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ReplayTV's Remote Remote 113

Posted by emmett from the set-it-and-forget-it dept.
plasmar writes: "ReplayTV has announced a new service due to roll out this Fall that lets you control your ReplayTV unit from a Web browser anywhere in the world. Full story available here." Just what I need, someone reprogramming my settings. I come in from dinner, and all of a sudden I'm watching 30 hours of Ron Popeil's Showtime Rotisserie Grill.
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ReplayTV's Remote Remote More

ReplayTV's Remote Remote

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  • Kill your TV [localaccess.com]
  • Given that this service will allow you to control your Digital Video Recorder via the web, the DVR will naturally be connected to the net, probably by a modem. Television has traditionally been a one way medium with the exception of pay channels, and more generally cable TV. Therefore, most TV watchers in America watch channels and programs with impunity, since no one knows what they're watching. However the ability of the DVR to connect to the net will give BigBrother (or BigBusiness), to know your television watching habits, increasing the amount of information available in your "profile", something most people won't think about.

    Arun
  • Any time you think about saying "why would anyone want to do XXX?" it's a sign that you haven't paid enough attention to the issue yet
    Or you've vastly underestimated how lazy people are.

    Also, there are some things being pushed on consumers by corporate middle managers that have absolutely no point. WAP is the best example I can think of at the moment...

  • while on a business trip, and find out about a special you would like to see, but will be on before you return
    Like everything on TV isn't repeated ad nausium.

    Seriously, can't you just ring a friend and ask them to tape it for you?

  • Not Watching TV Gives You a Better Life (Score:3)

    by goingware ( 85213 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @10:36PM (#863516) Homepage
    I saw the link to the Kill Your TV Website a few comments back and after following it and reading some of the page I wrote the following email to a number of my friends. I urge you to check out the site too.

    The Kill Your TV Website:

    http://othello.localaccess.com/hardebeck/ [localaccess.com]

    No this is serious. He claims that Sesame Street may teach your kid to recognize letters and numbers, but it shortens their attention span.

    It happens that, when I was a kid, I stopped watching television when my sister left for college. I had never really actively watched TV before, but would sit passively while she changed the channels. With my sister gone, I would at first just sit in silence in the empty house. But I started listening to music which, unlike TV, allows you to devote your attention to other things while you listen.

    I read a lot, ground telescope mirrors, acted in the high school theater and eventually became the set director, started college at 16 while still attending high school, scored 890 out of a possible 900 on the SAT Math II achievement test and was accepted into CalTech, [caltech.edu] where I published in the astrophysical journal [noao.edu] and did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes.

    I still don't watch TV, and have a successful software consulting business. [goingware.com]

    Mike

    Note - you can find refs to my papers in the "Publications" section of my resume. Abstracts are available online. I didn't say it in my original letter but the work that was published I did while employed as a research assistant the summer after my freshman year.

    One [harvard.edu]

    Two [harvard.edu]

    Three [harvard.edu]

    Four [harvard.edu]

  • Yeah, every Tuesday when I realize I'll be working past 10 I can record West Wing. Same goes for OZ on Friday. Sopranos this fall too, whatever day/time it winds up on... Basically, I get off work at 10 about 1/2 the time, and I forget about setting the vcr about 1/2 the time on days when I want to see something, so that means that I only see the show 3 in four times, and still miss the first quarter in half of those instances...
  • I've thought of doing Tivo/Replay in Linux for a while and posting it to the net just to be funny.

    While they probably have hardware compressors and fancy algorithms, if you can use any PC you can use a public open-source compressor and just get a bigger hard drive.

    It really wouldn't be that hard.

    You'd probably get better realtime media streaming performance in the BeOS [be.com] but then there'd be a chokepoint and I don't think the company is deserving of support by third party developers anymore. [escribe.com]

    Better to give people yet another reason to use Linux.

    Are there any readily available hardware video compressor boards that aren't too expensive and have open source linux drivers?

  • Idea for Internet TV Commercial Blocking Service (Score:3)

    by goingware ( 85213 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @09:47PM (#863519) Homepage
    I've had this idea for a while, which the internet could make much more practical especially with always on services like cable modem and DSL.

    People who like to watch TV and want to make a few extra bucks would sign up to be commercial monitors. Either they'd enter the station they're watching into their handheld web browser or this would be handled for them by a set-top box.

    When a commercial comes on they press the "commercial start button". When all the commercials end they press the "commercial end" button.

    People who subscribe to the service would receive a little unit that plugs into the internet and, when a commercial is on, turns off the sound, maybe blackens the picture and pauses their VCR.

