Good to do

brad — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:26:47 -0800

Though I am not likely to shift to a windows box for my TV watching so I won't be beta testing Sage. The point however is that with a PC platform based PVR, "space shifting" is a trivial feature -- it's called "file copy." (Not that Myth, which its default cryptic filenames, puts a good UI on that, but that doesn't alter the point.)

So it's good to put a better UI on it. The only complex part is doing a live transcoder for limited bandwidth remote viewing if you want that.

SageTV Placeshifter Beta

MikeM — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:48:07 -0800

Appreciate you sharing your ideas on your blog Brad. We're releasing a placeshifting solution similar to what you describe for Linux and Windows next month. Be glad to send you a beta invite Brad. There are some advantages to integrating PVR with placeshifting.

I get, but mostly don't get, the slingbox

brad — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:18:13 -0800

Jeff Pulver is a giant fan of the SlingBox, a small box you hook up to your TV devices and ethernet, so you can access your home TV from anywhere. It includes a hardware encoder, infrared controllers to control your cable box, Tivo or DVD player, and software for Windows to watch the stream. The creators decided to build it when they found they couldn’t watch their San Francisco Giants games while on business trips.

And I get that part. For those who spend a great deal of time on the road, the hotel TV systems are pretty sucky. They only have a few channels (and rarely Comedy Central, which has the only show I both watch on a daily basis and which needs to be watched sooner rather than later) as well as overpriced movies. But at the same time you have to be spending a lot of time on the road to want this. My travel itineraries are intense enough that watching TV is the last thing I want to do on them.

But at the same time it’s hard not to be reminded of the kludge this is, especially hooked to a Tivo. And if you have a Tivo or simliar device, you know it’s the only way you will watch TV, live TV is just too frustrating. I don’t have Tivo any more, I have MythTV. MythTV is open, which is to say it stores the recorded shows on disk in files like any other files. If I wanted to watch them somewhere else, I could just copy or stream them easily from the MythTV box, and that would be a far better experience than decoding them to video, re-encoding them with the SlingBox and sending them out. Because of bandwith limits, you can’t easily do this unless you were to insert a real-time transcoder to cut the bandwidth down, ideally one that adapts to bandwidth as the Slingbox does. And I don’t think anybody has written one of these, because I suspect the MythTV developers are not that too-much-time-on-the-road SlingBox customer.

(Admittedly the hardware transcode would be useful, but a 3GHZ class machine should be capable of doing it in software, and really, this should just be software.) For watching live TV, if you cared, you probably could do that in Myth TV. If you cared.

So the SlingBox…

Brad Ideas - I get, but mostly don't get, the slingbox - Comments

Good to do

SageTV Placeshifter Beta

I get, but mostly don't get, the slingbox