Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
As regular readers know, the PVR Wire blog is retiring as of today. The retirement of a blog is sometimes necessary for a constellation of reasons. We at Weblogs, Inc. have honed our network over the past eight months or so in an effort to produce the best overall experience for readers. Doing so requires figuring out how to divide resources that, sadly, are not infinite.
But retiring a blog is never about the bloggers, and our hope is always to keep our writers with us in some capacity. In this case, PVR Wire matches up well with TV Squad, our destination for all sorts of television news and opinion, so the PVR Wire team is heading over there to continue its passionate survey of the PVR industry, its devices, and the joys of personal TV recording.
Look for your favorite PVR Wire writers here. You can grab the URL for bookmarking, and a dedicated RSS feed for your reader, as follows:
One of the biggest inconveniences involved with upgrading to Windows Vista is all of the potential software and hardware incompatibilities that may pop up once you are ready to go. As with software drivers, there will also be programs that simply just won't work.
Over at the Snapstream blog there is a piece which brings to light the specific state that Beyond TV is in with regards to Windows Vista.
The current version of Beyond TV (4.5) is not fully compatible with Vista, but if you hold on, version 4.6 is scheduled to ship "very soon now". This new version will contain a wide variety of bug fixes which will make it fully compatible with Windows Vista.
So if you are a Beyond TV user who is thinking about switching to Vista, make sure you wait for this upgrade to save yourself some hassle. It's good to know that something is in the works.
You may be aware that TiVo sued Echostar over infringing patents relating to the technology behind its PVRs. TiVo won and the court ruled that TiVo would get $88 million in damages and also Echostar would have to stop selling and using infringing PVRs.
Bit it wasn't over and Echostar appealed and was awarded some breathing space for the time being and then later requested more time to get certain documents together. The case has now got progressively more complex but I've tried to make sense of it the best I can.
The U.S. District Court Judge Duffey is now getting very frustrated with Echostar for not getting these documents in on time. It's rare for a court to give a company an extended time for appeal and Echostar is really dragging its heals in the mud and as a result is rubbing the courts up the wrong way.
Judge Duffey has now ordered that Echostar must now get the documents together by February 15th.
If all this legal mumbo jumbo is leaving your head hurting let me just conclude that the outlook still looks good for TiVo and Echostar is in for a tough ride.
Whenever you think of a DVR you automatically think of a grey box sitting in your front room hooked up to your TV. But digital video recorders are aren't just restricted to the living room, for example those sturdy surveillance DVRs.
But according to All DVR News Fast Forward Video Inc, a company that specializes in DVR technology for broadcast, industrial video, presentation, and military applications, has announced its Outrider CF DVR.
This DVR fits into the helmet of a SuperCross racer and is used for used for on-body recording while fitted with a camera, and has been worn by Ryan Clark.
Engadget has discovered that the TiVo Series 3 has had the PROM chip hacked. If you're like me your probably thinking "what the hell is a PROM chip?"
Well PROM stands for Programmable Read Only Memory and the PROM chip is placed on the motherboard inside your TiVo and contains some pre-loaded basic intelligence. It is this intelligence that contains security to prevent your TiVo from being modified with third party software and hacks.
This PROM hack can be done in the following not-so-simple steps:
De-solder the PROM chip from the TiVo motherboard
If you haven't fried the chip continue...
Extract the code from the Chip
Edit the Hex
Burn a new PROM
Re-solder the new chip back to the motherboard
Hope you haven't fried the chip
As you can see this is not exactly the easiest hack to do and it is only the first step. The next stage is developing individual hacks to alter the functionality of the TiVo, such as enabling TiVo2Go.
If you're technically minded enough and want to learn more then head over to the DealDatabase forums for more info.
Now this is cool! Control electronic devices in your house from the comfort of your couch using a TiVo remote control. That means you can now annoy other family members by turning off their lights from the comfort of your couch!
Once you have Homeseer installed there seems to be no limit on what devices can be controlled. If its got a button, a setting, a switch or anything like that then its likely that you could control it from your TiVo.
TiVo is now launching a service called StopWatch which offers data on the programming and viewing habits of TiVo customers, including that all important time shifted data. The time shifted data is what advertisers and TV networks are really concerned with at the moment.
TiVo has won one over on its leading ratings competitor Nielsen by offering second-by-second viewing data which Nielsen has refused to offer so far.
