pvr

I've spent a lot of time as a journalist covering City Council sessions in Philadelphia, but I've never sat in on a hearing quite as geeky as this. A Lincoln, Nebraska City Councilman will hold hearings in March on Time Warner's PVRs which as pretty much anyone in the country who uses them can tell you, kinda stink.

Councilman Jonathon Cook -- a Time Warner customer -- says subscribers "are not getting what they paid for," with Time Warner PVRs. Apparently the city's franchise agreement with the cable company allows City Council to hold such hearings. It's entirely clear what actions the city could take against Time Warner in response to the hearings, but if there's one thing I learned during my aforementioned years covering legislative sessions, it's that you don't need actual power to hold a public hearing, you just need the urge to grandstand on a topic.

Lincoln Time Warner customers have complained that a new program guide rolled out by the cable company is both ugly and buggy, and that the cable boxes are slow to react to button presses on a remote control, all of which sound par for the course for generic cable company PVRs.

The Lincoln Journal Star, which reports the story also has a page filled with customer complaints/suggestions for Time Warner.

[via digg]

So TiVo goes and releases it's 8.1 software for Series3 hi-def boxes, and everything's just peachy, right? Now Series3 owners can do almost everything with their expensive TiVo units as Series2 owners can do with the boxes that TiVo had been pretty much giving away for free.

KidZone? Check. WPA support? Check. TiVoCast? Check. TiVoToGo? Umm... still waiting on that one. But let's back up for a second here. TiVoCast is pretty cool, right? Now you can watch your web video in high definition right?

Freevo, one of the older PVR software solutions, has pushed out a new revision, 1.7.0 (up from 1.6.0). Although it does offer some of the standard bug fixes that come with these kinds of releases, there are also a few new features bundled with it such as:

• A web interface which gives you access to media stored on the machine
• A "web remote"
• A new encodeserver which can compress videos in the background
• Built-in RSS client which can automatically download podcasts

As of right now, the official release is not reflected on the Freevo home page, but you can check out the forum post which contains details about the package. The new package can be downloaded from here.

Yesterday Brad pointed us to a nice guide which went into detail with regards to building the perfect HTPC. Well that's all fine and dandy, but what happens when you have two or more in your house and you want to start sharing content between them?

Sure, Microsoft has told us about their upcoming Home Server, but unfortunately it won't quite do what we are looking for, and we don't know the exact cost of these things yet. The simplest answer is centralized storage, or a NAS (network area storage).

We've covered plenty of how to build an home theater PC articles in the past, but I have to say ExtremeMHz has put together one of the most thoughtful, near-comprehensive articles on the subject I've ever seen.

The 8-page article covers everything from the benefits of using an HTPC rather than standard A/V equipment to choosing the right motherboard, case, hard drive, cooling solution etc.

There's also a pretty detailed discussion of software. While the author recommends Windows XP MCE 2005 (rather than Vista), he also discusses Media Portal, an open-source alternative, several MCE plugins including My Movies and Theatertek, and DVD ripping software.

This guide is a great place to start if you're looking to build your first HTPC, or you're looking to upgrade your PVR.

CED Magazine is carrying a piece about a continued joint partnership between Showtime and EchoStar which will give birth to Showtime Interactive 2.0. The concept behind the deal is to create a zone accessible via EchoStar PVRs where users can go to get exclusive material.

So far it looks like there will be the usual kind of stuff, like interviews with various celebrities, "the making of" style of videos as well as extras for some of the original content that Showtime puts out.

A few days ago I made a brief mention of DVRMSToolbox in a post about enabling Commercial Skip in Media Center. Since then, a newer version (1.1.0.4) has been released and can be obtained from the author's blog.

If you haven't used DVRMSToolbox in the past, I would highly recommend checking it out if you run a Media Center based PC. It adds a whole new level of flexibility to the experience by giving you the ability to manipulate the DVRMS files that Media Center records to.

Now that the AppleTV is out and about and we can see what it is (or isn't) capable of, there are still a lot of people looking for PVR functionality on their Macs. In the past we have mentioned some options, but today Mac News offers up a review of MediaCentral.

MediaCentral supports a lot of the standard features such as a Music section, an area for pictures as well as a DVD library. Some of the more interesting features that it boasts are IPTV, Skype integration and support for radio stations.

