I’m still trying to catch up on the CES/Macworld news, but I can’t let the upcoming Hauppauge Portable Video Player (PVP) slip by without comment. It’s on the high-end price-wise ($699) but it comes with tons of file format support including MPEG4/Divx/Xvid, Microsoft WMV, and Apple Quicktime. It sports a 20Gig disk and whopping 7″ 16:9 screen (big for a PVP player; typical for a Portable DVD Player). It’s expected to ship Q1 of this year.
At that price, I think they might have wanted to separate themselves from the competition by adding a larger drive into the mix, but it will be interesting to see if this product will do well. Other PVPs tend to look more like MP3 players with video support, focusing on size, but the Hauppauge model seems to follow a different path.
(Hat Tip: Build Your Own PVR)
Om Malik has a good interview with the author of Videora, Sajeeth Cherian. Videora is a BitTorrent / RSS software product that has Tivo-like features including Wishlists and Season Passes.
After watching his college roommate continually scouring the internet in search of anime videos to download, Sajeeth started working on a better solution:
“After searching some of his favorite anime BitTorrent sites, I came across one site which offered an RSS feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a simple format that is used by web sites to send article headlines, summaries and links back to full-text articles on the web. Anyways, this RSS feed was special, instead of linking to articles on the internet, it linked directly to the very BitTorrent files that these sites linked to on their web pages. By simply scanning the RSS feed and downloading the desired BitTorrent files it linked to, I concluded that he could download his anime automatically without ever having to surf to an anime BitTorrent website again.
After discovering this RSS feed I began to envision a product. Some thing simple, which allows users to find shows easily and a couple clicks later (after the shows are added to their “season tickets”) would automatically download these shows to their hard drives in the background. With this, users wouldn’t have to look for certain video to download, because the video they want would already be on their hard drive. Thus giving them free time to do more interesting things, rather than scour the same old websites. This seemed like a killer idea with more potential than just quieting my roommate so I began to develop this idea into computer software. Along the way, I added a few other features including the ability to aggregate video files into “want lists” which allows users to easily manually download videos of interest. Needless to say, my roommate doesn’t complain to me anymore.”
ServerElements.com, the makers of NasLite (TVHarmony Review), a very elegant linux floppy distribution that changes an old clunker PC into a file server, just announced a new NasLite+ which increases throughput and simultaneously serves up files in both ftp, SMB (Windows Shares), NFS (Linux Shares), and HTTP. NasLite+ can be downloaded for $24.95.
The only consideration with the original NasLite and NasLite+ for video libraries is a 4GIG file size limit for SMB (Windows Shares). If you can live with that, $24.95 is a real bargain to turn that old PC into a whirling fast file server.
Via eHomeUpgrade, an article in the New York Times suggests that HP will come out with their own media PC called the “HP Media Hub”. As opposed to other HP media PCs that come bundled with Microsoft’s MCE 2005, HP will be based on linux.
This has to sting:
Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief executive, said that by using Linux, rather than Windows, Hewlett can reduce the cost of the device, which has not been set, she said.
“The real motive is not the cost,” she added, but “the ease of use and simplicity.”
Ouch!
Satellite radio provider, Sirius, is planning to add video as part of it’s offering in 2006. According to AP, the content will be targeted at children as a result of the increase in video equipment in automobiles to entertain kids. Sirius has struck a deal with Microsoft to use their technology for mobile products.
Chief Executive Officer Mel Karmazin said:
“We will take the DVD experience to the next level, offering the best content easily available to families and consumers.”
Having two young daughters, the portable dvd player has been a godsend for long trips, and while the devil is in the details, this kind of service makes sense to me.
Via TVPredictions.com, Humax will introduce a television with a DVD-R and Tivo service built right into the television. The television will be a 26″ LCD flat screen and the MSRP on the unit will be $2,499.
It sounds a bit overpriced to me, and like such inventions as the spork and the combination hat and beer holder, some things are better left as components. That’s especially true if one of the components requires a monthly service fee like Tivo.
Via PVRBlog, there’s an interesting new piece of software called Videora for finding and downloading television shows off the Internet. It scans RSS feeds and will track what television shows are available for download over the Internet.
Over the holidays, I had a chance to do some trial downloads using BitTorrent (although not using Videora) and it’s becoming increasingly easy to find and download television shows. A trial case for me was the show Desperate Housewives, which my wife and I missed while it was getting a lot of buzz around town. With a simple DSL connection, I was able to download the first 6 episodes, recorded in HDTV format, overnight. The remaining issue is getting those downloads to play on a television, and while that is difficult to do for a Tivo-only household, it’s trivial to do if you already have a MCE2005 or home built DVR.
Just for kicks (and because my wife was a fan), I tried doing another test of episodes of Northern Exposure, which I don’t think is broadcast as re-runs anymore. Finding episodes of old shows turned out to be problematic via BitTorrent (although another package eMule, was able to find some episodes online).
My take on the technology is that at the moment, this solution is pretty good for catching a show that you forgot to record, but the group memory of older shows is lacking. With MP3 downloading, people keep content virtually forever, but the same can’t be said for television programming.
Of course, there are legal considerations about this technology and undoubtedly there will be a lot of litigation. It’s hard for me to consider downloading a show that was broadcast on a channel that I pay to receive any different than having it directly recorded on my Tivo. It gets a little less ethical to download a show like the Sopranos when one doesn’t pay for HBO, and downloading a DVD movie seems a clear violation of copyright law.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Additional Info:
Om Malik Has More on Videora
Tivo investors were briefly happy yesterday with the stock jumping up 5% on the news that TivoToGo was released. Unfortunately, the party didn’t last too long; today shares are trading lower than where they started before the news broke.
Here’s Tivo’s 5 day chart.
Via the erudite Thomas Hawk, there’s a new resource for Microsoft Media Center Edition users called the MCE 2005 Wiki. It’s a great resource for finding all things MCE and I’ll be adding it to my blogroll during the next site upgrade..
With three different Weather plugins to choose from, it looks pretty comprehensive.