    For this to work reliably there'd need to be a voting system so you'd only skip content if a lot of monitors said there was a commercial on. Monitors who were consistently outvoted would be dropped from the monitor pool.

    If you don't blacken the picture the subscriber could notice there was an error and override to turn the content back on (or if the commercial looked interesting)

    There are things you can do to try to detect a commercial technologically (like have hardware listen for sudden changes in audio volume) but I'm sure advertisers will pay technologists to find a way to defeat it. I don't think there's a way to defeat the power of thousands of bored couch potatoes who feel they're putting something over on the corporation.

    This invention was conceived by me, Michael D. Crawford a couple of years ago. I place it in the public domain as of Friday, August 11.

  • Heck, it may be possible to swich the playback of evangelist TV shows just for a fraction of a second like in Fight Club and put images of penis' and sex for these right wing moralists that piss eveyone off! Imagine their kid's faces!! :-) *evil grin*
  • Yup, WAP is a joke: I don't even see in what way it could be useful (Sidenote: As far as I understood every mobile manufacturer has his own standard *sigh*)

    Some weeks ago a coworker brought his fancy WAP-phone and showed us (for a laugh) a WAP p0rn site... It was hilarious!

    Nobody would seriously surf that way (tiny screen, low-res). What was the initial idea of WAP anyway?

  • someone here sugested that you could mabey program the unit to record certin programs if they ever came on, if these units had some kind of removable storage, it would be great for collecting episodes of your favorite series, i know a lot of people out there would like every episode of startrek recorded and burned to cd or some other removable media when ever it came on

    how bout backup tapes?

    4gb raw capacity should be enough to record a movie
  • It looks like a Linux box equivalent has already been made. Here's [cadsoftusa.com] one example. They used software from linuxtv.org [linuxtv.org]. (As it turns out, I've used their PCB software, pretty good for small stuff.)

    Linuxmedialabs.com [linuxmedialabs.com] place seems to sell boards, but not for cheap.

    You could also buy a standard tvtuner board and use these [sourceforge.net] or these [sprynet.com] drivers.

  • Presumably this works by storing your programming choices centrally, and then downloading them to your Replay device when it next dials-up to the Replay service (nightly?)

    This means that most of the scenarios posted (South Park is on in 10 minutes, and the server just crashed... decisions, decisions...) are not feasible with this particular service.

    Give the Replay device a web server and an Ethernet port, and then we're cooking with gas.

  • There was once a movement by the ad industry to pressure TV manufacturers to have the "mute" button not completely kill the audio, but instead to reduce the volume by around 45 dB. I have a Sony TV that implemented this policy -- and the only way I could have complete silence was to port the TV through my stereo system (with a Hafler remote-controlled preamp) and deselect the TV during commercials.

    Despite ReplayTV's claim that the 30-second skipover feature is "to skip past boring scenes in the show", the real incentive for putting that there is to skip over commercials -- a feature that seems to have disappeared from many top-of-the-line VCRs. I don't know why.

    Given the 70K TiVo/ReplayTV systems out there versus the 100+ million televison sets, I don't think that the ad people or the TV people are too worried as yet. The attempts to make VCRs illegal failed, which meant that "time shifting" was made a fair use for private efforts. (The issue of "sharing" a show, perhaps with commercials deleted, is another question.) The set-top boxes don't have the capability of sharing -- the media isn't removable -- so I suspect that the broadcasters won't go down that road again.

    When we see the maturation of ReplayTV/TiVo, though, I would expect some action to be taken by the people who perceive themselves as "gored" by the new technology.

  • Actually, if they have a WAP enabled interface I'll go buy one of these things. (ok, probably not.) Recent example, my friends and I are out a bar and an episode of SNL is on that seems pretty funny. But we can't hear it and really don't want to be watching it in a setting where we're supposed to be hanging out and enjoying each other's company. Now, if I could use my "fancy" ($69) WAP-phone to record the show and forget about it, I think it would be useful.

    Who tries to browse on their WAP phone anyway? It's just for quick info, like movie times, stock prices, or the occasional ./ headlines. I personally don't see how hires, Flash(y), graphics-intense web pages are useful. I just want some info -- fast.
  • Ingrediants: One Win9x machine, one ATI TV Card (or Linux and a Matrox, from what I've heard... I bought the wrong damn card three years ago), and one massive hard drive.

    Directions: Set the software to record your shows.

    It may not be in a cheap self-contained box like TiVo or the other clones... but it works, and you can do all kinds of nifty stuff to the video. All you'd have to do is write your own web-based programable-thingie and you can do it yourself.

