Thomas Hawk posted the second part of his four part interview with some of the MCE program managers. Part 2 talks about the role of partnerships in this market.

No, this isn’t breaking news that Apple bought Tivo. However,there is a new interesting DVR product for the Macintosh called EvolutionTV from Miglia which will be released later this month for $280. Via PVRBlog, the EvolutionTV product will have a USB2.0 connection and have hardware video compression to MPEG2, MPEG4, and Divx.

Competition is always a good thing for consumers and it looks like more and more vendors are starting to see the Mac platform as a good place to create products.

Related Info:

Plextor ConvertX for Macintosh

Tivo announced that it was awarded several new patents both domestically and internationally. Among those patents were it’s fast-forwarding technique of backing up a little to correct for reaction time, as well as some other user interface features unique to Tivo. Tivo also announced that it has an exclusive license for what they call the Goldwasser Patent, the earliest patent known in regards to DVR technology.

It’s hard to say how much these patents are worth until they start enforcing them. From my experience with patents, if Tivo tries to enforce a patent, they’ll likely go after the weakest sheep in the flock, hoping to gain a precedent that they can use against bigger companies. Since litigation is expensive, we’ll see if they start pursuing it as a strategy.

We’ve turned our comments back on, hopefully changing the system enough to fool all but the most motivated spammers. Users will now be required to type in a number when they comment in a new field of the form. For instance, the field may say “Type five hundred, twenty five” and you’ll need to type “525″ into the field. While not rocket science, hopefuly it is just enough trouble to do programmatically that spam-bots out there won’t change their code to handle it.

Sorry for the inconvenience while the system was down and we always encourage everyone to post comments and questions.

Via DigitalMerging.la, Engadget has a nice primer on HDTV and it’s many different technologies that might effect your buying decision. It’s the first of a multi-part series, but I’ve already learned an important blogging tip from the article: don’t mess with Bea Arthur.

Build Your Own PVR is reporting that a new version of MediaPortal has been released. I’ve been using an older version for a month or so as a front-end for our video and audio library, and I have it on my to-do list to do a review of it as a full PVR solution.

It’s a nice product that continues to get better and better and the user interface is pretty slick.