Maiku, who writes a user journal at Build Your Own PVR.com, wrote a nice How To on getting MythTV installed on a Mandrake distro. MythTV is a daunting task, but it’s a pretty cool product and every time someone puts one of these How To’s together, it gets a bit easier for the next person.

According to TivoBlog.com, JavaHMO 2.0 was released this weekend. JavaHMO is a freeware replacement for Tivo’s Home Media Option. I’ve been using a beta version that I found very stable so I had a feeling it would be out pretty soon.

Here’s the new features:

In addition, 2.0 introduces numerous new plugins:
- Email: read your incoming email on the TiVo interface,
- Image organizer: similar to the audio organizer to allow you to categorize
your images by dates
- iTunes playlists (MP3 files only)
- Jukebox: every song you play in the other JavaHMO plugins will
automatically appear in the Jukebox playlist
- NNTP: download and view NNTP (News server) images automatically
- RSS: view RSS published content on the internet
- Web pages: view fullscreen versions of any web page
- Expanded weather: alerts for your county from the National Weather Service
will be part of the weather plugin
- Stocks: view the daily trading information of stocks

It’s a nice way to extend your tivo with new features so I highly recommend it.

The San Jose Merc ran a cringeworthy misleading headline entitled “Comcast DVR not ready for prime time” for an article that describes the rollout for the Comcast HDTV DVR in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some customers were told it wasn’t available yet, while others were told there was a big backlog. According to Comcast:

Comcast spokesman Andrew C. Johnson said Friday that some of the company’s service representatives had apparently misinformed callers about the Bay Area DVR rollout. But he said the company is indeed offering DVRs throughout the Bay Area, has begun installing them, and expects to fill thousands of new orders received Friday “within the next two to three weeks if not sooner.”

“We’re going to have those kinds of missteps as we launch the product,” Johnson said. “We have a product that’s obviously attracting a lot of attention. But we can’t let these dozens of complaints, these one-off experiences, drive what customers experience, which overall has been happy. We’ll get better next week.”

Tivo and a some Comcast customers see something more nefarious:

Mark McKenzie, 47, of San Jose said he was told to call back every two or three weeks and not to phone too frequently. He and several other customers suggested Comcast’s DVR announcement was a ploy to keep holiday shoppers from buying TiVo’s product.

“I do think that this was probably a scam on their part to hurt their competitors,” McKenzie said.

TiVo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly agreed.

“That’s exactly their approach — it’s available and it’s not,” Kelly said. “That’s been their ploy for over a year now.”

Not so, said Johnson, adding such a tactic would leave Comcast vulnerable to a competitive counteroffer by TiVo and its satellite-TV marketing partner, DirecTV.

Regardless of nefarious plots by evil corporations, it sounds like there has a been some good demand for the product.

Forbes.com has some more analysis on the troubles Tivo is facing. One item from it that stuck out was that 75% of Tivo’s subscribers are from the DirecTV and Tivo only receives a net $1.34 per month compared to the full $12 us standalone users pay.

If the DirecTV relationship fizzles, the good news is that it wasn’t a great deal for Tivo as far as monthly fees. The bad news is that it accounts for 75% of their existing user base.

Comcast’s HDTV DVR is now available in Tivo’s own backyard, the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the San Jose Merc. Comcast customers will be able to replace their exising set top box with the DVR for an additional $9.95 a month. According to the article, the Comcast unit, which can record 15 hours of HDTV (60 hours regular) is now available to 65% of it’s 21 million subscribers.

This is the moment of truth for the wife and I. It comes down to this: Do we upgrade our television to HDTV and go with Comcast or stick with our old television and our beloved Tivo? Without a standalone, affordable, HDTV Tivo, those are really our only two options. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re the only ones having to make that choice.

TivoBlog.com has been doing some snooping into his own web account at Tivo and found new web pages have been added for tivotogo access keys, central components to the decoding the TivoToGo streams. Either the web guys crossed wires with the Engineering dept. or it looks like it’s very close to release.

It should be a good Christmas for Tivo users this year!

Build Your Own PVR.com has a good review of the Plextor ConvertX USB2.0 capture card with built-in Divx Encoding. Add it to the list of positive reviews that for this easy to setup, MPEG4 encoder hardware.

Most people have heard by now that Target has banned the Salvation Army from putting out their kettles this year which will make it much more difficult for them to raise funds. I can, at times, understand the business reason for this at Target, but it’s still a shame.

Hearing the bellringers outside stores is something I can remember even as a little pup, and it’s indelibly etched in my memory along with all those other religious and secular symbols of the holiday season. While shopping malls and mega-parking strip malls have in many places replaced the downtown square, the Salvation Army has moved along with them. I guess courtrooms and boardrooms are a little harder to navigate.

We don’t have the ringing wav file, but we do have a link as our featured sponsor, so if you feel inclined, feel free to use it to make a small donation.

HTPCNews.com has a nice review of the Plextor ConvertX product with SageTV. HTPCNews has some good screen comparisions between MPEG4 encoding, MPEG2 encoding, and the Hauppauge 250 encoding. Here’s their final pro/con list:

Pros

• Hardware DivX encoding!!
• USB 2.0 so it doesn’t use a precious PCI slot.
• Works with SageTV and soon BeyondTV (from what we’ve heard).

Cons

• Software bundle that is really not useful for HTPCs.
• Needs some tweaking to get the input to the quality level of a PVR-250.
• Where’s MCE support (even if only in MPEG2 mode)?

I’m really impressed with the Plextor guys. I took notice when they came out with the original killer hardware specs including MPEG4 encoding and USB2 interface, but they’ve taken it one step farther by doing a couple great partnerships with SageTV on Windows and EyeTV on Macintosh. It’s a combination that is hard to beat.

Additional Info:

TVHarmony Product Tracker: Plextor

Toshiba is going to introduce some really interesting technology for flat panel televisions next year using a technology called SED according to PC World. It’s supposed to be faster than other technologies like LCD and plasma, and just as bright as a CRT.

One interesting quote from the article is how Toshiba views the future for new technologies:

Toshiba is eyeing SED as a replacement technology for PDP panels, particularly for use in panels of around 40-inches or larger. The company has already begun laying plans to phase out production of PDP televisions in 2007. It plans to keep LCD panels in small and mid-size sets and use SED for larger sets.

If you believe Toshiba, plasma will be a dead technology in the long term.

The funny thing is that I’ve probably owned/used at least 25 new computers and 5 cars over the last 12 years, yet we still use my old Sony TV in our living room and my wife is becoming more amenable to upgrade to something better. The way technology is changing so quickly in consumer electronics, what’s the chance our next personal television is going to last 12 years before it becomes obsolete?

(Hat tip: DigitalMerging.la)