    TiVo is for people who want to seem high-tech but can't figure out how to work a computer. The real geeks can use a TV Tuner card.
  • Somebody already posted this link you bafoon.
  • One of the more interesting possibilities with these devices is the feature that lets you tape all movies with a certain actor in them. If you're a Christopher Walken fan, for instance, (and who isn't) the box should auto-record all Walken films for you. A few months ago some friends of mine and I decided that you shouldn't have to get a TIVO of a ReplayTV to get this functionality. We hacked up a website www.tvminder.com [tvminder.com] that sends you email whenever films with actors you like come on TV. It runs on Linux, written in Java and Python. It would be fun to make this service available to the "Open TIVO" people that are rolling their own boxes. We'd send mail to your TIVO (if you ask it to), telling it what to record for you. Hmmm. It would need a good access control mechanisim so that you wouldn't get hacked, but it seems like a cool possibility.
  • I've never owned a TV. A VHS player and a tunerless monitor, yes, but nothing with a tuner. I just can't stand the commercial interruptions.

    The amusing thing is that I develop tools for high-end animation, some of which are used for TV production.

  • Great for you, but I have watched a hell of a lot of TV my whole life and I graduated from Caltech as well. And please, if you're going to rant like that, at least spell Caltech right (it's not CalTech, Pasadena freeway signs to the contrary). Besides, you most certainly can multitask with TV... I usually leave it on while I'm doing other things (including, but not limited to, programming). TV doesn't turn your brain off for you, people do that voluntarily, and did it millenia before TV was invented.

  • I like the idea. If somebody can hack my ReplayTV to record eight hours of porn from these "can't say the f-word, can't show the finger" TV channels in USA I would really appreciate it :-)

    More seriously, for example if I'm at work and see on /. that there is an interesting TV program today but I can't leave early enough to see it live I could remotely set the unit to record it. I would have needed that feature a long time back.

    Of course the whole idea of having to record something at home is lame, I want more like video-on-demand service, something like my.mp3.com for TV, but I guess that's not going to happen for another 5 years at least.

    -z.
  • your replay unit would only be able to update its settings after dialing in to the server, and it does this once per day, late at night. so you would miss the simpsons. if only the replay unit could update itself via cable modem or dsl, then the my.replay service could push the updates out to the box pro-actively.
  • A tremendous amount of potential. How about a tie-in with IMDB, to implement metafile data for movies and shows? Could construct complex query strings based on writer, release date, other data not contained within the tiny capsules available to Replay. Next step is a Firefly-like affinity database, which says "since I have historically liked what x and y like, capture movies from their lists."

    Or, how about a interface that uses the live TTY sessions generated in news programs, so you can actually record news segments that are interesting to you. So, a Web site collects streaming caption data from the major networks. If a caption contains certain keywords, the Replay records for a predefined interval.

  • This is actually an excellent idea. I've often left town and forgotten to set my VCR up to record, and this is a fix for that problem. Besides, someone would need to be REALLY bored to "h4x0r" your ReplayTV unit.
  • Why not be able to choose your programs through a cell phone (either web-enabled or just by pressing buttons?) Wouldn't that be a hell of a lot more mobile, and defeat the whole "cracking" issue (most digital cell phones have pretty high-level encryption as it is).
  • "This is another example of the ways personal TV technology can empower the TV viewer and add a level of interactivity which molds the TV experience to the modern American lifestyle."

    How truly sad it is to see that American culture has gotten to this point. How many hours of programming do you think it took just to make sure that Joe Bloe doesn't miss the next episode of Star Trek Voyager?

    Very sad indeed....

    ........................................./rogue
  • I still don't watch TV, and have a successful software consulting business.


    I do watch TV and yet I'm a successful PhD student in astronomy. Funny that.

  • Normally if our company has a spot on a finance program one of us (usually me) records it (thanks to TiVo) and encodes and burns it to CD (Thanks to a BeBox).

    Today we were notified My Boss would be on CNBC at the last minute, and I had to race home to tell TiVo to record it.

    But you're right that happens so rarely.

    BTW: My Tivo here in NYC seems to have developed a taste for Australia, any show with an Aussie in it or about Australia gets recorded.

    I wish I had not chosen "the Crocodile Hunter Week" to go away on vacation, it missed taping the first Bledisloe Match because it _had_ to get the 13th consequetive airing of that goose! The crocodile hunter now shares the distinction with Alby Mangels of being the only show to earn a "3 thumbs down".

  • Sure. If you're half the country away on business, would you want to call your parents/mate/friends and say "Oh, dude, I forgot--I'll pay you back for the tape when I get back, but could you tape Stick Your Pole In My Hole for me tomorrow night?" Didn't think so. :-)
  • You don't have to program it and you can skip commeercials. I think most channels now are at 8 commercials in a row. 8 freaking commercials damn it! If it weren't for the news, I'd have probably gave up on TV already.
  • You could setup your machine to, say, tape things every week at the same time or better yet, you could buy yourself a nice book to read.

