Entertainment 2.0 #140 : There are Bits Everywhere!

Aug 19, 2011 by

PrintOn episode 140 of the Entertainment 2.0 podcast Josh Pollard was joined by old-timer Adam Thursby and recent frequent visitor Richard Gunther. The trio had plenty to talk about, but wound up spending more time than expected on a few topics, so they decided to trim the show down by a couple of topics. It just wouldn’t be an episode of Entertainment 2.0 without some listener feedback, and this week you’ll be taken to school about solid state hard drives by the master of hardware: Mike Faucher. To kick off the topics they had to get into why Adam was making his return. Of course the reason was simple: self promotion! He has a new podcast on the site called DMZ Radio, and he came to tell us all about it. The show also couldn’t go a week without talking about CableCARD tuners, so the guys briefly talked about the updates from SiliconDust on their HDHomeRun Prime tuners. After that they dug deep into Adam’s article that questioned whether or not people should be doing CableCARD self-installs. Then they briefly discussed TiVo’s latest rumored device, a quad-tuner 2TB TiVo Premier Elite. The final story was lead by Richard briefing us on the highlights of the new MyMovies for Mac OS X.  Make sure to join the guys for the live recording next week at 8pm ET!

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  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_W3Y7FD4VJEIC74W5FBC74XQP5E Mike

    As a long time and current Tivo user, I want to add some information that was missing from the podcast.  First, the existing Tivo software does what they call “Tivo Transfer”.  What this means is that it is copying the recording from one Tivo to another.  You can start watching on the target Tivo as soon as it starts copying, so in that respect it’s like streaming.  However, the fact that it is copying is significant because it is limited by the copy flags the same way transferring to the PC is.  So, you can only currently watch HBO programs flagged copy-once on the Tivo that recorded it.  Note the word “currently” in the prior sentence.  They briefly enabled true streaming in the software, but pulled it because it was not reliable and they were getting support calls on it.  In typical Tivo style, when it’s not perfect, they just pull it instead of letting people play with it.  I would prefer that they tell people that call for support that it’s not a supported feature yet and how they might improve the situation, but that’s just not how they roll.  This leads to the next story, the Tivo Premier Elite.  The part of the story that you missed is that they are also releasing an “extender” box.  It should be able to view live TV with an internal tuner and small embedded buffer, but it cannot record.  It can, however, stream from a Premier box like the Premier Elite.  By implementing true streaming without copying, they can avoid the limitation of the copy flags because it’s not copying the program.  When you have a whole house DVR, those 4 tuners and 2TB capacity are really needed.  I think Tivo will have a good value proposition as a whole house system when the new boxes are available.  I think the weak link in their current system is that they allow people to use wireless to connect the DVR to the network.  That’s great for guide updates and the occasional internet streaming from Netflix or Hulu, but streaming an HD program to an extender is just not going to be reliable on 802.11g wireless.  It’s not reliable on HTPCs either.  Using MOCA in the new boxes will alleviate that issue.

    One other point from the podcast is that the new DirecTV wiring system called Single Wire Multiplex (SWM) can use your existing cable TV coax installation and they have their own MOCA style system called DECA.  It’s functionally the same as MOCA, but uses a lower frequency range because the satellite signal uses the 1GHz region that MOCA typically uses.

    Thanks for the informative shows, I just wanted to fill in some information from beyond your experience base.

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