. It's a great high level overview of the state of affairs in the PVR world.