Well, as my last two posts implied, I own a TiVo again. In fact, I own a TiVoHD. Pay per view on the TiVo works through Amazon, so they have the best price. I’ve been playing with it for 2 days now and I have some thoughts, comments, and a small review.
The TiVoHD is a much different device from the Series 1 TiVo I received 7 years ago. The Series 1 was intended to be connected to your cable box as a pure DVR addition. The TiVoHD becomes your cable box and your Internet/TV media center. It’s hard to compare them since they are very different devices.
The Verizon FiOS cable box with DVR is a lot closer, and the TiVo is worse in some ways:
- you don’t get On Demand or Verizon’s pay per view: This is working with Comcast now if you live in the Boston area. I shed no tears for pay per view, but On Demand had a lot of free content.
- the TiVo interface is almost unacceptably slow: When you press a button on the remote, it takes anywhere from a half second to a full second for the device to register it. To make matters worse, with a Dolby receiver, the TiVo sometimes doesn’t make a confirmation sound. This problem makes the device feel cheap and hard to use. I’m amazed that they released it without solving this problem. Other people think so too.
- entering text using the remote (for searches) is much, much harder: Verizon had the ability to use the letter substitutions on the number keys to enter text. So 228 matched CAT and BAT, but searching was easier and faster.
- the guide doesn’t show which shows will be recorded already: this didn’t work reliably on the Verizon DVR, but it was nice to look through the list of shows and see that The Daily Show was going to be recorded.
It’s better in a number of ways too: the channel guides are much much nicer; scheduling shows is easier and more understandable; fewer bugs; the TV picture seems better somehow (maybe a better MPEG decoder?); easier to use; expandable storage; ability to record shows to DVD or VCR; closed caption support; a better remote; swivel search; and Guru Guides which help you find interesting things to watch.
But the most interesting thing about the new TiVoHD happens when you give it a broadband connection. TiVo seems to be trying to make their device a full media center. You can listen to Internet radio stations, (on your stereo!) log into online photo sites and view them on your TV, purchase and play movies from Amazon, etc., etc. It will also allow you to download recorded shows and movies to your computer, (and then to your iPod, etc) stream photos and music from your computer, and transfer videos from your computer to your TiVo.
And finally, TiVo has released an API to design new applications and do cool and interesting things. And here again things fall down. There are some developers creating interesting things, but development seems to be slowing or stopping. A grand community doesn’t seem to have formed. In fact, the forum is fairly quiet. Obvious ideas like Youtube videos, Facebook monitors, or networked games aren’t even being discussed.
So, what’s going on? Is TiVo too hard to obtain now? Is there not enough of an audience? Are the hackers all using the open source equivalents? Is it too hard to install and use third-party software? Or is this just a community management or advertising problem? Or am I missing a vibrant community of people? Does it cost too much for developers? (The monthly price seems to be much cheaper than renting the Verizon box…)
Matthew | 08-Feb-08 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
No clue why, but using FF3 on Ubuntu to view your site triggers its “suspected attack site” block. I had to disable it to view/comment.
xkahn | 08-Feb-08 at 2:38 pm | Permalink
Matthew,
Hmm… I’m using Firefox 3 on (guess!) Fedora and don’t see anything of the sort. The theme I’m using has little annoying flash applets, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve heard of blogs getting hacked to serve malicious javascript. Maybe that’s happened?
Craig | 08-Feb-08 at 4:16 pm | Permalink
I’ve been using Mythtv for over 2 years now, and it’s amazing. I would never consider anything else.
As Free Software guy, I really appreciate the Freedom. I don’t contribute, unfortunately, but I always watch the lists and help improve it via testing. It’s gained a number of great features over the time I’ve been using it, and it’s nice to use an open platform that people write plugins for, supports unlimited storage, and other such things.
The only downside (and I blame the media system, not Mythtv!) is the unavailability of HD content. HD content is marked with encrypted and other such nastiness (DRM) so only “authorized” players can play it – such as the cable company’s box or Tivos. Mythtv is Free, and can never comply with the DRM requirement, so it can only get broadcast HD or unencrypted cable/satellite HD (of which pretty much no company makes available).
Adam Williamson | 08-Feb-08 at 4:20 pm | Permalink
Possibly most hackers just don’t watch a lot of TV?
I’m not a hacker per se but in that kind of demographic. I have an HTPC, but all it does is show downloaded video (mostly Japanese TV…) and play music (via Freevo, I had a showstopper bug with MythTV when I was initially setting the machine up and I’ve never seen a reason to go to the trouble of switching since). It does *have* a TV tuner and I initially went to considerable trouble to make it work as a PVR, but then found that I never used it. The only stuff I watch via broadcast TV I don’t really care about recording. So the PVR functionality’s been broken for ages and I don’t bother fixing it.
Maybe there’s many others in this situation. I suspect the Tivo / hacker demographics overlap superficially – Tivo’s a fun gadget, hackers might buy one to poke – but not fundamentally – hackers don’t watch enough TV to *really care*…
or could just be everyone’s using the alternatives, as you said. The Neuros OSD seems to have a pretty active community.
MegaZone | 08-Feb-08 at 6:14 pm | Permalink
As far as HME, if you read the mailing list archives you’ll pretty much see what the problems are.
