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Archives: Digital media

Music, photos, video ... as long as it's digital, this is where it's filed. You'll also find information about online services (like iTunes and Napster), hardware (TiVo and cable TV), codecs, digital rights management, and associated copyright issues here.

A sneak peek at the new DirecTV DVR

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog ran across some info about the new R15 DIRECTV Plus DVR, as posted at TV Predictions. There's only one very blurry black-and-white screenshot, and the details are sketchy. Highlights: The new service will cost $5.99 a month (hardware is extra) and will have a 90-minute live buffer. It will...

Satellite TV growing fast

Lost Remote passes along details from a study reporting that satellite TV now reaches 27 percent of households. That's up from 19 percent just a year ago, according to J. D. Power & Associates. Some of the growth came from people like me, who switched from cable. But most, according...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week's list is formatted as song title, artist, and album (in italics): Riding with the King, B.B. King and Eric Clapton, Riding with the King Night Is Left...

DirecTV and TiVo get closer to Splitsville

PVR Wire has the latest installment in the DirecTV/TiVo feud: It's not really news, but it does make it official: DirecTV will stop marketing TiVo's PVRs later this year, replacing them with NDS Group Plc technology, which is owned by DirecTV investor News Corp. The word came Wednesday during Reuters...

Innovation

Oh dear. And here I thought that Apple was the company that innovated and Microsoft was the one that "borrowed" ideas from everyone else. Imagine how disappointed I was to learn that the coolest feature of the iPod, its "clickwheel," has actually been rejected for a patent because of this patent issued...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week's list is formatted as song title, artist, and album (in italics): Tato Wa Biso, Ray Lema, Gaia La Hormiguita, Juan Luis Guerra, Ni Es Lo Mismo, Ni...

The terabyte lifestyle?

When a company that makes hard drives commissions a survey that promotes "the terabyte lifestyle," my BS detector pins at 11. Still, I just added up the cumulative storage in my office and it's well over a terabyte. It's over 2 TB if you include the living room. But when it comes to...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week's list is formatted as song title, artist, and album (in italics): 8 Cylinders, Yonder Mountain String Band, Live at Newport Music Hall 2-21-2004 The Boy in the...

HDTV, MCE, DRM, and DCMA

My lack of connectivity last week kept me out of the latest round of the DRM debate. Chris Lanier started it with a very sensible post here. He makes the point that DRM is already a major part of the digital media ecosystem, and in fact most of it is practically...

Media Center already does HDTV!

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog gets suckered by misunderstands SnapStream's Beyond TV 4 announcement: SnapStream have announced their next major rev will include support for HDTV recording and playback. This is pretty significant, as HDTV support in software PVR applications is still fairly new, with MythTV's HD playback in early stages. It...

Goodbye Comcast, hello DirecTV

Three strikes, you're out. Comcast didn't seem all that interested in my business, so I called American Satellite and ordered a shiny new DirecTiVo. Couple that with the Qwest DSL line and we'll be a Comcast-free household. Oh, and major, major props to American Satellite, and especially salesperson Ray, who...

Want to upgrade your 8300HD?

I'm moving out of Cox territory and into Comcast land, which means my Scientific Atlanta 8300HD is going back to the cable company. I've upgraded it with an external 300GB SATA drive and a hard-to-find SATA II cable (required). If you own an 8300HD and you're interested in this hardware, drop...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week's list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics): High Tide or Low Tide, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Songs of Freedom Disc 2 Diamond...

TiVo hires the world's worst CEO

Reuters reports: TiVo Inc. on Monday said it named media veteran Tom Rogers as its chief executive, effective July 1, succeeding Michael Ramsay, who had previously announced his plan to step down as CEO of the television recording technology company. Ugh. See my report from earlier this year on Tom...

PVRs won't hit the mainstream for years

If you own a TiVo, or a Media Center PC, or a PVR from your cable company, you're part of an elite. A new research report from Accenture says that the percentage of U.S. homes with personal video recorders will increase by 500% in the next four years, but even in...

The importance of photo sharing sites to Media Center

Thomas Hawk posted some excellent comments to a recent post here and then turned those comments into a post on his own blog. He's absolutely, 100% right. Digital photography is a killer feature that is getting people excited about PCs again. Managing photos, digitally manipulating them, turning them into slide...

When will HDTV over cable come to Media Center?

