Engadget highlights a new product coming from Philips that is yet another Personal Media Player that is hitting the market in September. I think the addition of a small stand is actually a handy thing for those airline flights.

David at eHomeUpgrade mentions this when talking about the Philips product:

Rather than opt for the “smaller is better” philosophy, the PMC from Philips opts for a more video-friendly approach to their design.

Having stocked up on various PMPs for testing our product TVHarmony AutoPilot, there are a lot of great products out there that support video but not many that are a great form factor for my 3 and 5 year old to use in the car.

As a consumer, I’d love to find an inexpensive 7″ screen PMP that I wouldn’t feel uptight with my 5 year old holding it while she’s making a mess eating goldfish in the car. Right now, I’ve tried only two solutions neither of them are ideal. The first is a cheap portable DVD player, which has all the issues with scratched DVD disks and the hassle of carrying around all the accessories. The second is to have a portable screen like a Lilliput that gets connected to the video output of another PMP, but that turns out to be a cable nightmare as well.

Here’s my ideal cheap product that I wish existed:

* 7″ screen
* No hard drive/ No DVD player
* dual headphone jacks
* a video out jack
* An SD or compact flash card slot
* A usb connection so you could transfer files directly to an SD card
* Capable of playing Divx/Xvid files
* Plays mp3 and views photos
* Decent battery life
* Sub $200 retail

Is that too much to ask?

Via eHomeUpgrade, iRiver has introduced a cool new personal media player called the iRiver Clix. It’s got 2GB of storage and it’s flash based, so it’s small compared to other personal media players that support video.

The only thing missing from the unit, in my opinion, is the lack of a compact flash or sd card slot. At 2GB limit is a bit small for video, and a expansion slot would have given users another option for carrying content.

After a long haitus working on our software project, TVHarmony AutoPilot, hopefully at this point we’ll have enough time at this point to start blogging again.

We’ve still got a long ways to go with our plans to develop AutoPilot, but there are so many interesting products and news about DVR and mobile video, that it’s a good time to start blogging again.

To those of you who were once regular readers, sorry for the absence. For those new readers, welcome.

I just received an email announcement that Meedio will release their much anticipated DVR software, Meedio TV which seamlessly integrates with their other products. Among the features they list:

• FREE integrated Electronic Program Guide (EPG) with listings from Tribune Media Services.
• Support for third-party EPG services based on XMLTV.
• Multi-tuner viewing, timeshifting and recording with conflict detection.
• Search and browse recorded programs by time, channel, keyword,
  title, cast, or any custom-defined categories. Leverage the full power
  of the Meedio platform to customize the experience that fits you best.
• Search scheduled broadcasts by time, by channel, by title, by keyword, or by cast and credits.
• Recordings automatically added to the Meedio media library.
• Supports external tuners through composite and S-Video inputs.
• One-time or repeating recordings with repeat detection and prioritization.
• Records in a background process when Meedio is not running.
• Auto-delete recordings, manage hard drive space, and create recording quality profiles.
• On-screen configuration wizard.
• Manages special European channel and frequency assignments.
• When used with Meedio Essentials, provides a seamless and
  fully customizable interface to digital photos, music, movies, news,
  weather, games and over 200 application plugins.

I’ve always been impressed with Meedio’s sleek user interface. This should really be a great addition to their product line.

CNN Money has an article squashing rumors that Apple will be acquiring Tivo any time soon. Quoted in the article:

“I don’t see any logic in Apple taking over TiVo and I don’t think TiVo is dressing up for a sale right now,” said David Miller, an analyst with Sanders Morris Harris. “This is clearly the most emotional, rumor-driven, highly ephemeral name I’ve ever dealt with.”

If analysts were always right, I’d be retiring on my Webvan stock right now so I take it with a grain of salt along with my brown bag lunch.

Via TVPredictions.com, DirecTV CEO Mitch Stern resigned unexpectedly today.

PVRBlog.com has been hearing rumors that Apple is interested in acquiring Tivo, sending a mini jolt to Tivo investors.

It would be an interesting marriage, with both companies having a similiar corporate culture of innovation and a focus on user experience. That being said, I’m not sure it makes a good deal of sense from a business point of view.

The million dollar MBA question is what do the two companies combined do to the Tivo equation? If getting cable and satellite operator partnerships is the way to profits, I’m not sure Apple has the relationships and skills to alter the equation. If it’s to create a boutique brand of DVR, perhaps it makes more sense, although as I mentioned a couple days ago, I can’t see a boutique brand that doesn’t include HDTV support, and only Tivo knows when a product like that may make it to market.

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.”

Tivoblog notes that the JavaHMO 2.0 Beta 4 is up on their server with several new bug fixes.

Additional Info:

TVHarmony: JavaHMO 2.0 Beta Is Out
TVHarmony: JavaHMO Interview

Thinksecret has some interesting rumors on the new 60Gig IPod, the biggest of which is that along with music, you’ll be able to view photos on it’s 2″ color LCD screen.

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