    - Desi

  • Good for something (Score:3)

    by tolldog ( 1571 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @09:59PM (#863543) Homepage Journal
    Consider this:
    You are at work.
    Server crashes.
    Southpark is on in an hour.

    A) Miss the show and save the server
    B) Screw the server and catch the show
    C) Save the server, record the show and watch during your comped time off

    It seems that this would be usefull, just keep those script kiddies away.
  • I could, if my machine was inclined to do fancy things like that...
    I try to keep what books I can afford for work. Considering I knock off about 2000 pages a week, I don't feel that I can be faulted for 2 to 3 hours of television a week.
  • Also: This will be completely obsolete when the technology exists to view our 500+ channels in the privacy in our own heads.

    - Desi

    No rest until Pepsi is written upon the sky.

  • The danger is not from crackers filling ReplayTV's harddrive with Matlock, but the fact that it gives ReplayTV, Inc. (Or whoever...) A deep insight into what you watch.
    I can imagine being at work and reading on the web that something good was on - Sure, being able to set it to record would be a convenience. (Of course, I would then like it to FTP the show in DiVx format to my X-Drive, so I can watch it from my desk the next day, but from what I hear, that's 2-3 months away...)
    But do you really want some company knowing that not only do you secretly watch 'Anne of Green Gables' you actually *tape* it? I thought not.
    (Broadcast) TV and Radio are one of the few places that you have this kind of anomynimity anymore. Imagine what Nielson will do with the database of "What People Tape".
    Remember the 'Bork Tapes'? Years ago, when Judge Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court, the Washington 'City Paper' did a story listing all of his video club rentals. Good ol' Bork had extremely boring tastes with nothing scandalous, but the fact that anyone's rental history is fairly public scared the crap out of enough lawmakers to very quickly pass some legislation.
    This is worse.
    One question for ReplayTV:
    Does the net connection report what you are watching, even when you are not taping?
    Also, when are you getting that super-secret X-Drive thingie done???

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo
  • Depending on response time and switching speeds, you might be able to do mass practical jokes.

    Switch back and forth between multiple shows at just the right time. The playback could be quite funny.

    Now, if you can download video to someone else machine.....hmmmmm...stop me before I get in too much trouble.

  • That's because I have something to say that is of value to the world, [geometricvisions.com] and I already know that saying it can touch the lives of others in a deeply meaningful way. Just to give one example.

    How many high-school kids don't do much more than hang around at the mall, drive their cars up and down main street or do bong hits when they're not watching the tube?

  • And your concept of a vacation is travelling down the road to stay with your parents? Or do you think that the rest of the world tunes into American networks?

    Rich

  • Commercials pay for the content you are watching on television. Broadcast TV is still free to watch, provided you use an antenna.

    If the majority of the people defeat their advertising mechanism, they will be forced to increase their revenue through other means.

    Is this really such a good outcome?

    It's like what would happen if everyone started using junkbusters to strip banner ads (lets pretend .com's actually have to make money for a second). The web sites would have to look for other ways of making money. Would you like to have to sign up with your credit card and pay a few cents every time you look at a web site ? That would really suck, I'll take the banner ad at the top thanks.
  • Yeah, but will it put the tape in the VCR for you, too?

    -Rob
  • This is good news for those of us looking forward to the day when we can say "I just hacked your refrigerator and put it on defrost

    The juxtaposition of this and your sig gave me an image of Bill Gates sitting at a terminal with an evil grin on his face while in a distant house, someone's refridgerator was reaching a nice glowing cherry red (K=Kelvin)

    Rich

  • Sounds like a great idea to me. I don't know if there are any laptops that could support this, now, but I could easily foresee being able to do this:

    I'm on a business trip with my tv-tuner-enabled laptop. Instead of bringing up a web page to tell my HOME system to record something, I could record it, now, on THIS laptop.

    Voila! A portable TV and DVR! You get some privacy, too, as nobody has to know which programs you're watching or recording.

  • a) Tivo runs a modified Linux PPC.
    b) Yes, you can even get a shell prompt on it (thru the serial port on the back no less).
    c) Yes, you can even pull out the drive and mount it on your Linux box, with some minor effort.
    d) We're getting closer to figuring out the drive format they use to store shows.

    Therefore e) within a few weeks or months we'll know how to pull shows off the unit in MPEG format.

    If you want to help, get a Tivo and come by the Tivo Underground forum at www.tivocommunity.com.