When will you be able to plug a digital cable into your PC and record HDTV signals? It might be a lot sooner than you think. Maybe before the end of this year. I realize that's not the current conventional wisdom. Last month, Chris Lanier speculated that Windows-based Media Center...

Tip of the day: Listen to a podcast at warp speed

Windows Media Player has a well-hidden advanced playback control that allows you to vary the speed at which a media clip is played back. This feature, it turns out, is ideal for listening to broadcasts that emphasize the spoken word, such as podcasts and vlogs. This feature does much more...

Rupert Murdoch vs. Wal-Mart

It sounds like a bad horror movie, doesn't it? According to Edward Jay Epstein in Slate, Rupert Murdoch has a plan to give away 20 million DVRs to DirecTV subscribers. The satellite-based service would download HDTV-quality movies, in encrypted format, onto subscribers' hard drives in the middle of the night....

New TiVo features on the way

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog has pics from a TiVo meetup in Las Vegas that apparently shows off some cool new features, including movie downloads (from Yahoo! and Best Buy and TiVo itself) and the ability to upload home video to a TiVo. All rumors and speculation, of course, but competition...

Microsoft trying to undo iTunes lock-in?

Well, this is an interesting idea. According to CNET News, Microsoft is working on some serious changes to its online music service, including this doozy of a feature: The tentative features of the new service--which is still under development--include advanced community aspects and playlist-sharing. But sources say Microsoft is also...

Get yer Beethoven symphonies

The first five symphonies in the Beeb's remarkable free download series are available, but only for a couple more days. The remaining four symphonies will be broadcast and made available for download later this month. Don't dilly-dally!...

More irrelevant radio news

Steve Rubel passes along this tidbit: Z100 - a popular Top 40 station in New York - has debuted some podcasts. To my knowledge, they're one of the few Top 40 stations that have done so. They may even be the first. What's unique is that they include interviews with...

FM radio is dead

Wired News has details of the latest move by the FM radio industry to survive in a world where they're increasingly becoming irrelevant: From Seattle and San Diego to Baltimore and Buffalo, more than a dozen big-city radio stations have converted to a format known as Jack-FM over the past...

A new music meme

This meme arrives via Steve Gilliard and Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise. No one invited me to do this, so I don't feel obligated to abide by the last item on the list and invite three other people to do the same. Besides, that feels too much like a chain letter....

Free Beethoven!

Loyal reader Ken Gardner has been pestering me to broaden my musical horizons and listen to music written by guys who have been dead for hundreds of years instead of those who are either still alive or died in the past 20 years. "For me there are also only two kinds...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what [*]. This week's list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics): Strong Winds, Graham Parker, Passion Is No Ordinary Word Possession, Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy House...

Dave Matthews, Inc.

I'm a big fan of the Dave Matthews Band, especially the sense of community that I feel at a show by the band. There's a lot of the feeling that the Grateful Dead had in their heyday. So I was surprised, to put it mildly, to learn that the latest...

"Poisoned" media files wrap-up

The other day I mentioned Microsoft’s new Security Advisory service. The first update in the series has been released, and (surprise!) Microsoft Security Advisory (892313) covers the issue of Windows Media files that can serve as vehicles for delivering unwanted software: In March 2005, Microsoft issued an update to Windows...

Media Center or cable? The debate continues...

Tim Coyle is out with a comparo between his cable company’s (practically) free DVR and his Media Center PC. He covers a lot of the same ground I covered in my three-way comparo back in March and reaches pretty much the same conclusion: Media Center comes out ahead by leaps...

CNET reviews "free HD TiVo knockoff"

David Carnoy mourns the loss of his TiVo but says he simply had to replace it with the cable company's HD-capable Scientific Atlanta 8300HD: The long and short of it is, the 8300HD isn't quite up to TiVo standards. But it does a decent job and offers significant feature upgrades...

This week's 20 random songs

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what. This week's list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics): Beneath the Southern Cross, Patti Smith, Live in Bethlehem, PA, 1995 (bootleg) Dry My Tears and Move...

Finally, a (partial) solution for "poisoned" Windows Media files!

Update: The original version of this post contained an error. According to my testing, the most recent version of Windows Media Player 10 does not include all of the fixes referred to in this article. The Windows Media FAQ offers this confusing explanation: "If you installed the latest update to Windows Media...

A pessimistic view of CableCARD and OpenCable

Engadget's Peter Rojas Stephen Speicher has a superb piece that explains why the CableCARD and OpenCable standards are seemingly stuck in neutral. The CableCARD eliminates the need to have a digital set-top box for your cable connection. Instead, by plugging the card into your PC or DVR or other compatible device, you get...

