Microsoft evangelist Jeff Sandquist says, “I’ve turned off my Tivo.” Me too.

Last Friday morning, I found out that Cox Cable here in Phoenix now offers high-definition digital video recorders. By Friday afternoon, I had one in my hands, and by Friday evening I was merrily recording HD content.

Cox uses a Scientific Atlanta 8300, which is unlike the Comcast boxes Jeff Sandquist uses in Seattle (my friend Michael in LA is going to get one of those models today). So far, I like it a lot, especially the two-tuner capability so I don’t have to choose between “Lost” and “The West Wing.” Observations:

• The recording capacity is much less than my old TiVo, which I had upgraded to a capacity of 180 hours or so. Fortunately, this box has a SATA connector in the back that supposedly allows me to connect an external drive to immediately bump up storage capacity. A 200GB SATA drive with external enclosure should be here by the end of the week.
• Picture quality is superb, although I noticed last night some visual artifacts and audio dropout. Only a minor annoyance, but still…
• TiVo has better series recording options, including the ability to specify first-run shows only (no reruns) and automatic conflict resolution.
• My video distribution system still works. In fact, I can stream the recorded high-definition signals to a TV in the other room and the picture is impressively sharp and clear, and it appears in the HD letterbox format.
• After four years, it’s nice to finally be able to see real high-definition content on my high-definition TV!
• I’ve officially crossed into remote control overload. The Cox remote for the HD-DVR doesn’t recognize my Pioneer receiver, so I can’t use the DVR’s remote to control the system volume, and my MX-500 Universal Remote Control doesn’t have a preprogrammed code for the Cox remote. So I’ll have to get out the manual and “train” the Universal remote this week.

For now, I have the TiVo box hooked up to basic cable, and it’s still merrily recording away. We’ll see how much use it gets in the next few weeks. My guess is you’ll see it on Ebay before too long.

I also set up Windows Media Center 2005 over the weekend. Although it doesn’t do HD, it’s still very, very impressive, much more so than I expected. I’ll have lots more to write about it later.

The good folks at G4TechTV are on the same page as me. In HDTV Epiphany, they say:

What’s the point of signing up for high-definition TV service and spending thousands of dollars on the hardware if you can’t pause, rewind and record the HD content? You’d have to pry my cold dead fingers off the remote control before I’d give up my time shifting rights.

Thankfully, it won’t come to that. High-definition DVRs have, at long last, begun to hit the market for cable, satellite and plain, old over-the-air content at a time when service providers are also expanding their HD offerings. And it’s not a moment too soon. HD broadcasts are still about as rare as a cheap HDTV, but the stuff that is airing I want to see, making it even more compelling to have the ability to record what does air.

G4techTV labs looked at three HD recorders all for around $1000 that offer extremely high resolution if you can afford the extremely high price.

Not there yet, but getting close…

Oh, and as long as we’re talking about digital media… I now have a copy of MCE 2005 and will be installing it as soon as I have some spare time. (January? February?)

Mike at Techdirt has a mini-rant today arguing that the current music format standards battle is Bad News For Everyone. The thrust of his argument is that MP3 was good enough, and the moves by Apple and Microsoft to introduce other standards are wrong:

In some sense, MP3 has just become a generic term for digital music file — which is only going to lead to problems later when the AAC and WMA files don’t behave the same way MP3 files do. Once again, the industry is doing more damage by fragmenting the way in which people store their digital music. There’s no benefit to the end user, but it will lead to confusion and anger — which isn’t the way you should want your customers to feel.

I disagree. There is a profound benefit to the end user in these other standards. MP3 was not “good enough” for anyone who cares about audio. AAC, in fact, is the MP3 standard updated with better compression and better audio quality. WMA likewise offers better compression and better sound. My collection of perfectly legal digital music occupies nearly 100GB of disk space. It would take twice that much to get the same quality using MP3.

There are two bigger problems at work here. One is digital rights management. I don’t buy music from online music stores (Apple, Microsoft, or anyone) if it’s locked up. I want to be able to reuse it on my own collection of devices. The other problem is the Apple vs. Microsoft feud. Apple won’t license the WMA format from Microsoft, because they don’t want to pay for it or allow iTunes users to download from sources other than Apple. And Apple won’t allow Microsoft to license the AAC format, so any tunes downloaded from the iTunes store have to be converted to MP3 format before they can be played.

Basically, consumers have to choose sides in this war. I’ve chosen the WMA side, and I’m perfectly happy, thanks very much.

I got a couple of good replies to my recent post on the debut of Windows XP Media Center 2005.

First, a note about what I use. I have what could politely be called a Frankenstein media system. I’ve upgraded an old TiVo to give it lots of storage capacity. The TiVo is connected to the big-screen TV in the den and is also connected to a device called a MediaCaster, which distributes its signal over the coax throughout the house. In the living room, the bedroom, and my office, I have infrared collectors that take the IR from any remote control and send it to the components in the den.
Continue reading “More on PCs and TVs” →

I have a four-year-old TiVo that I’ve upgraded with a big hard drive so it has a capacity of several hundred hours. I have an HDTV-ready TV, but haven’t ordered an HDTV box from Cox Cable yet. Yeah, HDTV looks fabulous, but it’s worthless to me without a personal video recorder. I don’t want to be a slave to the TV.