    ---

  • I was at a talk by Mel Karmazin, chief executive of CBS, a few months ago. One of the questions from the audience was something like "as a network, do you feel threatened by the potential of these new Tivo devices for viewers to avoid commercials".

    Turns out he has one. He said that if they found that consumers were skipping over the commercials they would find a way to put the advertising in the shows. Now, he may have just been kidding, or saying it for a bit of the shock value, but he seemed serious. That would suck.

    I have a TiVo as well, and I absolutely use it to skip over intros, commercials, etc. You can take in an episode of South Park in 20 minutes. Unlike Replay, however, there is no button for 30 second skip; instead there is a 2x, 12x and 60x fast forward. I've actually come to prefer this, as I'll sometimes see something interesting or unusual zip by and go back to watch the commercial (some of them are more entertaining than the programming). So in the best of scenarios, widespread use of these devices will force commercials to be more entertaining/interesting so people will actually watch them.

  • Wouldn't this be easily abused? (Score:5)

    by vertical-limit ( 207715 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @08:51PM (#863556)
    Now, I don't own a ReplayTV, but a service like this seems really easy to abuse. We all know that crackers like to mess with anything they can get their hands on, and it doesn't seem it would it like be very difficult to crack this system. Imagine the havok that the script kiddies would wreck: people tape the wrong shows (hint: porn), people don't get any shows at all or get them all muted, people's TV keep incoherently flipping from channel and channel, etc.

    Seriously, why would you want to control your TV from a web browser in the first place? Are some people so lazy that they can't even budge from their computer to adjust the volume? This all just seems like an invitation for script kiddies to mess with peoples' TVs. If I was a ReplayTV user, I'd be pissed.

    Still, I can see how this would have some advantages, so hopefully ReplayTV will implement a secure-enough system (hint: security through obscurity never works!) that the lamer members of our population won't be able to ruin yet another new thing.

  • This answers the current poll question without a doubt. Your TV most needs an IP.


    luckman

  • TV?? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You of all people should know that television rots your brain.
  • Very nice idea. Would have been handy a few weeks ago to adjust a few recordings while I was on vacation. Now Dish Networks just needs to hurry up and scrap the DishPlayer and get a Replay based reciever out. And add an ethernet jack, since my house has no normal phone lines anymore.
  • You'll end up dismissing our entire culture that way!

    ...and your point is? :)

    I think our culture could use a little dismissing.

    :wq!

  • Wait..let me get this right; you sign-on to your computer and log on to your ISP so you can remotely control your TV tomorrow so you can watch it later...I am losing my fargin mind.
  • Shouldn't be that hard to make a proxy. I made my first wap CGI (hell, my first wap page) in about 10 minutes.

    :wq!

  • That someone would invent something so completely useless. Can anyone think of ANY good reason to have something like this?

    - Desi
  • Certainly. I am at a friend's house and decide that I want to record an episode of Law & Order that I just found out is on. Rather than use my friend's VCR or run home, I can access my ReplayTV from remote and tell it to record. Seems pretty obvious to me.
  • I have the line in a book right here. It could be wrong. If it is I would love for you to show me what you have read that could show that, I will change it for poor Charles

    ________

  • I believe infomercials are an unfortunte result of reduced value to airtime due to the popularization of cable and satelite TV and their 50+ channels.

    Personlly, I hate them. Advertising sucks to begin with.. but usually interspersed between advertisements are some tidbits of value. This lets me put up with advertisement. How do people watch infomercials? How are they able to get any viewers?

    Is there anything we can do about them (besides not watch them)?
  • Like everything on TV isn't repeated ad nausium.
    Believe it or not, not everything gets repeated, especially things which are produced by the local stations.
    Seriously, can't you just ring a friend and ask them to tape it for you?
    Are you offering to buy something to play the tape?
  • Seriously...how many people really go on vacation and just HAVE to record a TV show. Chances are, if that TV show is any good, it'll be available where you are vacationing and then you can watch the show live. Although the people behind this service call it "revolutionary", I'm hesitant to even call it "evolutionary" because in the end this'll probably be one of those features that just doesn't pass the Darwin test!
  • And you automatically assume quality television comes from the U.S. or that I'm American or live in America which I don't. what can you do when someone just repeatedly makes bad inferences and tries to mock somebody with these bad inferences.
  • Uhm, call me crazy, but isn't this sort of a dumb idea? I mean now you can have a hacker record eight hours of porn for you while your five year old is waiting to watch their transformers.

    Oh wait, unless Microsoft handles security, then it will be fully protected, LIKE HOTMAIL! BWA-HAHAHA. Actually, then it won't even take a hacker, it will just take some five year old.

