PVR/DVR – Page 6 – Digital-Lifestyles

Elonex’s Wall-mounted Media Centre PC

Elonex have produced an all-in-one media centre that is so simple to install you just need to drill some holes in the wall and provide an aerial and power.

The eXtentia (UK£2114, €3162) is essentially a slim wall-mounted PC with a TFT display – the display is bright and clear and has a 17” diagonal viewing area, running at 1280 x 768 pixels.

The media centre will connect to your home network through its integrated 802.11g interface, or even plain old Ethernet. Interestingly, there’s a dial up modem on the motherboard, though this probably won’t see much action: if you’re going to hang something this expensive on the wall to watch your DVDs, no doubt your internet access will be broadband.

Also inside the eXtentia is a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor with 512mb of RAM. Both memory slots are full, so if you ever want to upgrade you’ll have to throw the original sticks out. The graphics card is a Radeon 9600 – which isn’t bad for a media centre, though it might struggle in a couple of years when playing new games.

Sound is stereo with the integrated speakers and sub-woofer – but since there’s a full set of 5.1 outputs, including optical, presented at the back you can plug it into your existing set-up. Other connections for getting media into and out of the PC include five USB ports, Firewire and a variety of AV ports for camcorders.

Control of the eXtentia is through a wireless keyboard and mouse, and more traditional infra-red remote control. There’s a handy 8-format memory card reader so that you can display photographs and transfer files form all your other devices – and let’s face it, you probably use at least four different card types.

The unit runs Microsoft’s Windows Media Centre, and this provides the user interface for recording TV programmes onto the 250gb hard disk.

We can look forward to seeing a lot more of these devices in the future – Sony have already had success with their Vaio lifstyle PC, whilst Dell and Gateway are offering more products that are aimed at domestic media use.

What’s not known though is if public are ready yet for a TV that needs service packs, a firewall and anti-virus software – perhaps media centres will come to use an embedded OS and be more like the TiVo.

Elonex

Gateway’s Wireless, XP Media Centre-aware, DVD Player

Gateway have released an upgrade to their wireless DVD player – and it seems to be a world first. The ADC-320 Wireless Connected DVD Player will take a wide range of content from your PC and show it on your TV. Ideal for watching all those TV programs you recorded with the Windows Media Centre PVR.

The 802.11g enabled player will connect to a PC up to 300 feet away, and is compatible with Windows Media Centre as well as ordinary Windows boxes. Interestingly, multiple ADC-320s on the same wireless network can “listen in” on a media stream and display the same content in multiple locations – handy for events and large parties. Consequently, the DVD player incorporates security features to enable it to comply with secured networks, supporting WEP and WPA encryption.

The player also supports a large range of formats: MP3, MPEG1, 2 and 4, Windows Media , Microsoft PVR and AVI files.

This new hardware is essentially the previous ADC-220 with a firmware upgrade and a 802.11g card in the back – in fact, Gateway are already offering an upgrade path to the 320 through their website.

An ADC-320 will set you back US$199 (€166), and is available now.

More about the ADC-320

Ready-made MythTV Media Centre/PVR Available

Based around the MythTV open source personal video recorder package, Australian company Development One (D1) are selling a home media centre from AUD$1800 (~UK£738).

The HMC has all the usual features: DVD/CD playback, audio jukebox, PVR functions, electronic programme guide – but it’s the first MythTV/Linux appliance we’ve seen available commercially. It runs Redhat with a custom 2.4.22 kernel, and MythTV, the popular GPL PVR software. The D1 website makes no mention that the HMC is Linux based – presumably as it’s being marketed as plug and play, and Linux has anything but a plug and play reputation.

The HMC comes in a Shuttle form factor case with LCD status panel and even has a remote control for accessing commonly used functions.

Interestingly, the MythTV feature that enables users to skip ads has been disabled, but there’s a quick hack to get round that.

MythTV is still in early development stages and still has a few show stopping bugs in it – it can quit unexpectedly, even on well-behaved systems. It will be interesting to see how consumers get on with an appliance that could potentially dump them out to a Linux command prompt.

We’ll have more on MythTV in the future as the application develops.

D1’s information on the Home Media Centre

Slashdotters discuss licensing issues

MythTV

CeBIT: PSX Will Make its European Debut at CEBIT 2004

The specifications are expected to have changed from the version launched in Japan a few months ago, but Sony are expected to unveil the European version of its exciting PSX media centre.