Hasta la vista, Napster

Last week Napster announced a record increase in their subscriber base for the fourth quarter of last year. I was part of that increase. For three months, I paid $15 monthly for the company's all-you-can-download Napster To Go service. At the end of March, I canceled Napster To Go. Although...

DirecTV aiming to kill TiVo?

Wow. I just read this longish post by Matt Haughey at PVRBlog: DirecTV's HD problem. And I am very glad that I chose not to drop a grand on a high-def TiVo/DirecTV combo box earlier this year, when it was on my short list. Matt's post is worth reading in...

The incredible shrinking iTunes

Once upon a time, someone pointed out that Steve Jobs appears to be surrounded by a reality distortion field that makes it impossible for independent observers to see his actions clearly. George Hotelling has been following the remarkable disappearance of features with each new iTunes version: It seems every new...

CableCard - not a panacea after all?

John Ludwig dashes a little cold water on my eagerness to bypass the cable company's set-top box with a Media Center PC and a CableCard: ... it is a PITA to get these cards and to make them work. I have one TV limping with a card from Comcast -- but the overall...

Yes! It worked!

My cable DVR just got a major upgrade, and it was ridiculously easy. The cable that I ordered last week arrived on Friday. I plugged one end into a 300GB external SATA hard drive, and plugged the other end into the SATA connector on the SA 8300 HD DVR. I powered up the...

Skip the ads? Sorry, TiVo won't let you

I first heard about this a couple days ago, but delayed posting anything until I was sure it was true. Well, the rumors have now been confirmed by the company. TiVo began testing interactive advertising tools during the weekend as it looks to appease companies wary of users' ability to...

Is the network DVR a good idea?

Mediaweek has a fascinating story on the possibility that cable companies could offer unlimited DVR capacity from a central location: A report issued last week by Magna Global predicts that if network DVRs become a reality, DVR usage could skyrocket. Unlike set-top DVRs, which are already offered by several cable...

I finally got Newsgator Media Center working!

The folks at NewsGator must be spitting mad over all the attention that the TiVo Bloglines add-in is getting. (Over the weekend, I posted my preliminary thoughts, which basically boiled down to "Why would I want this?") They must have gone crazy when they read this post from Alexander Grundner at eHomeUpgrade, who...

The American Taliban wants to pull the plug on your cable TV

The new head of the FCC is not my friend. Or yours. That's the only conclusion I can draw from this New York Times story, published today [emphasis added]: Leading lawmakers and the new leader of the F.C.C. have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year....

Add an SATA drive to your 8300HD DVR

Ah, I love the Internet! I especially appreciate communities that are made up of people who use the same toys I do and are committed to making those toys work better. This post is a perfect example. A poster at AVS Forums discovered the secret that allows you to plug an external...

Where can I get one of these?

Prof. Froomkin steers me to a story about a guy who invented a “Fox Blocker”: Sam Kimery …makes a little device the size of a thumb that you screw into your cable supply and which then blocks the Fox channel. I would pay for that. Sadly, he’s getting death threats....

Should bloggers accept free equipment?

Thomas Hawk picks up on the news that TiVo offered a special “journalists only” promo for its hardware: I can see where TiVo would probably be frustrated and use this to try and push their message. They probably have the best PVR on the market. When you poll consumers everyone...

Still more details on the TiVo-Comcast deal

Via Shelly Palmer, here’s the text of TiVo’s 8-K with the SEC, which lays out more details about its deal with Comcast. It doesn’t contain any financial terms (those will presumably be in the full agreement, which will be filed as an attachment with the upcoming 10–K). Everything up to this point...

What does TiVo really get from the Comcast deal?

I just read the Comcast press release to see exactly what sort of deal Tom Rogers negotiated for TiVo: Under the terms of the agreement, Comcast and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo service that will be made available on Comcast's current primary DVR platform. New...

More on the TiVo-Comcast deal

TiVo’s stock went up 70% yesterday on the news that it had signed a deal with Comcast. But is it really a good deal for TiVo? This revealing paragraph was in The New York Times this morning: The Comcast deal, completed late Monday, was spearheaded by Tom Rogers, a former executive...

