The new TiVX 5010-P HD TV recorder is one unique and sleek PVR from DViCO. To start off this futuristic grey cylinder does not contain an internal hard drive but requires you to add your own external one via a USB port.
I actually quite like the option of being able to add my own external hard drives as it makes for easy upgrades. But wait there's more; this HD TV recorder is more than just a weird looking PVR, it's also a media extender.
It can record videos in 1920 x 1080 resolution and stream files to and from a PC in a variety of video formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, (VOB, ISO and IFO), AVI, TP, WMV9. It can also send pictures and movies around the house too. Other features include:
An Electronic Program Guide to use on your TV
ATSC hi-def television tuner
DVI, component, S-Video and composite video outs
2x USB 2.0 ports for adding external disk drives
A third USB port for other storage devices (e.g digital camera, MP3 player)
fixed 10/100Mbps Ethernet or 802.11b/g WiFi
It is currently being launched in Korea and will cost $352. There is no word on releases in other territories, but hopefully there will be.
NDS is the company that is majority owned by NewsCorp and previously replaced TiVo to create the DirecTV PVRs. While these PVRs have not had the best of times, NDS has today announced some very innovative IPTV products.
The first is what NDS call the "Distributed DVR" which allows users to use hard drives from anywhere on a home network instead of being restricted to a hard drive on a single PVR. This itself is brilliant and will give users a lot more freedom when it comes to storing content.
The second is ShareTV where users can share content stored on their PVRS with other subscribers over a P2P network making the world's first Peer to Peer PVR (from what I'm aware of).
It sounds like the recordings will be protected by DRM and only available to other subscribers to the IPTV service, but it does sound like you will be able to download TV shows that you haven't even recorded.
This effectively allows you to get huge libraries of videos and TV shows, which you can then store anywhere on your home network. I very much like the sound of this.
I wonder if this will end up being rolled out as a DirecTV service given the close ties NDS has with DirecTV already.
A few days ago I posted a video of the Apple TV in action and you could see the menu on the TV set, and it did look pretty good and easy to use.
Now here is another video giving you a full tour of the AppleTV interface and once again I'm impressed and didn't expect anything less from Apple.
But I just can't understand why Apple hasn't allowed you to cut out the PC entirely on this one. Getting a new video or music involves going to the PC first and then downloading the video off the net through iTunes.
Why not just let you access iTunes directly through your TV and download the videos you want from there, and then synch everything you download back onto your PC for permanent storage.
GameVideos has an excellent interview on video (see below) with the two Microsoft execs Chris Satchell and Albert Penello, talking about IPTV on the Xbox360.
The Xbox 360 IPTV service is not going to be something like getting YouTube videos on your PC but a service that is more familiar to the cable and satellite TV services that we have now.
Sarchell and Penello talk about downloadable movies, the Xbox 360's channel guide and even the use of the Xbox 360 as a PVR (gotta love that one!). Although not confirmed directly the interview hints that a larger hard drive will also be offered to cater for the PVR functionality.
I was a bit disappointed with the Apple TV to say the least but I have to say it was nice to see RocketBoom being shown on a full screen TV set via the Apple TV, although the Apple TV is of course one of the many products that can do this.
The video below shows the Apple TV in action and it looks and smells all Apple-ey. It's small, looks good next to your TV set, and has a friendly user interface that my girlfriend could even figure out.
It was of course expected that Apple would deliver a user friendly, fashionable device, but its just a shame the Apple TV is all about getting you to buy from the iTunes store, while also lacking many much needed features that can be found elsewhere.
I don't think Apple will be threatening TiVo and the Cable companies just yet.
Announced at the TiVo Community forum was a neat piece of Windows software called TiVo.net that allows you to use your TiVo as a media extender so you can play a variety of video formats from your PC.
A list of video formats and codecs that TiVo.net supports can be found here. The software works by converting the video on the fly to MPEG2 TiVo compatable video that can then whizz across your home network to your TV screen, via your TiVo.
TiVo.net is an open source project so others can get involved. It's early days for the software and if you experience any bugs it would be worth pointing them out to the developer.
The HAVA Gold HD has been launched today at the highly respectable price of $129. For this small price you can turn a regular Windows PC into a PVR and also stream MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video to multiple PCs on your home network, and also over the internet, just like a Slingbox.
Additionally when used with Windows Media Center (both XP and the soon to be released Vista MCE) it opens up the option of using the HAVA Gold as a TV Tuner appearing on the PC as an installed TV Tuner card.
The HAVA Gold HD will connect to any TV source such as Cable, Satellite, DVD, TiVo or a Camcorder allowing you to spread your TV to any PC over your home network or the internet.
Unlike the higher end HAVA Wireless HD model it does not come with built-in wireless features and fewer I/O options.
I have to say as an entry level Slingbox device I like the specs and I like the price.
Want to run MythTV but don't have the energy to install Linux? I can't help you with that, but if you've already got a MythTV system up and running and you'd like to be able to watch recordings on your Windows machine, you're in luck.
MythTV Player is a PC-based program that lets you watch videos stored on your MythTV backend box. It's not a full frontend, but simply a way to access your recordings. There's support for MythTV bookmarks, skipping commercials, and you can delete recordings using the player.
MythTV versions 0.18 to 0.20.1 are currently supported.
The CW has finally joined its network brethren in offering up full episodes of TV shows on the web. Beauty and the Geek, Supernatural, Veronica Mars, One Tree Hill, Everybody Hates Chris, All of Us, Girlfriends and The Game are all available for free.