The Japanese PSX shipped with a few of the key features missing (namely MP3 playback and the ability to play some image formats), but they were later addressed in a firmware upgrade and it is hoped that the European PSX will hit the market with all of the proposed features enabled. We’ll have to wait and see if the box that Sony show at CeBIT is the proper European version, of if they will simply demo a Japanese unit – the later would be deeply disappointing.

The Register

Scientific Atlanta Planning Games Console

In what’s beginning to become a crowded market, Scientific Atlanta have announced that they are working on a games console. No specifications have been released yet, but the company claimed the device could compete with current games consoles from Sony and Nintendo. Chief Executive James McDonald said their new product would offer “the same performance you get out of those game boxes.”

Scientific Atlanta do not expect their Explorer hardware to be available to buy on the high street but will instead be installed by cable operators in subscribers’ homes. Games will then be downloaded to the box on a pay-per-play or perhaps a “buy outright” charging scheme.

Set top box builders and suppliers are working on ever more sophisticated hardware to compete for the coveted space under your television – getting the most compelling media gateway into millions of homes is worth a lot of revenue.

It will be interesting to see how the new console compares with Infinium Labs’ notorious Phantom console, summarised here a few weeks ago. What content will be available for Scientific Atlanta’s new console? It’ll need a lot of software to be able to compete with the systems already in the market, and with the potentially huge library of adapted PC games available to the Phantom.

Also allegedly about to emerge is the DISCover Console – a PC based system that boasts of the simplicity of a console. It allows users to play games simply by dropping the disk in the DISCover’s drive, rather than having to install and configure each game. The DISCover may cause problems for both Infinium and Scientific Atlanta based on the technology they eventually use: their website claims “‘DISCover® technology is protected by U.S. Patent No. 5,721, 951: a “home entertainment system for playing software designed for play in home computers.’ No one can manufacture a game console that plays PC games without infringing on this patent.”

Scientific Atlanta

DIScover, Not console yet, but you can buy a nice hat.

The Phantom still sleeps

BSkyB Announces Next Stage for Sky+

The Sky+ personal video recorder is set to evolve under new plans from BSkyB: they want to transform the PVR into a video and audio jukebox that subscribers can download films and music to.

Other plans include integrating five separate tuners – a move which will allow subscribers to record four channels simultaneously whilst watching a fifth.

Sky are also working on a technology that will allow Sky+ users to download content from their set top box to their portable video player so they can watch recorded programming whilst out an about.

Sky hopes to make £400 from each subscriber per year by the end of 2005. By building new functionality into their Sky+ product and then charging on a service by service basis, they should be able to earn significantly more revenue per customer, on top of the basic £15 subscription fee.

Since most domestic users are unlikely to ever want to record four separate programmes whilst watching a fifth, it seems to Digital Lifestyles that BSkyB will probably use this new capability to download films and programming to the PVR automatically, to a dedicated area of the hard disk. This will then allow Sky to promote the programming and offer it to to subscribers on an impulse buy, pay-per-view basis.

Media Guardian on Sky’s plans

Hewlett-Packard making strides in DRM

HP has licensed content protection technology from Intel and has developed a new copy protection technique with Philips.

Hewlett Packard has licensed a copy protection system from Intel that prevents video from recorded as it travels between devices, such as between a video card and TV.

HP is also working with Philips to develop a technology that will allow users to make legal and protected recordings from digital broadcast sources, such as from cable, in accordance with the new FCC broadcast flag rules.

Reuters

More details of BBC iMP revealed – All content DRM’d

More details of the intriguing BBC interactive media player, iMP, first made public at IBC 2003, were revealed this evening at a AIGA meeting in London. Sara Watkins, Executive Producer, Broadband, BBC New Media gave the audience further details of what iMP will do and importantly, what it will not.

The most significant revelations were concerning the protection of the content. All content will be DRM’d, only available for a limited period time, once downloaded. As expected, it will also only be available to UK broadband users. In a break with the BBC’s long-standing support of Real, Microsoft DRM will be used for the technical trial, but it appears that no final decision has been made.

Sara started by running a video giving an overview of what the BBC hope the iMP will be and where it might go.

As was known previously, the EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) will cover fourteen days; seven looking forward and seven backward. The programs that have been broadcasted will be downloadable to the computer simply by clicking on them. A preview of a piece can be watched before committing to download a complete show.

Although it was not mentioned in this presentation, in previous discussion we have had we understood that upcoming programs could be selected to download, once they have been broadcasted.

People will also be able to recommend programmes it to friends.