TiVo and Comcast to play together

Yesterday it was rumor. Now it’s confirmed: TiVo and Comcast have made a deal to put the TiVo interface on a Comcast box. From News.com: TiVo and cable giant Comcast have reached a distribution deal, easing some investor concerns over the digital video recorder pioneer's future. The companies announced the agreement...

From cassette to MP3 (and vice versa)

ThinkGeek is selling “the ultimate in retro-cool PC mods.” The PlusDeck 2 is a full-logic cassette deck for your PC. Use it to archive your old cassette tapes of 80s hair bands into digital media files for playback on your PC. Or better yet, archive your favorite audio files or streams...

Making the case for the CableCARD

Via eHomeUpgrade, I read this post from Shelly Palmer, chair of the Advanced Media Committee of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (I’ve highlighted two key sentences in bold): An array of technology firms, including major computer and TV-set manufacturers, is pressing federal regulators...

Creative's powerful portable speakers

Last summer, I ran across a deal on the Creative TravelSound MP3 portable speaker system and, on an impulse, I bought one. It arrived via UPS a few days later, and I promptly set the box aside. Over the next few months, I took a few short trips, but never felt the motivation to throw this...

Creative Zen Micro: "Better than iPod"

Omar Shahine’s Creative Zen Micro vs iPod review is excellent, and his conclusion (“Kick Ass – better than iPod”) matches with mine. I only wish that Creative would make this device in a 20GB or larger format....

This week's 20 random songs

A random selection from my music collection. (If you don’t know the rules, read this. Inspired by Thomas Hawk, I’ve kicked the number up to 20.) List is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in parentheses): Cheikh Lo, Guiss Guiss (Ne La Thiass) Cowboy Junkies, Miles from Our Home...

Censorship is on the march

Two oddly related bits of news landed in my RSS reader this week. First comes the news that at least one high-ranking Senator thinks HBO, Comedy Central,  and other cable networks should live by the same rules as over-the-air broadcasters. Paul McLeary writes in the Columbia Journalism Review: At a meeting of state...

TiVo versus MCE versus my cable company

These are rough times for a TiVo fanatic. The company and its groundbreaking box are getting squeezed into irrelevance. On the one side, cable companies offer their own DVR boxes, which may not be elegant but are easy and cheap. On the other side, you have PC-based solutions like Windows XP...

I wish I could have been at this dinner!

Not only does it sound like the food was great at the San Francisco Geek Dinner, but the guest list and conversation were apparently, well, ultra-geeky. (And I mean that in a good way.) Thomas Hawk reports: The conversations that immediately come to mind from this evening include everything from...

Grateful Dead goes digital - with no DRM

Love the Grateful Dead? Now you can get any of the recordings in their live Dick’s Picks series over the Internet. Single songs (up to 10 minutes long, which cuts out most of the extended jams the band is famous for) are available at the iTunes store. Full tracks are available at the Grateful...

Staying away from iRiver products

I have an older iRiver H120 music player. It does what I want it to do, but the user interface is awful, and I would never recommend it to anyone who isn’t a certified geek. I had put the newer iRiver models, especially the 40GB H340, on my gotta-try-this list. Until I...

Bye Bye Napster!

Microsoft guy Mike Torres says Bye Bye Napster! Two strikes, Napster is out.  I am not waiting for a third, I play by my own rules.  Which brings me to a declaration: The end-user should never, under any legitimate circumstances, have to worry about copy protection.  This is the chief...

A few thoughts about e-books

Joe Wikert, a VP and publisher at Wiley and Sons, just started his own blog (Scoble made him do it). In the comments to one of his first posts, I asked Joe what he thought would make electronic publishing take off. His answer was thought-provoking: …until we get past the notion of...

Microsoft needs a Music Czar

Thomas Hawk points to this “personal note to Microsoft” from analyst Michael Gartenberg: There's no doubt that you must be frustrated. Really frustrated. After all, you were in digital music long before Apple. There were WMA players on the market long before iPod. In fact, Microsoft might have been dominant...

Copy-protected CDs? Sadly, America shrugs...

eHomeUpgrade prints a press release from an organization that did a survey showing some consumers don’t mind having ridiculous restrictions placed on their rights to fairly use copyrighted material: Consumers Amenable to Music CDs With Copy Protection. Contrary to widely held industry beliefs, U.S. consumers are not overwhelmingly antagonistic toward the concept...

Why was Media Player updated?

Updated March 2… eWeek is out with a news story headlined “Microsoft Updates Media Player to Thwart Spyware Threat”. As far as I can tell, this story is almost completely inaccurate. Microsoft Corp. has released an update for its flagship Windows Media Player to protect users from a known threat...