The advertising company Starcom is the first subscriber to TiVo's valuable data.
Yesterday I mentioned Microsoft's propriety video format MS-DVR which is used for Windows Media Center recordings.
Previously you would need to convert the videos to a more standard format using something like DVRBox so you could edit them with ease. However Vista Movie Maker now comes with full support of MS-DVR files so editing out those adverts is now pretty easy.
Check out the Vista-ready OMS-GX300 Media Center from Okoro Media Systems. This beast of a media center will set you back $4,995 but includes some mouth watering specs:
A silver and sleek SilverStone LC18 case which comes with a little 7" Touch Screen display featuring a 15:9 wide display with HDTV transcoder for 720p
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor
2GB of Crucial's Ballistix memory
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card
1TB of hard drive space (2x 500GB) – can be upgraded to 2TB.
16x Dual-Layer +-RW DVD Writer
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX PCIE 768MB HDTV & HDCP
Saber 2020 TV Tuners with hardware MPEG-2 encoder.
PCI Over-The-Air HDTV Tuner
Optional USB HDTV Tuner
Microsoft Media Center Remote Control w/ IR Blaster
Snapstream Firefly Remote Control
You may be thinking this is a little over the top for a Media Center PC unless you want to do gaming. But as CrunchGear points out, a great feature of Vista is that it works seamlessly with the Xbox 360 controller making living room gaming from the couch much more appealing.
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.
The Vista launch has come upon on us and so it's a busy time for a lot of PC related companies. One of which is Hauppauge which has announced that it has the widest range of Vista ready PC tuner cards available.
Hauppauge will now be offering the new Vista driver software with every Hauppauge product shipped from today. Existing customers can upgrade from the Hauppauge website.
If you are keen to read more about the Windows Vista launch then check out Engadget.
OQO, a company that specializes in ultra-mobile personal computing, announced the Model 02 at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
The Model 02 is an extremely powerful portable mini PC that has the ability to run Windows Vista Ultimate. Kevin Groppe of FloppyHead pointed out that if it can run Windows Vista Ultimate (which comes with MCE) it must therefore be a mini Media Center PC.
Further more the Model 02 comes with USB support so could get hooked up with a USB Digital Tuner turning the Model 02 into a portable mini PVR. Also the Model 02 has a HDMI output so could be hooked up to any HD TV.
Whether this little PC could stand up to the heavy requirements of PVR recording and playing HD content is yet to be seen. But it would damn cool if it could!
Anyone who reads this site most likely understands and appreciates the many features of a PVR: pausing, commercial skipping, program guide, etc. Well a fella in Salt Lake City has found a new, and somewhat ingenious use for his PVR.
Matthew T. Jarman hopes to be able to build a system that actually censors the language in programs that you are watching through the use of the closed captioning text. When it finds a word that you 'blacklist', the PVR will mute the audio for the duration of the word.
Other uses for the PVR will include the ability to lock out programs or channels depending on any number of things like title, rating, station, etc. As pointed out in his patent papers, this would be more versatile than the current V-Chip (does any one actually use theirs?) since you will be able to use your own discretion when it comes to blocking different shows with the same ratings.
Although I know I would have no intention of buying one of these, it could potentially be great for public places that have TVs (e.g. waiting rooms, store fronts, etc).
DVR-MS is a proprietary Microsoft format that is used in Media Center Edition to record videos. Unfortunately this format can't be played on may other devices so you may want to be able to easily convert your DVR-MS video recordings to some other format..
DVRBox is free open source software that does just that converting your DVR-MS video files into other formats including Xvid and MPEG 4. Features include:
Editing of DVR-MS videos
Batch processing
Automatic crop detection
Scheduled compression
Outputs to MPEG-4 including XviD, x264
In development is manual cropping, directory scanning, profilesand iPod Support.
SageTV, the popular provider of PC PVR software, has announced support for AMD LIVE! Home Cinema And Home Media Server.
An AMD LIVE! PC is much like a Windows Media Center PC offering a complete solution for video, music and photo access through an easy to use interface. With SageTV an AMD LIVE! Home Cinema will also provide the popular complete PVR functionality from SageTV too.
We already knew that TiVo was getting into the ratings business when it 
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. 
SageTV, the popular provider of PC PVR software, has announced support for AMD LIVE! Home Cinema And Home Media Server.
