Snapstream has released a new beta version of BeyondTV, the company's PC-based personal video recording software. BeyondTV 4.8.2 includes a bunch of bug fixes, and a few new features that I've been looking for for a while:
You can configure automatic Showsqueezing (WMV or DiVX compression) of HD, SD, or all videos
Improved performance when recording overlapping shows. If one recording is scheduled to end at 10:02, and another begins at 9:58, the program with the highest priority will win.
Set permissions for library folders (block your kids from watching Dora The Explorer as a prank -- or you know, programs they actually shouldn't be watching).
The feature I'm most excited about is integration of a Couchville-style program guide with the web admin. Snapstream launched Couchville to much fanfare last year and then shut it down a few months ago. The TV listing site is simple, easy to use, and apparently cost the company more money than it was worth to maintain. It's good to see Snapstream salvage the technology for use in its core product: BeyondTV.
Amazon Unbox is probably one of the simplest non-Apple services for renting and buying downloaded TV shows and movies on a PC. The service is also compatible with TiVo, but I know a few folks who refuse to pay for any video unless it comes in high definition. And so far, HD video has not been available via Amazon Unbox.
Bu it looks like that could be changing. TiVo Vice President Jim Denney tells TV Week that HD capabilities are coming to Amazon "in the not too distant future." And judging from the source, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that means you'll be able to download and watch HD video using a TiVo HD or TiVo Series. As MegaZone at Gizmo Lovers suggests, it's likely that Amazon will use the H.264 codec, which would let the company distribute high definition videos with relatively small file sizes (relative being the key word here).
The BBC may be porting its iPlayer internet television service to the Nintendo Wii and other video game consoles and set top boxes, but for some reason the BBC has ignored the mos obvious way to get web content onto a TV: Windows Media Center.
Most computers sold today come with Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate, which means that they already have Windows Media Center software designed for displaying video and web content on a TV screen. Taking an application like the iPlayer, which is designed for keyboard and mouse navigation, and integrating it with Windows Media Center for remote control navigation should be a breeze. And it turns out, it kind of is. Since the BBC hasn't designed a MCE plugin, developer Martin Millmore made his own.
The plugin isn't perfect yet. While you can navigate iPlayer content with a remote control, Millmore hasn't been able to get programs to play or switch to full screen mode without using a mouse. And of course, the iPlayer service won't work if you don't live in the UK. But that's a feature, not a bug.
It seems like just last week that member of the TiVo community figured out that you can control a TiVo from an iPhone (or pretty much any other internet capable device for that matter), via a simple telnet connection. Oh right, it was. In order to actually flip channels or perform other functions, you had to enter IR codes like "ircode thumbsup" by hand, but now a member of the TiVo hacking community has released a graphical utility for the iPhone that lets you press a series of buttons, just as God intended.
TiVoRemote isn't going to win a beauty pageant anytime soon. The interface looks more like a crossword puzzle than a TiVo remote control. But it gets the job done. Because the utility connects to your TiVo over an internet connection, you'll need to know the IP address of your TiVo. And the program will not be able to control your television set or other A/V equipment. Just your TiVo. In other words, this software is pretty cool and could come in handy if you misplace your remote control. But I wouldn't recommend replacing your TIVo or universal remote control with TiVoRemote just yet.
There are dozens of ways to find out what's on TV tonight. You could check the TV listings in your local paper, or in TV Guide. But honestly, I don't know anybody who actually does that anymore. There are hundreds of web sites with TV listings as well. But mytvrss provides one of the simplest web-based solutions for keeping track of new episodes.
When you visit the mytvrss web page, you're presented with a list of a few dozen popular TV shows. If a show you watch isn't listed, just contact the site and they might add your show to the list. All you have to do is click the check boxes next to the shows you want to follow and mytvrss will create a custom RSS feed for yu. Pop it into your RSS reader, and you'll receive an update every time there's a new episode of one of your shows.