Dear Microsoft, what's in this new Media Player version?

Dear Microsoft, When you release a new update to Windows Media Player 10 like the one that mysteriously appeared in the Microsoft Download Center yesterday, it would be nice if you also included some documentation on what sort of changes are included. I noticed a “Music Assistant” flash past as the...

Doing the Napster math

I’ve been sampling Napster To Go for the past few months. So has Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post, who did the math and concluded that Napster To Go Doesn't Add Up: It wasn't until after my initial binge that I thought a bit more about the virtues of this service....

Why I prefer CDs to downloads

My buddy Michael called yesterday. He’s spent the better part of two days trying to clean up his 15–year-old niece’s spyware-infested computer. (Kazaa, of course. You had to ask?) He thought he finally had it cleaned up, only to discover that some of the crud had returned, and then the PC...

Wired News conducts a clinic in bad journalism

Wired News published a horrible story this morning. In Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill, author Leander Kahney writes: To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's management, Apple Computer's iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft's workers. Now read the story. Read it carefully. (I’ll wait.) Note that the entire...

What's the point of digital media?

In the comments to my previous post on ripping a CD collection into digital format, Ken asks some good questions: Ed, educate me. I use my home computer primarily for e-mail, Internet browsing and research, word processing, the occasional PC game, and CD burning -- but not CD ripping for...

Thoughts on ripping a CD collection into digital format

John Walkenbach started with the idea of having a commercial service rip his CD collection for him but has since given up on that idea: After doing some more research, I decided to abandon the idea of using a company to convert my CDs. As it turns out, the total number...

Dolby goes overboard

Digital Media Thoughts has word on a new announcement from Dolby Laba at CES: "Dolby Digital Plus builds on the original Dolby Digital specifications, allowing for higher bit rates and more channels. Dolby Digital Plus has a maximum bit rate of 6mbps, and support for 13.1 channels. In comparison, Dolby...

Windows Media Player secrets

Mike Williams explains the mysteries of Windows Media Player Artist fields: WMP gives you three primary fields to work with for musical artists: Album Artist, Contributing Artist, and Composer. While functionally different, successive versions of WMP have hopelessly complicated how these are presented to the user. In v10, the Library...

Comcast's new HD-DVR

Just before the holidays, Matt Haughey had some first impressions of Motorola's serious looking DVR, which is now rolling out to Comcast users. In a fresh post today, he has designer James Duncan Davidson's first impressions of the unit and links to a screenshot of the unit in action. Only...

Digital rights (and wrongs)

In a previous post, I included a snippet that linked to Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail. (Chris is editor of Wired magazine.) After I posted that, I read a little more. I've been meaning to write about digital rights lately but haven't found the time to set out a...

Your jukebox, uncensored

I've seen this several places, and it's a cool idea: Open up the music player on your computer. Set it to play your entire music collection. Turn on the "shuffle" option. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing....

Windows Media Player performance

Thomas Hawk has a great Christmas wish list, with a lot of overlap to the things I'd like to see (I don't need a Pogo stick with training wheels, though). But in this post, once again, Thomas takes a shot at what he considers the miserable performance of Windows Media...

MyPVRSucks.com

I'm a member of a Yahoo group devoted to the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 personal video recorder. It's been enlightening, to say the least, to read about the experiences of others who are stuck with this woeful piece of consumer electronics gear. Now, a software engineer who is also a...

More on the Comcast DVR

Years ago, I worked with John Montgomery at Ziff-Davis's PC Computing. Now, he's a mucky-muck at Microsoft. And he has a very entertaining blog, in a geeky sort of way. I liked his comparo on the new Comcast DVR. I'm still deciding whether I like the Cox/Scientific Atlanta combo. The...

Comparing HD-DVR interfaces

Lost Remote has some screenshots of the new Microsoft TV software found on Comcast boxes in Seattle. (Elsewhere? who knows...) My cable company, Cox, is using a competing software design called SARA, designed by Scientific Atlanta. You can see it at PVR Comparisons. Confusingly, their review is filed under the...

Bye-bye, Tivo

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...

HDTV + PVR = Nirvana

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...

Music format wars

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...

More on PCs and TVs

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....

HDTV or PVR: Why make me choose?

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...

Live and legal

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...

Hawk: WMP 10 rocks!

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...

Heard any good new music?

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...