BeyondTV 4.6 is out, with a number of new features and bug fixes. 4.6 is a free upgrade for BeyondTV 4.x users. Here's a quick look at what's new:

• Microsoft Vista 32bit compatibility
• Web based DivX streaming
• Support for Hauppauge HVR-1600 in dual tuner mode
• ShowSqueeze and SmartChapters now work if you have Windows Media Player 11 installed (previously, installing WM11 would cause major glitches in programs you ShowSqueezed to Windows Media Video)
• "Display Upcoming Episodes" now displays all channels a show airs on
• The Web Admin is faster
• Improved video playback
• Faster SmartChapter generation
• Faster keyword searches

Bonus feature: If you tried out BeyondTV 4.5's DVD burning plugin for 21 days and decided not to buy it, you can get another 21 days free with BeyondTV 4.6.

Update: I just installed the upgrade, and I'm still having major problems with the audio in WMV ShowSqueezed files. I'll stick with using DivX compression for now and see if I can't find a solution to post about later.

[via byopvr]

Yesterday Nielson released some new findings regarding how likely PVR users are to watch commercials. Well today is a new day and with that Chris Lanier has given us a quick run-through of what needs to be done to activate automatic commercial skipping in Media Center. Take that Nielson ...

The main ingredient for this tasty treat is the good old DVRMSToolbox application which can be found here. During installation there is actually an option that you can check off which tells it to automatically skip commercials. By checking this off, you will be prompted about whether you want Commercial Skip to process the show when you start to view recorded content.

The Nielsen Company released some new findings yesterday which looked at the relationship between PVR viewing habits (e.g. commercial skipping) and how much time has passed since the program was recorded. In a nutshell, are people more likely to watch commercials if they view the show right away?

Nielsen's answer to that question is a yes. In fact their words were "playback that occurs closest to the original telecast retains more of the audience during commercials than DVR playback that occurs further out."

CTpvr version 2.1 is out, and while the software isn't as well known as PC based PVRs like Windows Media Center, SageTV, or BeyondTV, CTpvr does have a few nifty features, like support for picture-in-picture.

Here's some of the new features in version 2.1:

• CTpvr now includes its own subscription-free TV listing data, with support for multiple channel lineups.
• Support for alternate composite video input
• Additional hardware support
• Some UI tweaks
• Import video, music, and recording information via plugins
• Play movie trailers for files stored in video libraries

CTpvr is available for $30, or you can run a free trial version for 15 day.

[via Missing Remote]

If you are a PVR enthusiast and it comes time to choose a new PVR, do you build it yourself and possibly save some money, or do you play it safe and buy an off the shelf solution?

DVR Playground decided to toss two of the top PVR solutions into the ring together to see who would win: MythTV or the TiVo Series 3. Some of the factors that they looked at included ease of use, setup and the features included with each product.

DVR Playground made sure to note that the biggest downfall about using MythTV (and most do-it-yourself PVR's) is the hassle involved with setting it up. Whether it be the actual software setup, or even choosing the right hardware (think surround sound and hi-def output), things are never quite as straightforward as is you had a manufactured PVR.

However, if you are technical enough that you feel comfortable playing with the guts of a computer, then MythTV is probably your better choice. But if you are giving this Grandma and you don't want to get calls every day when she can't watch her soap operas, then the good old TiVo is probably your friend.

Nielsen Media Research has released a boatload of Super Bowl related ratings data, including the first ever "live plus same day" Super Bowl ratings, which account for PVR users who watched the big game a little bit later than the rest of the country.

The game itself got a 32.8 rating, while the average commercial got a rating of 32.1, meaning that 92.8 million people were watching those horribly overpriced ads. Does that mean they were worth the money advertisers were spending on them? Probably not, but that's a lot of eyeballs (roughly 185.6 million of them, in fact).

One of the great things about Windows Media Center is that it is more than just a PVR. As the name implies, it's a central location for all of your photos, music, recorded TV as well as DVDs.

With Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, when you ripped a DVD to your hard drive, you could access it through your MCE interface via the 'My Videos' folder. This is great as it allows you to easily create a DVD jukebox. But where do they appear in Vista's Media Center?