You don't get a ton of information in your RSS reader, just the series and episode titles and an episode number. But there's also a link on each item that you can click to receive episode summaries.
I'm starting to feel like Hulu was designed specifically for people who don't have cable or satellite television. Well, people who only need a handful of cable channels including Sci-Fi, FX, and Bravo, anyway. I've been using Hulu to keep up with a couple of shows that I can't pick up with my terrestrial digita antenna, like Battlestar Galactica and The Riches. But Hulu only keeps new episodes of each show online for a limited time, so if you forget to watch for a few weeks you could miss a show.
Now Hulu has added a subscription feature that helps ensure you never miss a show. Hulu already let you add programs to a queue for later viewing. But now the site has two new features which make the queue more useful. First, when you subscribe to a show, new episodes will automatically be added to your queue. Second, you can set your queue properties so that Hulu will shoot you an email any time a new item is added to your queue.
You know how Apple's iTunes store was once music only, and then the company added TV and movies? Yeah, replace the word Apple with Microsoft and you've pretty much got today's news. Well most of it, anyway. Microsoft has rolled out an updated version of its Zune Marketplace software. And while movies are nowhere to be seen, there are about 800 episodes from popular TV shows available for purchase at $1.99 a pop.
Titles include South Park, The Office, Heroes, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Robot Chicken, and Rock of Love. All of the shows are from NBC Universal, MTV, or Turner. While the pricing in competitive with Apple's iTunes Store, it'd be nice to see a slightly larger content library. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if the networks currently on board sell a decent number of TV episodes, we'll see other networks join soon enough.
Lycos Cinema is a pretty nifty concept. Registered users can login to the site, find a movie they want to watch, and then invite friends to watch on their own computers. The movie plays almost simultaneously on each computer, which lets users chat in real-time about the movie they're all watching. The site featurs a combination of free movies and TV shows and videos available for rental. You can pay to watch a movie yourself, or pay a bit more for a 5 or 10 person rental.
But there's one major problem. The content is absolutely horrid. There are no contemporary movies or TV shows. And the older titles are pretty much B-list material. If you like Godzilla films, Lyco Cinema might be the site for you. But if you're looking for the latest summer blockbusters, you might want to try Netflix.
Dvico has released the FusionHDTV7 PCI express card, which is a dual HD TV tuner. Dvico claims that this is the first PCIe card capable of recording two HDTV channels (either digital or QAM) at the same time, and I can't think of any others off the top of my head, so I'm going to agree that this is at least one of the first. Like most HDTV tuner cards these days, the FusionHDTV7 can tune into either digital ATSC broadcats or analog NTSC signals.
The card allows you to record two shows at once, record one show while watching a live program on anothr channel, or view Picture-in-picture videos. Of course, you can get all of the same features by buying two cards, but at about $140, the FusionHDTV is probably cheaper than picking up two other cards. And it takes up less space in your PC.
A little while back, TiVo teamed up with home automation software maker Crestron to allow TiVo users to control their light switches, thermostat, and other information through their Series3 and TiVo HD set top boxes. But it appears that a side effect is that anyone can now connect to their TiVo units via telnet, and blogger Dave Zatz figured out that means you can use simple command line codes to replicate TiVo remote control functions from pretty much any internet connected device. In other words, you can use an iPhone as a TiVo remote control.
The easy part is that all you have to do is figure out your TiVo's IP address, use Port 31339, and you can start entering commands. The complicated part is that you have to type out commands like "ircode pause," and "ircode thumbsup," instead of, you know, using your TiVo remote control and just pressing those buttons.
But now that we know this is possible, it's probably just a matter of time before we see third party developers writing TiVo remote control applications with pretty interfaces for the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices, and other internet connected gizmos.
EVGA, a company best known for its PC graphics cards, is joining the crowded field of companies producing USB TV tuners. The company's inDtube HDTV tuner (Get it? inDtube sounds like "in the tube." So clever. Wait, no.) looks like your basic TV tuner with support for ATSC and NTSC signals, and S-Video, RCA, and composite video.