The iMP, originally envisaged by BBC man Ben Lavender, will be a PC-only application that will be downloaded from the BBC website.

Further into the future they are looking forward to having the content on other devices, such as portable music players and even further forward, towards mobile phones. This portable content will initially be limited to audio, as the rights to these programmes are nearly all owned solely by the BBC.

Running through the demonstration version of the product, we were shown the player would have four sections

_Library area

A list of the content residing on the computer will be shown, as you would expect from any filing system. A new revelation was that the rights information for each show would be displayed on the right hand side of the screen.

Each separate show will be capable of having its own DRM setting, primarily how many days it will reside on your machine and therefore, how quickly you will need to watch the show before it become unavailable.

The examples given were

Eastenders (most popular UK soap) might be available for two weeks
An episode of Blue Planet (recent super budget natural history programme) might be available for two days.

The amount of compression applied to each piece of content will vary, so the video quality will vary. More popular programmes will be lower quality but programmes that would benefit from better quality will receive it, such as Blue Planet.

_Traffic area

As per standard peer-to-peer (P2P) packages – showing what is being transferred to and from your machine at any time.

It was reiterated that P2P file sharing technologies would be used to automatically exchange content between broadband-connected computers running iMP, thus saving the BBC a considerable amount of money on individually serving each files.

_TV and radio guide areas

No real details were given about this.

Stages of development

The BBC plan to carry out an internal technical trial, where they will work out the logistics of how to get the content from its original source (tape, etc), how to will be encoded, archived and make it available.

Later in the year, possibly around Easter, a closed network of users will be given the product to test it. During this phase they hope to understand how effective the interface design is.

Following these stages they will enter a product development mode – taking all of the learning and re-polishing the product. No date was mentioned for a public release.

During the Q&A session another interesting revelation concerning the Greg Dyke’s idea floated at RTS Edinburgh 2003, the Creative Archive. The content that makes up the Creative Archive will be downloaded using a similar application, but will not be restricted by DRM enabling people to re-edit it, or use it to make other programmes. Importantly it will not be the complete BBC archive, the examples given was – it will be nature programmes but it will not be show such as Dad’s Army (An old very popular comedy show first show in the 1970’s).

AIGA London

Transcript

ATI Announce HTDV PVR Card

ATI Technologies have announced they will be releasing a card capable of receiving and storing US-standard HDTV. Called the HDTV Wonder, the add-on card will receive standard NTSC cable as well as free-to-air HDTV broadcasts enabling content to be saved to the computers hard drive. Full PVR functionality will available, as will the ability to burn recordings direct to DVD.

They plan bundle it with a selection of their All-in-Wonder graphics cards and make it available as a standalone product when they release it in the spring. The price hasn’t been disclosed.

No word has been received from them as to whether the card will comply with the FCC Broadcast flag requirements.

Hy-Tek are getting to free publicity, by announcing their will be releasing two wide-screen all-in-one multimedia computers, Tekpanel 300HD and the Tekpanel 370HD which will incorporate the card.

ATI

Hy-Tek

Akimbo Launch PVR-over-IP Box

Akimbo Systems launched their television-via-Internet service yesterday at Demo2004. They are claiming the service will start with over 10,000 hours of video content, organised in to 50 categories, will be pulled from a variety of sources. The number of hours available will grow to 20,000.

The $199 player, which is expected to be in US retail stores in late 2004, receives content via a broadband connection and can hold 200 hours of video, in Microsoft’s WM9 DRM-controlled format on it’s 80Gb drive. Subscription to the service is $9.99 per month.

This product is the first of released example of the long spoken about idea of distributing content by passing previously used broadcast structures. Akimbo claim a number of factors have now come together to enable the services to become realistic; the cost of transporting a gigabyte of video over the Internet has dropped to around $1 from $20 a few years ago; video compression has improved to the point that DVD-quality video can fit into a 1.5 megabit per second stream; broadband has grown to an audience of 50m people.

Given it is initially a dedicated box, that we assume will be closed to customer enhancements, it will live or die by the content they can secure for the service. We suspect the service may well morph in to a content channel when more PC’s are connected to the TV in the lounge.

Akimbo are canvassing for new content from video rights owners and are giving the option for subscription, rental, purchase, or advertising supported model. Their big pitch is niche content direct to the consumer and they will handle transactions, delivering the due fees to the rights holders.

We feel the other vital component for them to get right is the navigation of the content, enabling consumers to actually find the programmes that they want to watch.

Akimbo