Re: [Openpvr-devel] Interesting Tivo links

[James O. <jf...@fu...>]

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On December 3, 2001 04:38 pm, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> I had a short discussion with somebody in which he pointed out that
> buying a Tivo is probably cheaper than buying enough "peecee" hardware
> to do the same job.  He is probably right if you consider what is in a
> Tivo.

He'd be right. I almost bought a Tivo a number of times, but I'd rather be 
part of an effort to design an open one that can do stuff that Tivos can't. 
This is the point of open source to me. Price has nothing to do with it.


> Notice that this includes both MPEG2 encoder and decoders!

That stuff *can* get expensive. Ever price a good video-in card? I used to 
work for a vision systems company and had a Matrox Meteor in my desktop. 
CDN$905 and that's the cheap stuff. Tivo, the company, make their money on 
the subscriptions, not the hardware. They could never affor to sell just 
hardware at their dirt-cheap prices.


> Openness.  Wouldn't you like to be able to take what your PVR records
> and play it wherever you wish not just on your PVR?  Want to add
> features to your PVR?

I said the same thing in another message. The streaming capabilities alone 
are enough to attract people.


> I wonder what the feasibility of using the Tivo hardware platform for
> an OpenPVR would be?  It certainly would require some device driver
> writing.  I do recall somebody told me once that Tivo have posted the
> source to their kernel changes.  I doubt that includes device drivers
> for thinks like the MPEG2 encoder and decoder chips or hardware
> scaling chip, etc.

If somebody wants to do this, I can't stop them. However, Tivo loses money on 
hardware sales so I will frown on it. Jeremy Allison et al. figured out the 
Tivo schedule format but didn't release it. Tivo worked hard building what 
they did *and* played by our rules. Let's not turn around and stab them in 
the back.


- -- 
James Oakley
jf...@fu...
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