TiVo released the SDK and provided a few updates – then nothing for TWO YEARS. No updates. Developers got tired of the bugs and limitations in the SDK (user audio not working correctly, no video support, no HD support for the new boxes, etc.). Some work was done – developers figured out HD support and hacked it in on their own. Apps.tv, PlayTeeVee.com, and Galleon.tv all had development sustained at some level. And there are a number of other HME apps – here’s some: http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2007/03/31/tivo-hme-applications/
TiVo always had two branches of HME – internal and external. The internal SDK has more features, with hooks deeper into the system. Those weren’t released in the public SDK because of stability and security concerns. But they’ve used the internal HME toolkit to implement a number of TiVo features – KidZone Guides and Guru Guides, Download TV & Movies, and Universal Swivel Search (which you’ll find in the Find Programs menu) are all really HME apps running on TiVo’s servers. In Music, Photos, Products & More – those are all HME, of course. Rhapsody, Live365, Yahoo Weather & Traffic, Picasa, Photobucket, etc, etc – all HME apps using the internal toolkit.
Most notably of all, the internal HME toolkit formed the basis of TiVo’s OCAP software platform which is being deployed by Comcast (and coming to Cox). HME and OCAP are both based on Java.
But with limited resources, what TiVo ended up doing is putting everyone on the *internal* toolkit, and *no one* was assigned to keep updating the external one. I asked about it back at CES 2007 and was told that, at the time, not one person was assigned to it.
Things seem to be looking up a bit. The HME group has grown as TiVo has been using it for more and more, and the OCAP software is shipping now so the big development push is relaxed a bit. In October of 2007 TiVo released the first public HME SDK update since October 2005. It is a beta release, but it adds official HD support and fixes a number of bugs.
I talked with the person in charge of the HME group at CES 2008 last month and he said we’ll probably see more updates this year. They’re working on some major overhauls to HME internally and he hopes to then ‘sanitize’ the internal toolkit to produce a revised public toolkit. Notably many of the features developers have long requested, like video support in HME, are now in the internal toolkit. So there is hope that they’ll find their wait to the public side as well.
I lot of developers walked away from HME because it was stagnant. They felt that they did as best they could within the limitations of HME, and there was little gain in continuing to work on it without support from TiVo in the form of promised updates and bug fixes. (The issues on the TiVo itself, of course, can’t be fixed by the developers. SDK issues can be worked around, but not bugs and missing features in the platform itself.)
Talking to people at TiVo they certainly didn’t deliberately shun the developers. It was a case of limited resources and more ROI from companies who would pay them to develop hosted HME apps.
DJ Saltarelli | 08-Feb-08 at 10:13 pm | Permalink
I have the new TivoHD as well and I have to say, I agree with some of your complaints. The system does seem rather sluggish. I really know nothing about the custom tivo linux kernel, but I would bet that they have hacked in IO priorities and guarantees that make every other process besides the recording and playback ones starve badly. You can tell from things like bringing up the guide or doing program searches that they have severely limited the database system’s cpu and IO priority which leads to this halting feel. But I’m okay with these problems. I built a pretty good MythTV box with both SD and HD capture cards, but could not tune the system sufficiently to overcome all potential for missing frames during HD captures while watching other HD content (at least not without adding real hardware assisted IO). So in the end I’m pretty impressed with their ability to put together such a nice box for $299. When my Core2 Duo box is old and crufty, it’ll probably go back to doing MythTV and bump the Tivo from it’s current place, but who knows?
/djs
xkahn | 09-Feb-08 at 11:27 pm | Permalink
Well, a TiVo called me today (I called support during the install and they were checking to make sure it really was resolved) and I mentioned the sluggish interface. The technician had a fix.
Unplug the box and remove the cable cards. Plug it back in.
When the box is ready, try out the interface — it should be responsive now.
Put the first card back in and test the speed. It should still be responsive.
Put the second card back in and test the speed. It should still be responsive.
That’s it!
These strange steps seemed to help a lot. But what helped the most was learning that my Harmony remote had set the key delay to 500ms! No wonder everything seemed so sluggish!
xkahn | 09-Feb-08 at 11:57 pm | Permalink
Craig: MythTV is interesting, but a lot of work to set up *right,* as you noted. Pricing it out, also put the cost pretty high as I’d want to use a pretty enclosure. If I ended up using two different machines for the frontend and backend, I’d need to run two devices all the time — a much higher electricity load. But the community is very seductive. (BTW — it’s possible to hack the TiVo to support 16 exabytes of storage. Link here: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784 )
Adam: I hadn’t heard of hte Neuros OSD before, but it looks interesting and inexpensive, if very different. It’s true that many hackers I know don’t have cable, or only have basic cable and use Netflix or an extensive movie collection for passive entertainment.
MegaZone: Well, that’s a pretty sad story. TiVo has always seemed like a company always on the verge of going out of business, so I can understand their focus on bringing in revenue. But, third party developers are important, especially with competitors coming out with new products all the time.
I notice, for example, that even the awards for interesting 3rd party apps doesn’t exist anymore:
http://www.tivo.com/4.3.hmewinners.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20070525201959/http://www.tivo.com/4.3.hmewinners.asp
Out of band, a number of people pointed out that the API is problematic since applications don’t run locally at all. All graphic elements, animations, content, etc. is downloaded as needed from the Internet. To make matters worse, it isn’t cached, so network lag can cause applications to freeze.
Hopefully API updates resolve this problem — it seems like C# and Python bindings are coming, which helps people who dislike Java create applications.