New TiVO's won't skip past commercials. Would you reconsider buying one for this reason?

source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...astadvertisers

 

Hell no. My ReplayTV is amazing and it will skip commercials.

 

Uh... the article says that Tivo still fast-forwards through commercials. They're throwing ad images up as you fast-forward to get you interested... which I suspect will just get people to use non-branded PVR's.

These tricks are innovative and intrguing but people will stop clicking quickly...

Love my TiVo... but not replacing it soon.

 

but I don't have to fast forward, ReplayTV skips commercials instantaneously.

 

Really? So it can sense where the commericals are and skip them dynamically?

I have a Tivo too. I got my fixed up though!
HDR 212 w/ 320 hours, 2 160gb maxtors, Video extraction, cachecard, doppler radar, sports scores, and many other programs.

If anyone ever wants any info about Tivo or how to upgrade yours let me know. I know way too much about them...Guess what I use to spend time doing before I got the TSX....

 

Do you have an upgraded harddrive?
How many hours can your replay tv hold?

 

Yes, I'm not sure what it uses to "sense" commercials, but it does so pretty well about 90% of the time. I'm guessing it uses black space between the show and commercial. I haven't upgraded my hard drive yet, but since you can connect ReplayTV to your network and download programs off of it, I haven't done anything with it yet, hardware-wise.

 

Very nice man. What is the monthly subscription?

I've always seen replaytv and wondered more about it. There don't seem to be quite as many users as there are Tivo users, so it's hard to find people to talk to about it.

So what kind of video format are the replaytv files?
Is it proprietary or do they use one of the popular video formats such as .mpg?

 

hehe well mine is a long story. I bought it on ebay from ReplayTV directly for like $90 shipped. The auction's picture said that a free lifetime activation was included. After I did buy-it-now, they balked and I turned them in to ebay and paypal... they never bothered me again and here five months later my lifetime activation is still working fine. Normally, lifetime is like $300, monthly is like $10.

The video format is an mpg of some sort, though the encoder is pretty weird. I found a plugin for TMPGeNC which allows me to encode any video for play on a replay tv, but it's sort of a pain in the ass to do it. Instead, I just save videos from the replay tv, re-encod them to xvid, and enjoy them on the computer.

 

The new tivo will skip past commercials, you just will get a ad while your skippin.

 

That's cool dude....A free lifetime subscription...Damn..u came up!! lol...
Very good deal! I pay about $7 a month for mine.

I figured that it would require some re encoding. Some of the Tivo extraction utilites do allow you to extract as standard playable mpg, but I like to edit out the commercials and encode them to Divx for playing on my portable video player, which I have hooked up to the Pioneer n1 in my car. Even that is a pain in th ass to do sometimes. Especially if it's a show that I only wanna watch once.

I'm gonna have to look a little more into replay Tv and also the hacks out. If it's not too expensive it might be worth checking out!

So you can just put the replay tv on your network and your computer could see itz harddrive right away?

 

Which Tivo do you have eld?

 

Odd...my DirecTV combo box doesn't. Although we are still on version 3.1.2c. DirecTV won't release v.4 with the cool folders and such.

 

well there's a program out there which I use. It actually turns my PC into a networked ReplayTV, in the eyes of my real unit. I can them stream shows between the two of them. I can watch shows which are on my ReplayTV's hard drive on my computer, and vice versa. It's a neat feature but it is kind of difficult to use. Streaming is only useful if you're directly cabled, wireless gives me trouble.

 

I'm a replaytv guy myself and love it. the Commercial skip is really nice. It creates an event file (.evt) and marks all the moments in the show when there are black spaces. Then it creates another file where it rates those black screen moments, the higher the rating, the more likely it'll get considered as a commercial during playback, and skipped over. The low rated ones (not entirely black screen maybe, or was a very short period with no audio break either, indicated just a dark scene in the show), it wont skip over.

yeah they use mpeg2, but a weird encapsulation method. luckily my burnign program has no trouble with it, and I can drag and drop replaytv mpg files and burn DVDs out of them with just a few seconds on transcoding, with no re-encoding needed. (i.e., about 10 seconds of work between hitting burn, and the actual burn starting, to prep the file for dvd video spec)

the program used to grab the files off the replaytv is called DVArchive, runs on windows, linux, and macosx. it'll let you download shows, stream shows with no downloading, upload shows back in (if they haven't been altered), and setup/schedule recordings remotely.