That’s why announcements like these are so frustrating:

Hauppauge Computer Works: WinTV-PVR-500MCE

Watch one channel while recording another with the WinTV-PVR-500MCE and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. WinTV-PVR-500MCE contains two complete TV tuners, each with their own hardware MPEG encoder!

Cool! Two TV tuners and a PVR. But no HDTV.

.:: Niveus Media, Inc ::. Imagine, Design, Create

Niveus Media, Inc., manufacturer of media entertainment devices for the high-end audio/video market, today announced their 2005 Denali Edition Media Center offering, featuring Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 software from Microsoft.

“Customers have been asking for high-definition support in Media Center Edition PCs since their inception,” said Kevin Unangst, director of Windows consumer marketing for Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased that Niveus will work with the Media Center Edition 2005 to meet consumer demand by offering its A/V form factor Denali Media Center with support for high-definition television broadcasts.”

It’s gorgeous (and no doubt very very expensive). But no PVR. So why should I bother.

Dear consumer electronics industry: Please wake me up when you get a high-capacity HDTV PVR. I know you’re working on it. I can’t wait. (And no, DirecTV with TiVo doesn’t count. I don’t want to switch to satellite and lock myself in to one source of input.)

(Via Engadget)

Steve Gilliard offers up some interesting observations about music downloads, entitled The live, the Dead and the “stolen”. It contains some interesting ideas and one glaring mistake.

It’s late and I’m listening to one of my favorite bits of music, Live Grateful Dead.

… as a live band, they were simply awesome. They played this incredibly American music, with the Blues, Country, rock, and folk music. As musicians, they were excellent together. Jerry Garcia may not have been much of a father or husband or even friend, since he loved smack over everything, but he was a great musician.

I discovered the Live Dead one New Year’s Eve, dead drunk, and having turned on WBAI, which would play Live Dead back in the day. Unlike so many bands, you could play their bootlegs and not get a cease and decist the next day. So, every New Years for years, they would play the Dead.

When the internet exploded, I realized that I could actually access these bootlegs. Like you could for a lot of bands, especially Springsteen, which had a thriving bootleg market in New York. You’re never gonna find Live Dead on iTunes or Napster. Because these are not legal recordings to begin with. Now the band, in both the Garcia-era and in the new, Dead-era, doesn’t really care. The new band will sell you a live copy of their show as you leave.

Let’s fix the error right away. Free does not mean illegal, no matter what the RIAA would have you believe. Most live recordings of Grateful Dead shows are perfectly legal. They’re not just tolerated by the band. Instead, they’re authorized and even encouraged.

In fact, The Dead are but one of many “taper friendly” bands that actively encourage the noncommercial use and trading of live recordings. At live shows, most even designate special “taper sections” where fans with (often quite expensive) mobile recording gear can set up. Right now, I’m listening to a live recording by one of my favorite taper-friendly groups, Yonder Mountain String Band, which I highly recommend.

With that aside, Steve’s point is well taken. I am not interested in buying the latest stick of bubble gum from Britney or Avril. Give me interesting, eclectic, independent music any time. In fact, I especially like the stuff that I can’t get from the large, corporate labels.

In some cases, I can find cool stuff through online communities that use FTP servers and peer-to-peer sharing systems like BitTorrent. (Not Kazaa. Never Kazaa.) Some enlightened artists make their coolest stuff available for free as well. YMSB, for instance, is currently distributing a soundboard tape of a great live show from last year’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

And there are rays of hope for commercial servers, too. Emusic.com relaunched itself today with precisely that goal. They’re even selling live recordings from independent bands. I subscribed to Emusic for a while and found a lot of great stuff there. I suspect I’ll sign up for the new service soon.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection has a rave review of the new Windows Media Player 10:

Having used the program for a number of years I think it is quite simply a brilliant piece of software — a masterpiece developed by extremely talented engineers in so many ways. Even more spectacular is that is free. Microsoft gives it away. If Microsoft didn’t give this software away I’d gladly pay money for it. I love it.

He lists nine good points and five bad points. When I get some time, I’ll offer some responses to the criticism, because there are some easy work-arounds.

Anyway, I have to say I love WMP 10 as well. I use it all the time and have few complaints. As for the music store, I just don’t care. I don’t believe in paying 99 cents a track for inferior copies of the original tracks on CD.

I heard a track from Peter Gabriel’s
Up on Radio IO tonight. I have to confess, I saw Gabriel performing a song on the Today show a few weeks back, and was more captivated by the changes in his appearance (round, bald, old) than the music.

Anyway, the song was absolutely riveting, spare and crisp and practically hypnotic. It’s the first music in a long time that’s made me go straight to Amazon.com, buy the CD, and then sit by the mailbox waiting for it to get here.

While I was at Amazon, I picked up
Satellite Rides by the Old 97’s, also based on having heard a track on RadioIO.

If you haven’t tried RadioIO, give it a listen. The music is refreshingly eclectic and invariably turns me on to tunes I would never have heard anywhere else. No commercials, and a cool little pop-up window that lists the last 10 songs played, so you can answer the question, “Who was THAT?”

Check it out.