TV HACKING ASSISTANCE
It's been a delayed and bumpy road, but it appears the dreams of TV programming on demand are beginning to emerge as realities -- albeit imperfect ones.
First, there was pay-per-view where you had to call up the cable company and order a particular movie for a particular time. The next step was to cut out the manual ordering process by using the cable box to do the work with a few clicks. You still had to be in front of the TV at the precise moment the movie started or, well, too bad. Videotape helped out a bit if you could get beyond the dilemma of programming the VCR to start on the right channel at the right time.
The industry hung onto that status quo for quite some time.
When TiVo arrived its built-in intelligence took a great deal out of the programming exercise and certainly saved a lot of small furry animal sacrifices to the cable deities to get it all working together.
Now there's PVR, or Personal Video Record. It's a TiVo-like device in that it both records and plays back programs with ease -- but it has limited space to record stuff.
A number of articles on the Web speak to the Frankensteining of TiVo with bigger hard drives to record more content -- arsdatum.com/tivo and tivo.samba.org, for example, although neither is for the technologically faint of heart.
With either product, the only practical solution to archieving programming for now (notice those operative words, "practical" and "now") is to play the recorded material and capture a second generation copy of a wonderful digital recording on regular old tape or your very large capacity computer video capture card. So far, there's no 1394-Firewire or USB connection.
Those with a bit a technical savvy -- or satellite programming junkies willing to learn -- will want to browse by dream-multimedia-tv.de/cat_eng/produkte.php4.
Soon, we will have The DreamBox DM5600, which purports to solve all of the above problems. It's a German-made product due to hit the market in January 2003. Let's just say it's an "open system," and if it delivers as promised -- wow!
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