The CW's video player is based in your web browser, and requires installation of a plugin. But that takes less than ten seconds. My biggest complaint is that the video quality is far lower than that offered by sites like NBC and Fox. While the video player occasionally jumps up to 700+ kbps, most of the time it streamed video at just 227kbps.
That said, there's plenty to like about the CW's offering. There are no commercials, you can skip to any point in the show, and there are several episodes of each program available for viewing at a time. It's a perfect solution if your PVR died on you and you just need to catch up on the last few episodes. The only thing that would make it better (besides higher video quality), would be if you could pop the video out of the browser and make it truly full screen.
Mark Cuban poses an interesting question: Why are companies like Apple and Microsoft working so hard to give you a way to move video from your PC to your TV screen? Why not just make the video available on your existing set top box or PVR?
Basically, he argues that cable or satellite services could transfer video feeds directly to your PVR and you could peruse video clips from content producers like CBS or from frat boys running around like idiots. No computer needed. Your PVR is already designed to let you easily sift through a large amount of video content to find what you're looking for, all from the comfort of your couch.
The problem is, you'll never be able to store the same quantity of video content on your PVR hard drive that you can access by visiting sites like YouTube. Nor, I suspect, would you want to. The beauty of internet video is that it's there waiting for you if you want it, and it's not taking up space that you'd rather use for other things, like say, choosing your own television programs to record.
While I agree with Cuban that you could easily access internet video with a PVR, I think the way to do that is to connect more PVRs to the internet. Throw a web browser on there. You can already access online video using PC-based personal video recorders like Windows Media Center (with Yougle), or SageTV (which can access Google Video). Why not add the same functionality to set top boxes, which are basically stripped down computers these days anyway.
Or you could always buy an Apple TV or Xbox 360 to stick next to your TiVo so that you can record shows to watch on one box, and flip a switch to use another box that will let you watch programs recorded on your third box, the PC in the other room. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
With Microsoft Vista set to officially launch in a couple of weeks, Microsoft has begun adding content to the Online Media section of Vista Media Center.
The Online Media function provides online content to Media Center users in the same interface they use to view their personal media such as television recordings and music collections. Some of the new content includes clips from the Discovery Channel, Yahoo video, VH1, Napster, and other music services, and access to MovieLink video purchases and downloads.
While Media Center functions are included in several versions of Vista, most computers still aren't sold with TV tuners, so I imagine online content is sort of a selling point for using a Vista PC as a digital hub in the living room.
A company going by the name of AHT International has an upcoming product called the Nuvio One which puts an interesting spin on the way we use IPTV. It won't ship with a hard drive, which means that you can only initially watch streaming content, but there is room for an internal SATA drive or an external USB drive.
Basically the Nuvio One is a set top box designed to stream video via the internet to your TV. What makes it interesting though is that aside from just downloading content to be streamed, it also uses the Tribler P2P network to get content which can also be accessed via your PC.
Between the IPTV channels and the P2P network, that makes a lot of content available. At the moment the set top boxes are not available, but you can download the current beta release and try it out on your PC.
The details of the planned set top boxes are a little spotty, but they will apparently have an embedded RISC CPU with integrated I/O and video decoder functions, 64 MB of RAM, 64MB video, video resolution of up to 1920x1080, and it will support HDMI, S/PDIF, Ethernet, and USB 2.0. For a more complete set of specs, you can check out the Nuvio One product page.
You know, when we first heard rumors that Netflix was going to offer video downloads, possibly even partnering with TiVo, it sounded pretty exciting. But that was in 2005.
Now everybody and his grandmother has a video download store. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, AOL etc. Still, Netflix has been an innovator in movie delivery and product recommendations, so when I heard today that they would be launching a limited trial of their service, I was still excited.
And then I found out that the company has a DVD catalog of over 70,000 titles, and what are they making available online? Older movies that don't get rented very often, like Amadeus, Chinatown, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. That's right, Netflix is competing with basic cable here. All told, about a thousand movies should be available online at launch, so I'm hoping there's some better ones in the mix somewhere.
News broke late yesterday and I have just received an email from The Venice Project team that it has now been renamed to the much more catchy name: Joost. Here's what the email from Fredrik de Wahl of Joost said:
"While we're still in beta, we hope that Joost will become synonymous with the best of TV and the best of the Web.
We're working on putting more content on the platform and creating more and more applications and functionality. For those of you who've already been on the client, you can expect to see some of these updates in the 0.8 release - which is not far away at all.
Now that we're Joost, we're going to be sending out many more beta invitations. I know some of you have been waiting quite some time for your invitation and I appreciate your patience. We've been somewhat conservative about expanding our beta - but that's going to change pretty rapidly now. So please keep a lookout for your invitation if you haven't gotten one already. And when you do receive it - please tell us what you think."
Along with the launch of the new name has come the brand new Joost website.
Looking at the screenshots of Joost in action its easy to see how it could be ported over to a PVR or set top box to bring high quality internet TV into the living room.
The new TiVX 5010-P HD TV recorder is one unique and sleek PVR from DViCO. To start off this futuristic grey cylinder does not contain an internal hard drive but requires you to add your own external one via a USB port. 
NDS is the company that is majority owned by NewsCorp and previously replaced TiVo to create the DirecTV PVRs. While these PVRs have not had the best of times, NDS has today announced some very innovative IPTV products.
GameVideos
I was a bit 
Mark Cuban
