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January 30, 2005

Riley Videos

Working on getting some photos posted, but in the meantime, here are a couple of videos of Riley walking and eating.

If the video doesn't work, you need Flash 7, which you can download here.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:18 PM

January 25, 2005

The Party Pooper

I really thought this was a joke when I started watching the trailer, but apparently it isn't. A&E has an original movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger's life and his run for governor called "See Arnold Run." I can't tell if it's trying to be campy or serious, but I really hope it's the former. This could be exceedingly grim. Trailer's fun to watch though.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:37 AM

January 24, 2005

aacPlus

Interesting story in Slate about aacPlus which supposedly gives near CD-quality audio at 48kbps and very good quality at 24kbps. In addition to the usual compression techniques (throwing out that which the human ear can't readily perceive), aacPlus mathematically rebuilds high frequencies and uses parametric stereo to save space. Pretty cool stuff, though I'm not sure the world needed another audio format. Could really make flash memory-based MP3 players much more useful if they can be firmware-upgraded.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:21 PM

TiVo to Go

It's been an awfully long time since I posted, I know. Christmas and a lot going on with the house have kept us crazy busy. Will put some kiddo pictures up ASAP.

Anyway, so my TiVo to Go update finally downloaded this weekend and it's not exactly what I've been hoping for.

First the concept: TiVo to Go lets you download video off of your TiVo's hard drive and play it on PCs. You can also, if you pony up for a special copy of Sonic MyDVD, burn the shows to DVD. Sounds great, right? Can clean all the junk off of the TiVo's hard drive and keep all those back episodes of "All in the Family" without having to buy the DVD sets. What could go wrong?

Setup: To start, you download TiVo Desktop 2.0. The old version let you "broadcast" your photos and music from your PC to your TiVo, which is a fairly decent trick if you have photos to show to the relatives. The interface was clumsy, but it worked. The new version of TiVo Desktop lets you go the other way, from your TiVo to your PC. When you're setting up the program, you have to give it the "access key," which is a unique ID number that your video content is branded with (more on that in "DRM" below). You also have to create a five character-plus "password," which is a little confusing since you also have an access key, but it's all explained pretty well and works like you'd expect.

Connecting to your TiVo: Here's where the wheels start to come off. I have my TiVo Series 2 (Tivo to Go only works with Series 2s) connected to my router via a little Linksys 802.11b dongle. Best I can tell, TiVo doesn't support any of the 802.11g adapters. The first few times I tried to connect to my TiVo, both from my wireless laptop and from my wired desktop, the program stuttered and hung, eventually reporting that it had trouble connecting and had given up. More oddly, the TiVo itself seemed to keep dropping off my network and, weirder still, its IP number kept changing. After trying several times, I did finally get both machines to connect and download a list of shows.

Downloading Content: Now comes the real buzzkill. This thing is sloooow. It does no conversion of the MPEG-2 files on the hard disk, so if you capture your content in anything resembling decent quality, you're talking about some monster files -- somewhere on the order of about 28MB/min. It's really unfortunate that the TiVo couldn't capture in something a little more svelte, like WMA9 or Real or DivX or Ogg Tarkin or whatever the hell you like. Anything would be better than having a 30 minute TV show turn into an 850MB file. Downloading over 802.11b is a nightmarish slag, with the 30 minute TV show estimating upwards of an hour to download. TiVo reports that the wireless connection is "excellent," so it shouldn't just be a matter of a bad connection; it's just freaking slow. Besides, maxing out an 11Mbps connection should yield somewhere on the order of about 1.3MB/s. Instead, I'm getting less than half that.

Which might be tolerable, except that the thing timed out every time I tried to use it and never finished a single transfer successfully. It also had difficulty resuming failed transfers, which means that you could let it sit for an hour or two, come back and find out that there had been a mysterious connection failure and you don't have anything. Oh, and if you have a failed transfer sitting on one machine, you can't connect to the TiVo from another one until you explictly cancel the first transfer, even if the TiVo Desktop software on that machine has given up the download.

One other option is to get a USB-ethernet dongle and plug in directly to the TiVo to download the files, but there are two problems with that. 1. It's a pain to have to do that. 2. TiVo's Plug-and-Play is seriously sketchy, which is to say, I've never gotten it to work, so you'd have to reboot the TiVo to get it to see the new network adapter.

DRM: Okay, let's say you do get something downloaded (I had a partial file). The good news is that the quality is fine, especially on a computer screen. It has the requisite NTSC fuzz you see when you go from a TV to a sharp laptop screen, but it looks nice. BUT, every time you play a recording, you have to enter the stupid password you created during setup. I know they're worried about piracy, but believe me, the market for fuzzy 1.6GB episodes of "Desparate Housewives" with Comcast cable box advertising crud at the beginning of the show (from the channel change) is pretty slender. Folks are doing much better quality HD captures with higher-end rigs, so having the Digital Rights Management on these files is just stupid. They're too big and too ugly to want to share.

TiVo Latency: Perhaps worst of all, TiVo menu response time has been slowed significantly. Menus draw more slowly and everything is just laggy compared to the old days (read: last week). Maybe it's related to the failed pending transfer I have hanging out there, but it's pretty rotten nonetheless, and TiVo should be able to handle sending a file over the network while it shows a menu since its able to capture and write video while it's doing it.

There are a couple of new TiVo features with the update, including the ability to turn off the LEDs, which I guess you'll want if you're in a home theater situation. TiVo to Go, overall, is a real mess, though, and let's hope they fix it soon. The file size issue is probably impossible to resolve, but, even if you get past that, the reliability issues are a real buzzkill for what should have been a useful service.

Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:27 AM