WalkerPad

I’m a bit sick and just sitting here drooling on my keyboard, sounds like a good time for a long ramble.

Ok, so I’m going to make a bold statement here. MS Vista MCE is the future and it’s pretty bright short term (5 years). Long term MS will screw us all over because they, much like Tivo,  rather be in bed with other big companies (particularly those sexy Hollywood and Madison avenue types) then us the customer, but for a while they will be the only way to go for most folks in a world where all the choices suck and where the man is constantly trying to take control away from us the consumer…

So, my first big outlay was like $650 for a Replay 4040, that was a great box with a great community and tons of cool hacks. Tivo has not and never will catch up to some the features Replay had (and not just the controversial sharing and commercial skip). But it lacked integration and having to redirect single was just no good once I got a Direct TV setup, I could tell the quality loss (this was before they started gutting their signals) and it didn’t support HD. I got good millage from replay, and I’m emotionally attached enough to the box that I never managed to get it up on ebay back when it would have had some value, ah well.

Then I bought the HD Tivo for direct TV for our main living room, it was 1k, which seemed insane to me but next to the 3k I had just spent on the new HD TV…I decided I could cope. Man, boy did I think that box sucked ass next to the replay. Yeah it had a few nice software features, but it was so fucking slow I almost ground my teeth down to nubs on resorting the priority list. A little research showed this plagues most Tivo boxes, it’s just bad code. The pictures was fantastic though, and it never once failed to do what it was supposed to do, and there where no space management issues. Never once failed, I can’t say that about any other box.

In tandem with HD Tivo I built and tore down a series of different computer based systesm. MCE, MythTV, Freevo, yahooTV (bleh), and a couple others. I haven’t tried sage TV since they wanted money up front from me… and after spending around 2500 between a mini ATX system the replay and the HD tivo over time… I had sworn no more upfront costs for proprietary systems.

My goal was for central movie picking for my two year old as well as central music and picture management, and few other requirements.

Anyway all the systems worked pretty well but most where really not wife test worthy for one reason or another. Without cable card support and limited OTA HD they couldn’t really be more then an auxiliary system. The two I kept coming back to mess with where mythtv and MCE 2005. Myth has a lot of features I liked a lot but it was a pain in the ass to troubleshoot and had really limited driver support (I’m primarily a windows admin type guy, I can do Linux fine but I don’t enjoy it for hobby stuff). There are a lot of unrefined elements to MythTV but the real issue with Myth was I was never going to get HD from a proprietary pipe from it, the writing was clear pretty on that. No cable card certification possible, and no way in hell any sat provider, who are even more draconian would let it happen. This made for tuff argument to continue to put time and hardware into. Both MCE and Myth work well with my USB OTA digital tuner and I can pump non digital cable through a PVR250 capture card with meh results… but at the end the day that just makes for a auxiliary system and a toaster enough approach for us.

The MCE UI is more refined, slicker, and adding application and modules is (at least for me) a lot less burdensome. It also seems to meat with a generally higher Wife Approval Factor (WAF). It works with extenders, including HD support through the 360. The whole MCE thing a bit more plug and play.

MythTV has some better, more replay like, features. Commercial skip, auto magic encoding for archiving, can be setup to work directly with bit torrent (talk about needing to setup QOS on my gateway, ouch), and list can go on and on but all of it is in a ruff state and often not super friendly. You can make any computer an extender to MythTv (but HD streaming still requires some oomph), and getting remotes to work and dabbling with cheap laptops that might or might not wake up etc… well it was all a bit of a headache and the WAF was low even though each success was pretty satisfying when it clicked for me.

At some point I got really tired of some things Direct TV was doing. they never patched (well just very recently now) their HD Tivo. No bug fixes no new features like folders that the stand alone Tivo had forever, we are talking years of them dragging their feet. I know Direct Tv was just trying to have a power play with Tivo and has pretty much cut the major ties with them now, but to put the customer in the middle like that was fucked up.

Frankly at some point Direct TV seemed to have gone a bit insane to me. They started acting like some lowbrow mafia organization trying to extort money from anyone who ever bought a loopback system that could be used to decrypt security cards (never mind there where and are lots of legitimate reasons to have something like, and they are not in anyway illegal to own or buy). They had this high pressure team and some lawyers go after everyone and anyone and tried to force them to settle even if they had no case by threatening the high court costs. It was so MPAA/RIAA  and totally abusive and wasteful of our legal system that I just decided to give my business to somebody else. You think you have pirate in your sights, great, you build a real case and take them down hard, this trying to shake down anyone you can get a line on no matter how tenuous, and force a settlement for cash is just total BS.

Anyway, now I have two Comcast 6412 boxes, and MCE box with a 360 exstender. The Comcast boxes work, sort of, most of the time, maybe. They are running MS foundation. They pretty much suck and make me long for my Replay or Tivo. The software is buggy, and the hardware seems pretty prone to failure. The things lack at a software level even the most mundane set of feature richness I would expect from a modern device at. There are lots of hardware elements on the box that are not turned on so it’s harder to say what the full feature set could be.

I have one box that I can no longer resort the priority list at all, the db is hosed or something Comcast’s solution? Come get a new box and never mind all the wifes shows that will be lost. Yeah, like I need that kind of pain in my life. The other box I just had to replace because one tuner just decided to no longer work with HD signal. The boxes are fast for most tasks but get jittery performance lag spikes. They have small drives that you can’t really expand, they have no stand by or power off (they do it just doesn’t really work). The fans run constantly, they dump all the guide data and it take hours, some time days, to rebuild it if the power cycles or your unplug them… there are just so many little things wrong I could go on all day. But they are cheap to own and cost me nothing if they fail, and I don’t have to pay somebody else more money for guide data, aka Tivo stand alone.