Btw, replaytv doesn't do commercial skip anymore, the last models to do it were the 50x0 models (5040, 5060, 5080, etc). They got sued over commercial skip and had to take the feature out, the new models 550x, do not have this feature (5504, 5506, 5508, etc). So if you want commercial skip, you gotta get an older model. the 50x0 and 550x models are identical otherwise, except for the commercial skip being removed.

-vasu

 

yeah i got lucky, mine is a 5040.

 

The article was just refering to the new generation of Tivo's. Hopefully they will not be able to update the older Tivos to also show ads while fast forwarding.
I think doubt that it's possible, but hey you never know what Tivo might try to pull.

Either way though, it is just a matter of time before a hack comes out to disable the advertising. The Tivo OS is Linux. It's based on a Linux kernel and has some modifications to it. It just runs tcl which has a syntax similar to C.

 

Very interesting info Vasu. So do you burn DVDs with the commericals, or when you drag it over, will it allow you to bring it over without the commercials?
I can do the same thing as you with burning directly to DVDs, but I don't like having the commercials.

What other replay tv modules are out?
I might look into getting one to play with, but I'm just wondering if the amount of programs that are out. There are soo many programs out for Tivo including Tivowebplus which allows remote control of your Tivo and also streaming your Tivo video signal to the web, so that you can view and control using a web browser. Does replay tv happen to have something like this out?

There's a lot more stuff. Take a look.
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/

People are actually now using there Xbox to control and play the files off of there Tivo. And also doing automated batch extraction and divx re-encoding.

That commercial skip feature sounds really sweet though. That is the one thing that the Tivo is lacking still. People have tried to write programs in order to strip the commercials out of a video file, but there has not been a reliable solution made.

 

There's another program called RTVTools, and a couple others that'll do it, that will take the downloaded .evt file and the .mpg file, and parse the show using the commercial points and spit out a commercial free episode.

Takes about 30 seconds for an hour long ep. There's no real processor work, it's just rewriting the file without the commercial bits, so as fast as your hard drive can duplicate a file (intensive read/write task), will be as fast as the output time. i.e., if you have a laptop (4200rpm) or slower desktop (5400rpm) drive, the time it takes the parse the file wil be a bit more.

The program DVArchive lets you do a lot. You can remote control over the web, and stream content, etc. There's even a patched version of VLC (a popular cross platform media player) that supports the replay event file so you can stream a show without commercials, which is REALLY sweet. The only thing you can't do it stream live tv, it has to be a fully recorded show.

But basically everymorning, DVArchive sends me an email ( i have it running all the time on an old computer that's also pulling double duty as a web server) of what it's going to record over the two days, any conflicts that need to be addressed, etc. There's also a web interface it can generate to search for shows, schedule recordings, delete shows, download/stream, etc. Basically everything you can do wtih DVArchive on your local network, it'll also let you do over the web.

-vasu

 

Holy Crap! ...My initial question was poorly worded but I'm overwhelmed by everything I'm learning about TiVO type tehnology. Granted, some of it is over my head but I get the idea that it's a great toy even if there are pop-up ads in place of the skipped commercals. I'll have to give this thread a second read when I'm not so buzzed.

 

Haha..!! Yeah if you have questions just ask man.

 

Very cool Vasu! It's nice to find someone that actually knows about some of the other programs out. I've asked people with replay TV in the past and all they say is yes. I have it. I push record and it records. Then I ask about extraction and they just give me a puzzled look...haha.

What model replay TV would I need? I just want that commercial skip. What's the price range? How big is a file for an hour long show?

There are lots of good Tivo ulities out there, but the only thing I care about is extracting and edit out commercials.

So to programing conflicts, those don't get resolved automatically by the replay TV based on priority of your Season pass?