    Yet again score another one for stupid ideas that seem nifty. It's all about gadgets. I can't imagine that many people who would really use this thing. But then again I could be wrong, maybe everyone will. Just don't blame me when your five year old asks why they're screaming so much.
  • Just what I need, someone reprogramming my settings. I come in from dinner, and all of a sudden I'm watching thirty hours of Ron Popeil's Showtime Rotisserie Grill.

    It could be worse, you could be watching 30 hours of Barney reruns.

    =================================

  • There is some potential here... (Score:4)

    by UnixFerEver ( 221392 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @09:23PM (#863572)
    I think the real possibilities here lie in the user interface. The ReplayTV/TIVO are simple and easy to use, but not that powerful.

    Add the web and some powerful database servers and you could do some pretty neat things:

    a) Have it record every movie that Roger Ebert and Co gave 2 thumbs up to for ever.

    b) You could quickly pull up a list of the top 400 sci-fi movies of all times, check the ones you liked and presto, they would be recorded if they ever came on.

    c) etc...lots of possibilites...
    Simplistic versions of these sorts of things exist or are coming to the set-top boxes themselves, but I think it will be tough to make them really work well.

    ps - I'm a TIVO owner and love it. All you doubters should get one (or a replayTV) from circuit city or someplace else with a 30 day return policy and just give it a spin. On the down side, I no longer exercise or read books. sigh.
  • "Hun why did you record 30 hours of that British guy selling cookware?" on the other hand I could explian that Pr0n "baby that must have been a cracker, you know that all I watch is Cspan and CNN"

    ________

  • Jim in Tokyo writes: Of course, I would then like it to FTP the show in DiVx format to my X-Drive, so I can watch it from my desk the next day, but from what I hear, that's 2-3 months away...)

    I sent ReplayTV an email requesting them to add DivX support in one of their nightly downloads.

    According to this link [divx-digest.com], DivX takes just 15% of the space that MPEG-2 takes (the format used for DVDs, my satellite, and my ReplayTV).

    If they could just add the software codec, then it would turn my 20 hour player into a 133 hour player!

    It would even be worth paying $100 extra for this download. Not that I'm asking them to charge me, just that I understand how the market works (nobody does something for nothing except college kids). ;-)

    Thing 1

    --

  • Problem is - DiVx isn't a legit format, IIRC. It's a cracked version of a Microsoft codec -
    But, and this is just supposition, the guys who designed ReplayTV had a big history in networking the home - So, I would guess, there will be a way to mount the drive on this thing from another machine. Why not? I log in to my home machine from work, buffer up a bit of the show and start watching. What's to stop me from sharing an episode of the Simpsons over Gnutella? What's to stop me from inserting my own commercials or adding my own content?
    Being in Japan, I really miss the Simpsons - I can't wait for this to be available!
    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo

  • Unlike opening your front door using the internet, this actually has the potential to be used often.

    Founder's Camp [founderscamp.com]

  • Even worse: The spammers and script kiddies'll get together and set up your ReplayTV to record infomercials.
  • Now I just want to be able to do this with Tivo. Not because I have a need to, but rather because I will then be able to say "Look at me, I'm setting a program to record from the library!"
  • I think Replay has already done this kind of thing, and Tivo WILL do it in the near future. You just tell your DVR what actors/directors/shows you like, and when those shows come on, they get recorded if there's room. On Tivo, they're called Suggestions, and they will get more sophisticated with the next software release.

    In the mean-time, I hope I get a choice if Tivo decides to do this web-connectivity thing. I do NOT want to deal with some script kiddie cracking my Tivo.

  • The hacker channel (Score:4)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @09:27PM (#863580) Homepage
    This will prompt The Hacker Channel.

    It will get better ratings than Survivor and Alley McBeal's kissing Ling Scene. People will just hack into it and have every system out there record The Hacker Channel during sweeps week.

    Talk about must see TV. :)

  • If I have to start paying for all television, not just pay cable (HBO, Cinemax, etc.) then:: 1) no more commercials. period. for trucks, or batteries or anything with Howie Long pimp some Radio Shack crap (i know, but they have stopped focusing on interesting stuff and started pushing cell phones and Tandy machines) 2) I want to have a much larger say in the programming. And not this Neilsen crap, where one insane guy in Nebraska with WAAAY too much time on his hands determines if "The P.J's" or "Who's a greedy moron" or "Big Pervert" lives or dies another season, a real say. Like an electrode hooked up to the programming manager for the stations and if it sucks, he gets a couple joules of juice. ZZZZZZZZZap!
  • I think this would be great for a 9-5 type person. When they get board at work, they could just cheak out the listings and decide what to record. When they come home they could have all there soaps or whatever waiting for them to view.

    Sig.

