Microsoft Standalone PVR
on 01.05.05, 09:29pm in home theater • comments (3)
[Jupiter Research via Matt Goyer] As part of their digital home efforts, Bill Gates announced as part of his keynote Microsoft is releasing a standalone DVR/DVD-Burner platform to compete with the likes of TiVo. First to market will be a new box from LG later this year. These units will have a look and feel similar to the Media Center PC platform but will not be traditional PCs nor will they be usable for PC tasks such as running Office. They will have the standard Windows EPG and will be able to burn content to DVDs. Since they support Windows Connect, they will be able to stream music and pictures from your PC and also be able to transfer TV content to your PC for syncing to a portable media center. Media Center Extender technology to connect to a media center PC is also planned but won’t necessarily make it into the final release.
YES! This is what I’ve been waiting for - an ‘appliance’ Media Center Edition. This could be the box to get me to dump the Tivo in the living room (and heck, depending on the features, I may even replace the MCE in the theater with it).
And, speaking of Tivo - I’m still waiting for the software update for TivoToGo.
Tommy Williams (January 5, 2005 @ 11:39 pm)
This seems promising, but I bet there won’t be a DirecTV version of the device. And without that, no dice.
I had to downgrade from UltimateTV to a DirecTivo Series 2 a few months ago when one of the tuners in my UltimateTV burned out.
And it was a downgrade — the user interface was much smoother, more friendly, and just better than the DirecTivo.
I love our DirecTV service, though, and that’s one area where I’m not willing to compromise. If DirecTivo is all I can get that’s integrated with DirecTV, then I’m willing to stick with it.
Barry Dorrans (January 6, 2005 @ 12:55 am)
And I’ll put serious money it won’t support any of the UK digital TV systems and the tuners will only be for the US. In about a year a UK manufacturer will release one, but it will only support the free to air channels, not the way more popular sky or cable.
Bloody US centric nonsense. Pah.
Dustin Mihalik (January 6, 2005 @ 8:37 am)
It would be nice to have DVR/DVD Burning/and video streaming on one device. But, with as much trouble as I’ve had with other UPNP (sounds like UPNP since it uses Windows Connect) devices, I’m gonna be fairly skeptical until I actually play with it.
I think Windows Media Connect has the ability to work pretty well if I could ever find a device that took advantage of some of the things it can do. I’m mostly worried about video transcoding since I usually end up trying to play video in strange formats. But, if it can use standard Directshow filters to transcode the video and stream it to the device, I’d happily move my MCE out of my entertainment center.