[ILUG] [OT] TiVo

[Gary Mc Closkey]

The Tivo is a nifty box - though it doesn't deliver everything digital television should. It also doesn't take advantage of the meta information delivered by the Electronic Programme Guide - e.g. you can't tell it to record all programmmes featuring penguins|Linus Torvalds .

They also don't talk about HD size - but assuming it's about 40GB to keep the cost within consumer range, that gives about 8-10 hours of good quality MPEG storage. Nice, but not earth shattering. Ooops - TIvo've just told me you can either have 14GB or 27GB drives, but they're quoting recording times of 'up to' 30 hours. To get this, recording quality would have to be significantly reduced.

Tivo is originally an American company, but Philips now have a significant interest/input. The rest of the world is currently trying define a Personal Data Recorder standard as we speak through the TV-Anytime Forum [0], amongst others.  This standard will use the Digital Video Broadcasting[1] Multimedia Home Platform as it's API, as opposed to the proprietary NDS [2] standard currently used by Sky. 

The idea behind the standard is to address system architecture, including a minimum feature set, meta-data requirements, property rights, and content referencing.

Gary

[0] http://www.tv-anytime.org/
[1] http://www.dvb.org
[2] http://www.nds.com

---
Gary Mc Closkey
Digital Terrestrial Television Network
Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE), Ireland
Tel: +353-1-208-2992 fax: +353-1-208-3090	


-----Original Message-----
From: ilug-admin at linux.ie [mailto:ilug-admin at linux.ie]On Behalf Of John
Kelly
Sent: 09 March 2000 08:32
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: [ILUG] [OT] TiVo


I finally got round to reading this month's linux journal last night
(instead of just skimming through it for newsbytes and things immediately
interesting to me), and I came across the article about the TiVo
(http://www.tivo.com/). This thing looks fantastic!  I didn't buy a dvd
player straight away, because I knew that I could live without one
(barely), but this thing just seems like it's too good to miss.  Anyone
got any details of it's European release/price/anything else?  The site
has an article about BskyB and TiVo joining up to release it in Europe,
but the article is mostly just a press release to promote the TiVo, and
details are few and far between.

- John


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