The tuner also comes with a portable antenna, a remote control, and a USB extension cable, as well as an F-Connector to MCX adapter. There's also some basic PVR software if you don't already have an application for watching and recording TV programs. Without even knowing what software the inDTube ships with, I'm going to go ahead and recommend you find smething better like Media Portal, GBPVR, BeyondTV or SageTV.
The inDTube works with Windows XP, Windows XP MCE, and Windows Vista. No word on pricing or availability yet.
While the window between a movie's theatrical release and DVD release has continued to shrink over the years, it's taken a while for the major studios to creep into the 21st century and offer digital downlaod options at all. Now that you can get most major releases from iTunes, Amazon Unbox, and other online stores, it looks like Apple has turned its atention toward the next digital divide: The length ot fime betwen a DVD release and iTunes releases. Today the company announced partnerhips with a whole slew of movie studios to release videos to iTunes customers the same day as the DVD release.
Participating studios include Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, Image, and First Look. Apple says this week you'll be able to pick up American Gangster, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as existing titless. The press release doesn't make it clear whether the simultaneous release applies to $2.99 movie rentals or just $14.99 movie purchases.
If history has taught us anything, it's that while Apple may be the first company to announce the news, we suspect the studios will be working with other online video distributors to enable simultaneous release dates soon.
Building B has pulled back the curtain on its set top box, which for some reason it's calling Sezmi. While the name makes the box sound like some sort of blogging service, it's actually a content delivery system that combines over the air high definition television with broadband video delivery.
The box has a 1TB hard drive for storing video the company pushes out over the internet, which lets it work as a sort of video on demand unit. But it's also got a terrestrial antenna for tuning into your local network affiliates, assuming you can get good reception. We use a terrestrial antenna in my household, and while most networks come in crystal clear, we have a hard time picking up CBS or PBS.
It's not clear at this point what kind of content will be available through Sezmi, as the company hasn't announced any partners yet. There's also no word on the pricing yet, but Building B has begun private beta tests of the Sezmi with a larger pilot launch scheduled for later this year.
Startup ZeeVee announced its new set media streaming device, the ZvBox today. Unlik the Apple TV, Windows Media Extenders, or pretty much any other set top box designed to let you watch PC and internet content on your TV, the ZvBox works with your home's coaxial cable network. In other words, you plug the ZvBox into your PC so it can use your internet connection, and plug the other end into a spare cable jack. It will find a TV channel not currently used by your cable provider and allow create a new HD channel you to tune in to on any TV in the house to access the ZvBox service.
So what content can you access? Pretty much anything you can watch on your PC, including YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, BitTorrent, and Netflix content. If your PC has a DVD player, you can access that. If it has a TV tuner, you can use ZvBox to watch live TV.. on your TV. Or more to the point, you can set up a PVR in the bedroom and watch recorded shows on any TV in the house -- assuming you have cable in each room in the house. If you're in a bunny-ears only household, the ZvBox might not be the best solution.
The ZvBox (plus the ZvRemote control and Zview software -- they like the letter Z) will be available in June for $499.
The BBC iPlayer service lets UK residents catch any TV show they missed in the last seven days, provided they're willing to watch on a computer or other supported device. Earlier this month the BBC discussed plans to create an iPlayer channel for the Nintendo Wii that would let video game console owners use a Wii to watch TV shows on an actual TV. But now it looks like the BBC is expanding its support for devices and partnering with Virgin Media to give cable customers access to the same programming.
Virgin Media has 3.5 million customes, and while I don't happen to have the number of UK households with a Nintendo Wii handy, I think it's safe to say that more people are going to wind up with access to the iPlayer service through Virgin than Nintendo.
It's likely that the BBC is working on deals with other cable, satellite, mobile phone, and device companies as well.
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