Beyond TV

Beyond TV With Cable Box

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I got my IR Blaster (product is called USB-UIRT) yesterday. it is a little device that plugs into my desktop’s USB port. I then can control my cable box from Beyond TV via my ATI Remote Wonder. After reading the newsgroups I thought I might have some issues doing this. It turns out that I got everything to work just fine on the first try.

I did have to play around a bit with Beyond TV’s program guide to get all my digital cable channels to show up, but after a few minutes I was all set. My next upgrade is to go from Coax, to RCA cables from my cable box to my USB-2 video capture device. I figured I would do that after I was sure that the IR Blaster worked.

Now I can be a bigger couch potato now that I can fill up any hard drive space that I can get my hands on with MPEG-2 video of my favorite shows, movies, or anything else I get lazy and want to record. I am living it up now, because in July the recording flag or whatever they are calling it will screw anyone wanting to record digital TV. More on that after I bask in my recording ability glory today!

Tivo To Go, Well Almost

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So Tivo launched their Tivo To Go service Monday. Great. I downloaded the software Tuesday and installed it on my PC. Oh, wait a minute. I thought Tivo said this service was active. Well turns out the software is available, but since you need a software update on your Tivo device it may take several weeks for my (or anyone else’s) Tivo to get updated. That last piece of information I had to get from the Tivo support site.

I wait ready to try this service out. In the mean time I am getting happier with Beyond TV. It just creates MPEG-2 files so I can copy them to my laptop and watch the shows anywhere right now. Maybe by the time my Tivo can do that I might decide I don’t need to pay $12.99 a month and just use Beyond TV.

Turns out I am not the only one ticked off by how Tivo is doing this upgrade. News.com had this article. I understand why Tivo is staggering the upgrade, but if I want to get it, and know my risks why shouldn’t I be able to get the upgrade now?

Home Entertainment System

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I have been pondering updating my Home Entertainment System for some time now. What that means is getting a new TV. I have a regular Sharp 27″ CRT TV. I have been thinking about taking some money and getting a Plasma or some type of HD TV. Part of me (and Jayson coaxing me) is saying go get a big TV. The realistic side of me is saying that I don’t want to spend the amount needed to get the system I want at todays prices. I also don’t really utilize Digital TV yet so a HD TV may be a waste for me. So for now I am in wait and see mode.

What I have done is got my Tivo Series 2 up and working. I also tinkered with my new desktop computer and am now very happy with my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 Capture Device, and Snapstream’s Beyond TV. I have my ATI remote wonder working so I can sit on my couch and use my TV just like I would use Tivo. At this point I could seriously think about replacing the Tivo with this new solution, but I wont just yet. I also like the ability to capture shows on two different TV’s. The only down side is that I have to change the video resolution on my computer whenever I want to watch TV with Beyond TV. I run my monitor at 1280×1024. The TV can only properly display 1024×768. Not that big a deal, but it is a pain.

What is also good is that my TV Capture system on my computer can save a ton more stuff than my Tivo and I can burn stuff to DVD if I want to archive it. I cannot offload MPEG-2 files of my Tivoed shows now that I have an un-hacked Series 2.

Holiday Week Recap

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I could say that I took the week off, and that is why I haven’t posted in a few days. That would not be true, but I could say that. I worked all of last week. I even ran to the office on both friday and Saturday. I had off both days but I had some quick stuff to do so I ran down there for about an hour each day.

Christmas eve I did some rewiring of my TV and computer. I bought RCA cables to hook up my computer video card to my TV and stereo. I can now use Beyond TV on my TV like a Tivo. It actually works really well. More news on that as it develops. I ended up down at Outback with Jayson and Gretchen for dinner. It was empty because it was Christmas eve, but the place was open till 10:30PM. I made it down in record time. The cab powers that be have been kind to me for finding cabs in the freezing cold. Gretchen knows I cannot pass up Outback. Dam her! That was the third time in recent memory that I have dropped what I was doing and went down to Outback because of a phone call. She is not helping my diet. Since I don’t have I diet, I shouldn’t care:) I did have a bloomin onion for the first time in months. It was a good day!

