TV evolves - the next moves

It's all change in the world of TV. The move to digital broadcasts has indeed been the catalyst for further changes and mutiple alternative delivery channels ( well over the internet ).

Having been one of the hard done by 2002 vintage Tivo fans in the UK who watched the USA incarnation move onward with features and functionality I have longed for some PVR catch up time. Well it's all happening now.

Having pioneered public free internet delivery of catch up missed TV on the Player service. The BBC is now making this great utility available on multiple platforms. The trailblazing video on demand catch-up service BBC iPlayer service moves out to Playstaion, Wii and soon Freesat HD.

Media centre software is a popular developer flavor, with Mac+FrontRow, Xbox+XBMC, PC + Media Centre as well as multi platform Plex all fighting for sofa based eye balls. Just having a player with codecs just doesn't cut it any more. The brilliance of the iPlayer is to brand the delivery player and not just the content. Where ever iPlayer turns up that's a dime to the BBC.

Tivo comes back to the UK as the set top box for Virgin Media. It is possible for a product to be launched both before and after the market window that Sky+ has saturated ? This may be a play for Virgin to break out of it's cabled getto. Get a great box out there and people will buy it for the service not just the wire it comes down.

The outsiders are Fetch TV service offers more than just iPlayer incorporating true video movies on demand into a set side box and UK Telco giant BT Vision TV on demand offering.

With PCs and Macs with humble USB sticks reaching for the airwaves along with YouTube going premium there is, as always, more TV than hours in the day.

Gannett

Uk Tivo Compared against a Humax Foxsat PVR

I used to have a Uk Series 1 Thompson built Tivo with Sky subscription and now I have a Humax Freedsat-HDR.

Lets compare some features.....

See http://www.spikynorman.dsl.pipex.com/posted/Humax_PVR_V_Uk_Tivo.pdf

Conclusions

The series 1 Tivo developed over the years since its release in 2001; the vibrant user community and speciality dealers helped modify the box with new hard drives up from twin drive 40GB to single 320GB, Ethernet, Cache card for faster EPG searching, Web browsing, Mode 0, remote access etc, all helped keep interest alive.

The Humax is a great box and wins on its HD capability and ease access via USB port and slim light form factor. The Humax could still learn a trick or two from the highly evolved Tivo. The most pressing areas for improvement for the Foxsat is the way the menus are accessed, a single menu access point and ability to play, delete, rename and examine from the same list of files are desperately needed. Tivo also has a single menu access and far, far better search the EPG functionality. The Freestat service needs more channels of course but pound for pound for me the Humax is now the way forward.

Gannett

Had a better week Mac wise

Defiantly had a better week last week and got a few long standing issues resolved.

Firstly I have a Mustek A3 USB Scanner that had been stuck on an old Mac G3 B&W. I Finally found a blog which guided the way to get the SANE drivers and files needed to get it up an running. Ok so the blog references a previous ( now defunct ) blog but thats was all I needed. See PJ Holdens blog. The scanner works OK on 150 dpi but scrubs on higher resolutions. Integrated into Photoshop CS as File -> Import -> SANE. Sorted.

Secondly Creating Disk Images on OSX for use as bundled backup files. Found the Application DropDMG at $20. Neatly packaged, command line options and quite configurable.

Also found the code hackable BuildDMG.pl perl module over at this location. It needed a bit of work, mostly to swap out /Developer/Tools/CpMac and replace it with /bin/cp that preserves special Mac file attributes from OSX 10.4 onwards. Find this bit in the perl an change to the following ...

# copy the files onto the dmg
# use /bin/cp rather than /Developer/Tools/CpMac Only works on OSx > 10.4.x and beyond
print "Copying files to $dest...\n";
print "> /bin/cp -R $files \"$dest\"\n" if $debug;
$output = `/bin/cp -R $files \"$dest\"`;
$err = $?;

Put the perl in /Applications/BuildDMG/BuildDMG.pl then you can create a script+crontab to build the images on demand and drop them on your backup drive. A kind of TimeCapsule if you like :-) Have not yet managed to figure out how to drive it for directories with spaces in the name yet.

Thirdly since installing Leopard I have been suffering panic on wake-up. Let the system drift off to deep sleep then 1 time in 4 it will system panic on wake up. Looks like a USB or IO stack and It's all documented on the support boards here but not really made much progress. The solution is not green, but sometimes you have to give something away to get what you want. In this case I wanted "no panics" so installed Folding_At_home and donated a CPU. The distributed science application has a small memory footprint and is niced down so gets out the way when you need the horsepower.

And finally found a really good Mac based uk Tivo file extractor. The Java based TySuite has gui & command line & web interfaces and will pull as MP2 ready for conversion to MP4/AVI. Not quite as convienet as TivoTool but is better on Leopard and can pull Mode 0 recorded files at 720 * 576.


Cheers

Gannett