  • this reminds me of a classic article from The Onion...New Remote Control Can Be Operated By Remote [theonion.com]...no more leaning forward to get remote from coffee table means greater convenience for viewers.

    i wanna be a karma whore!
  • This is good news for those of us looking forward to the day when we can say "I just hacked your refrigerator and put it on defrost"
  • Also, there are some things being pushed on consumers by corporate middle managers that have absolutely no point. WAP is the best example I can think of at the moment...

    As I've said before - "The killer app for the portable phone is the phone call."

    I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking WAP is a joke...

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo
  • I think it will sound more and more appealing as CPU speeds increase (software encoding becomes easier) and hard disks continue to grow. I imagine soon that one will be able to have a wide selection of movies/shows stored the same way you can have a large number of mp3's today.

    As far as privacy goes, if you did make your own linux DVR, you could connect to it remotely, tell it to record whatever you wanted, and no one but you would know.
  • This relates to my previous post. I don't believe there is any way to get the compressed data out of this machine in a digital format. A firewire or 100BT port would be quite useful, but would probably piss off scads of industry execs.

    A removable hard drive hack would be great. If the file system is non standard, it would have to be reverse engineered.

    But if you could come up with a way to pull the drive and plug it into your PC, that would be pretty cool.

  • So because of the inherent security risks, we can't just set it and...
    FORGET IT!

  • Second greatest trick. Greatest trick was God making the world think that He does exist.
  • Than a lot of other shows. How about this, though. . .could Replay TV set it up so THEY somehow had control of what one was watching? If this works through a web browser, I don't see why not. But then, I usually miss something vital.
  • It may just be speculation, but according to this posting on the dbs message board, the Dish Replay unit isn't going to happen:

    http://www.dbsforums.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000059. html

    and the avsforum posting where I originally heard this:

    http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum1/HTML/0006 39.html

  • So is there a Kill Your Computer Website or a Kill Your Website Website?
  • You misspelled buffoon, buffoon.
  • I guess that depends on which movies you watch. Don't go lumping everything together just because it all shares the same medium. You'll end up dismissing our entire culture that way!

    Ryan
  • Surely you're trolling. ReplayTV and TIVO record on to hard disk, not tape.
  • Total cost for TiVo or Replay unit: $300 - $500 depending on how carefully you shop.

    Total cost for your solution: probably close to $1000. Or more.

    Programming/setup for TiVo/Replay: 1/2 hour.

    Programming/setup for your solution: I shudder to think.

    Reliability of TiVo's Linux based or Replay's VXWorks-based systems: excellent.

    Reliability of your Win9x based solution: need I say more?

    So, you are proposing a more expensive, less convenient, less reliable solution.

    Brilliant plan, that.
  • Just because I'm white doesn't mean I need to watch C-SPAN. Who ya callin' cracker, cracker..
  • Mike, you and those of your ilk need a life, don't you.

    Honestly, how many people do you think you are going to change by preaching repeatedly about the "evils of television?"

    All of your kind -- I'm including the vegans, fur advocates and anyone else who thinks their cause should be the world's cause -- need to loosen up and live your life instead of telling me how I should live mine.

    Just remember, when you die, you'll be just like the rest of us -- dead. And those fancy words you used won't mean a damn thing.

    -m
  • I agree--personally, I think the web browser thing is just too much. Call me traditional [theonion.com].

    --
  • Those east coast states are so small, what's the difference. :-)
    Ryan
  • I'm sure that this could have some useful application in the real world, but to me it seems like a "gee-whiz" innovation.

    However, the ability to tell my tv to record this week's episode of space ghost while I'm out of town could prove useful.

    Then again, the evil corporations will track your recording habits through their webpage and build a profile with which to bombard you with more useless advertising.

    There's no escaping it...big brother is watching you.
    ---
  • The box has a built-in modem that you connect to your phone line. The current software polls a central server once a day for program guide and software updates. I would assume that they would download the new recording schedule to the box when it polls the server.

  • Re:It amazes me ... (Score:3)

    by StenD ( 34260 ) on Thursday August 10, 2000 @08:57PM (#863603)
    Can anyone think of ANY good reason to have something like this?
    Presuming that you think that there is a good reason to have a ReplayTV/TiVo in the first place? You're recording programs while on a business trip, and find out about a special you would like to see, but will be on before you return. With a service like this, you could have it recorded.
  • Don't forget noisy, bulky, and power hungry.

    I replaced my power supply with a super quiet model from PC Power and Cooling. It's much quieter, but still to noisy for an AV component. (and yes, that's with the hard drive spun down)

    Can you even get a slimline case on hack-it-yourself machine? I thought the really compact machines were all custom built for Compaq and other name brand vendors.