I went to my parents friends house for a Christmas party. it was ok. My family is friends with a bunch of crazy people. I should learn not to trust my mom when it comes to time or how far someplace is. The trip to the party was LONG. traffic was bad. Coming home it was not as bad, but my sister got into a small fender bender. As she was pulling over to the curb to let me out to the subway we hit another car. Some dumb-ass was stopped at the curb, so my sister went to pull in front of them to park and let me out. The dumb-ass begins to move and hits us in the side of the truck. I could see no damage to my sisters cherokee, but the other car had a nice dent and paint off of the bumper by the front headlight. After some “nice” words between the group of us, we exchanged insurance and off we went. Not sure who will be blamed by the insurance company. I think we will, even thought this ass-whole was not moving when we were moving into his lane. At least morgan slept through the whole thing.

As for commuting on the subway on a cold holiday, I was surprised by how quick most of the trains came on Christmas. Maybe I got lucky, but 3 out of the 4 trains I had to catch came quick.

Today I hung out at home. I had work to do on my laptop (see another post on that) and I had to update my checkbook in quicken. What fun. I just got back from seeing meet the fockers with Jayson and Gretchen. I went down to their neck of the woods and we saw it. That movie was stupid but funny.

Lets hope this week will be a calm and q—t. I won’t say the “Q” word. But I am probably wrong about it being “Q”. Why you ask? Because I am thinking it will be.

Tivo & PVR Trouble

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Sunday and Monday I spent time working on my Tivo. I have (had) a 40 hour original Phillips Tivo that I had hacked to a 160 hours. Well as I said earlier it died. My online searching said that the problem I was having could be the hard drive or the unit itself. I went out and downloaded InstantCake from PTVUpgrade. I originally had PTVUpgrade do the hacking for my Tivo so I figured I would check them out. IntantCake allowed me to prepare a new hard drive for the Tivo in hopes that the original drive was dead.

After spending most of monday trying to get 3 old computers to get drives working in the exact way InstantCake wanted I was finally able to get instantcake to build a drive. I don’t really blame instantcake for my woes there. They had strict requirements that I just had trouble getting to work with some old PIII 700’s. Once the drive was built I plugged it in to the old Tivo. No dice. The same problem happened again. It looked like my old Tivo finally died. We had a little more than 3 years together. I am upset that our relationship is over early, but I will get by.

I went to Best Buy near my apartment and picked up a new Tivo Series 2 80 hour DVR. I got it home and Jayson brought over a USB nic card that he had (I bribed him with Pizzeria Uno). The Tivo for some reason keep rebooting itself. The online community didn’t say very much about this problem other than it is very bad and I should bring back the unit. So after only 3 hours with it, my Series 2 Tivo went back and I got another shinny new one. This time the setup was a snap and I have been happy (or kind of happy, I did have to blow $299 before rebate on tech I already had but it broke)

At the same time on Monday I decided that the ATI All In Wonder video capture system was not doing it for me. I did some research on a product that looked like a good Digital Video Recorder (DVR) for the PC. Beyond TV from Snapstream got my interest. the problem was the demo sucked on my ATI card since the ATI card did software MPEG-2 encoding. If I knew that I would never have bought the card. The software itself looked awesome. So I took the plunge and bought a bundle of Beyond TV 3.5 and a Hauppauge USB2 video capture device. I got it yesterday and it rocks so far. I am now just programing it up, but it looks like most of the Tivo functionality on my PC. and I have full access to the MPEG-2 files it creates. The bundle even came with its own remote that actually works. It is nice.

These new hardware investments are now funded by the sale of all that old gear I got rid of over the past 2 months. Easy come, easy go I guess. I am at least using this gear. I am addicted to video capture recently, what can I say.