But all that is yesterday, I want to talk about tomorrow.

Vista…. vista MCE is a little more sexy then MCE2005 over all. They stole some good features from the popular modules and added them in. It works with the 360 as a HD extender and it’s just like having a full computer hooked up (fan noise and everything ). You can stream HD from 2005 as well but it’s not as smooth, at least not on my test system, which might be a titch under powered.

Vista will support Cable card labs. This means you can buy a pre certed box and stick it in your garage with a couple cable cards and however many HD OTA tuners you want, then hook up a couple 360′s around the house (I have two HD TV’s so this is important to me) as extenders and have instant access to all your HD and SD TV. All your music, all your pictures. All your ripped video (with a couple caveats at the moment). You can stick a HD DVD player on there. The 360 will upscale any signal over vga up to 1080P including dvd’s. I guess it can do it over component too though mine only seems to handle 1080i.

Need more storage, no probable add a USB drive, add a NAS or SAN whatever, tell vista where to get it and how much it can use (yeah there is some evil ass DRM shit there and that is why long term I think they will try to screw us all with the big IP owners laughing all the way to the bank). The jury is still out on if you can by pre certed components and build your own box that will work with cable cards. I’m guessing not since there is too much money on the table. Also smaller companies might have to go to cable labs to get certs as well, that is really expensive proposition and so it will limit players in the market, all bad things for us lowly consumers, but I think there will be a pretty good flood of boxes nonetheless.

MS also has announced they have a deal with Direct TV. Nobody knows for sure what this will entail but I foresee a very similar situation to cable cards, accept you might have to buy some retarded main PC from direct TV to get the ball rolling (just me speculating). Not sure where dish is with this, wasting time and money getting punched around by Tivo I guess. To bad. IPTV, who knows… who cares it’s not on the scene yet.

I think some flavor of this will become the standard for most geeky folks who give the issue any thought and want cable/sat and not just OTA. If you can get by on just OTA then there are a lot of good free choices.

The Tivo series 3 is like 1k once you add on a service contract, maybe more since Tivo just raised their prices pretty sharply and are really sticking to anyone it can. To me the whole thing smells like a valuation proposition, like somebody said “well we would love to buy you if you just had higher income streams…” but who knows. What I do know is the S3 is seriously crippled and that gives me nasty DTV HD Tivo flash backs. It doesn’t have any of the richer features like streaming or the Tivo home networking support, or tivo to go. They stripped all that stuff out to get cable lab certification, and then slapped a huge price tag on it and waited to see how many fan boys would line up. It might be a way to go right now but compared to MCE it’s feature limited and fails to be any kind of true media hub. I predict Vista will eat their lunch. Oh yeah no monthly fee’s with MCE. Considering those monthly fee’s can be up to $20 a month now I would say that is a big deal. I have nothing but respect for the Tivo feature set and what they have done to try and move the DVR market forward back in the beginning, but they are striving to price themselves out of their own market place.

Dish has a awesome line up of HD but Tivo is doing their best to smash then through patent infringement. There DVR hardware is pretty meh IMO, the UI is ok but the whole thing in my tests was a bit glitchy just like direct tv’s new non tivo mpeg4 boxe or MS foundation on the Comcast side. Drive size is puny and it can’t be expanded. Dish wants like 300 bucks for their DVR… I just can’t personally see it anymore, buying proprietary hardware, it makes no sense today, there simple is not a big enough gain and each tech shift can cause you to loose that valuation if you churn, why be locked in. It’s still tempting for all that HD goodness but with so little space how much would really get to enjoy is the question I had to ask myself.

Everybody else is still scrambling around to get cable card lab certification and for the most part it isn’t going to happen. This is an evil awful innovation stomping private business to certify devices and they don’t want devices in the market that are not tied to their masters, the cable companies. The arrangement is a unbelievable atrocity and as consumers we should all demand that the system be dismantled. Yeah, well I can dream. Frankly compliance should only be determined by a totally neutral party (government maybe) their responsible should be to allow for innovation in the space across all three incumbents and force interoperability between devices so consumers are not screwed every time they want to change a provider. Ah well, I already know I’m a heretic.

The satellite companies could be a real wild card and do something innovative but so far they have shown no ability or intestinal fortitude to do so, just like everyone else in this industry they want to control every inch of everything and screw the consumers as much as possible whenever possible.

My bet Tivo becomes a pure software provider and gets acquired by somebody. Good, they have a good OS but this monthly subscription shit makes no sense today, and makes less sense for tomorrow.

The IPTV stuff is all in limited beta/trial and all the fiber in the world doesn’t seem to be letting the bells rollout HD over it any time soon, and when they do they seem almost predestined to do so through a bunch of crappie proprietary boxes.

Course they might have to end up supporting cable cards and if they do that would be great for all the consumers who can just get some new cards and slap them into vista or their S3. God forbid there should be some semblance of 3 way competition in the market based purly on channel line up, price and customer service.

So I’m planning a vista mce hub, and if I can get sat or IPTV to it too great, if I can only do cable and OTA, well that is ok and should fit the bill for now. It’s my hardware and I can do what I like with it and expand it as needed and have another PC in a pinch.

Wow ok, cookie to anyone who manages to read through that.