    I only use Linux and NT which both have lousy power saving features. I know Win9x supports suspend/hibernation features, but can it automatically wake itself up at scheduled times to record shows?

    Now if you could get a Linux supported TV card in a Netwinder that would be a good, although substantially more expensive alternative to a TiVo/ReplayTV.

    Also, when comparing the price of a TiVo, be sure to leave out the $200(or $10/month) subscription cost since your home built box will be like a TiVo without the TiVo service features.
  • [I hereby grant full permission for any and all to retransmit, archive, republish and broadcast all of my postings

    Well thank God for that.
  • Shit, you ever post something early and then find out that after you read all the posts that some one else had the same thought and just typed faster than you?!?!?!?

    ________

  • I asked about what security measures we were planning to implement, and was told: "ReplayTV will use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology as well as password protection. This will ensure that only the person who has the password will be able to set the recordings using MyReplayTV.com." As for user privacy, please see: http://www.replaytv.com/custome r/productprivacy.htm [replaytv.com] Basically, your PERSONAL information, including viewing statistics will not be sold to anyone without your prior consent (although, I think if I was offered the option of becoming a Neilsen viewer, I might take it - get better shows on the air). AGGREGATE viewing statistics may be sold to third parties, but your PERSONAL viewing habits and demographic information is safe. -David -Hardware Design Engineer -ReplayTV, Inc.

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 )
    Several points
    • Even just with Australian cable (FoxTel) there's more that I'd be willing to watch than I have time to watch it. Missing one thing means I have time to watch something else
    • What, don't people have 10 minutes to program their VCR/ReplayTV in the morning?
    • Don't people check the TV guide ahead?
    • Do all ReplayTV owners live alone? Is there no-one to program the unit if they happen to be on holiday?
    Since getting cable, the number of programs I really don't want to miss has probably only gone up by 2 or 3 (Still undecided on Earth, Final Conflict & Lexx). If you're not anywhere near the unit, why do you need to program it for something?

    Oh, yeah, major hacking target...

  • Some of you seem skeptical of why this would be a good idea. As a ReplayTV owner [replaytv.com] for almost a year, let me explain.

    Replay is designed to be a very simple "set top" type box. It has no keyboard, only two LED's and one button on the front panel. The entire UI is manipulated via the remote.

    It works OK, but there are certain operations that are undeniably tedious when attempted via a remote. For instance, entering "Clint Eastwood" via an on-screen keyboard, to program it to record all movies that Clint is in. You have to use arrow keys to move around an on-screen alphabet and press ENTER on each letter. You get used to it, but it can be quite annoying.

    By providing a web-based alternative UI, it gives some users a way to work around the limited I/O capability of the set-top box. On the web site of course you can use your mouse, keyboard and so on. Conducting various searches to look for things to watch would be much less tedious when you can use a richer web-based UI.

    And consider the possibility of building scripts that visit the site automatically for you. You could figure out arbitrarily complex criteria for recording programs, put them in a script, and have it run your replay for you. This would give you lots of flexibility that you don't have right now.

    I'm sure from ReplayTV's perspective, this is also probably going to turn into another revenue opportunity for them. Remember, Replay's service is free for life, so they have to have an ongoing revenue from alternate sources. They already sell ad space in the "Replay Zones" menu. I will almost guarantee you they will be selling banner ads on MyReplayTV.com [myreplaytv.com] to generate more revenue.

    I agree there are definitely privacy and security concerns here. For instance, a web site with banner ads would have the potential to allow ReplayTV to link viewing habits to other web-oriented habit information collected by ad services like DoubleClick. Replay also knows your zip code (in order to give you the right cable listings) so the potential for geographical demographics are interesting too. And then of course the whole idea of someone hacking the web site and using it to program other people's boxes.

    That having been said, I think there is a good chance that the Replay folks will get this right. So far I've been impressed with the technical competency of their staff, both in their hardware and their web site. For an example, disable Javascript in your browser and visit http://www.replaytv.com [replaytv.com]. Unlike many sites which just go brain dead in this case, Replay's site recognizes the issue and lets you view a less snazzy version of the site. Very smart.

  • people tape the wrong shows (hint: porn)

    Man, if I had porn on TV, I don't think I would ever not be watching it, let alone wanting to tape something else. :)

  • Seriously, why would you want to control your TV from a web browser in the first place? Are some people so lazy that they can't even budge from their computer to adjust the volume?

    Haven't you ever realized that you had forgotten to program the VCR to record something, but you were too far away to do anything about it?

    Seriously: Any time you think about saying "why would anyone want to do XXX?" it's a sign that you haven't paid enough attention to the issue yet.

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