Is there a Season pass feature? Season pass basically will record every instance of a show regardless of what time/channel it's on.

 

Any 50xx series does commercial advance, though I think it's been replaced in the retail market with the 55xx series.

Here's some good information about the ReplayTV's capabilities.

http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/03/replaytv_hack_d.html

 

ReplayTV doesn't handle the actual recording as well as Tivo. It's kinda funny, there are people that buy cellphones that don't have as good reception or battery life, but get it knowing it has the better games, camera, ringtones, etc.

Replay, while not having a great interface or recording system, has (or at least had at the time), better extraction tools and auto commercial skip, so I chose it.

You can record 2 ways. A theme recording will record anything at any time relating to a theme, which could be "comedy" or you can make your own like make a "Seinfeld" theme. The latter works a lot like season pass, it'll grab all eps of seinfeld, all day, everyday. And since it's in syndication, that's like 4-8 episodes. You can also do a show based recording, i..e, "record scrubs, everyday it comes on at 830pm." This will catch eps of scrubs during it's normal primetime air time, and will look an hour ahead, and an hour behind just incase the show gets moved a little bit in either direction. But if you use a show based recording, isntead of a theme based recording, and scrubs gets moved from tuesday at 830 to thursday at 7, you'll be out of luck. You can tell it to do 830pm, look everyday and record the day it airs, but if it's more than 60 (or 30) minutes different than what you have set, it wont catch it. I hope that made sense. Basically theme recordings can be broad, and show recordings, very specific.

As far as conflict resolution. If you have a theme "channel" setup, it'll try and record the ep at a later time if possible (like if show airs at 8pm, and has a 2am rerun). I think you can also give it a number of cirlces like a rating (1 red circle or 2 red circles). And I can't remember, but I think show specific records take precedent over theme recordings. You can also get DVArchive to email you about conflicts and you can make changes over the web, which is sweet.

Also, the ReplayTV mpeg encoder is nicer. An hour long tv show at medium quality is around 850mb, I think. Alls I know is that when I set my replaytv to lowest quality and my friend with his tivo to lowest quality, the replaytv looked much much better.

A great forum to read up/ask stuff is the replay secion of the audio/video science forums: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forum...?s=&forumid=27 (there are also forums for tivo and home theater, etc)

You'll need to find a 50x0 model. jaydub is right, the 55x0 hsa replace it in the retail environment. Some people were successful if taking a hard drive image of a 50x0 model and writing onto a 55x0 drive and getting commercial skip, but a "os upgrade" in august killed the feature off, but of course, it's still working in the older models.

Your best bet for finding one is ebay. Search 5040, 5060, 5080 (40gb, 60gb, 80gb, respectivly).

There was a 5080 unit, factory refurb on the replaytv outlet site (www.replaytv.com then go to buy replay, and outlet store) for $99! Which is great cause a normal 5508 is $300. So it was the same features as a new one, WITH commercial skip for 1/3 the price.

Those quickly sold out a week ago though.

-vasu

 

i have a 35 gb tivo and want to expand it. How would i do it?

 

Very good info vasu!

I have to see whether it's worth it now. The Season pass and all of that stuff is actually pretty important to me. I often don't even touch my Tivo for a couples weeks and come back and watch everything at once. I don't like to have to do any maintenence in order to resolve conflicts. I have about 20 season passes right now and I just have them ordered by priority in the Tivo. If there is a conflict the Tivo just resolves it by recording the show of higher priority.

How difficult is harddrive upgrades?
Is there an automated extraction utlity available?

I'm not sure it's worth it in order to just get the commercial skip and archiving.
Those won't really do me as much good if it's not recording exactly what I want all the time.

Will it handle shows that go over 30 minutes....For example Friends last year had episodes that were 38 minutes long. Will it record all 38 min?

I wish I could see a replay TV first hand. Then I would know. Thanks for all the info!

 

Fry's had one on display, if you have one nearby.

 

Series 1 or 2?
Model?

It's not too hard. Do you have basic computer knowledge?
Can you install your own harddrive?
Do you know what master/slave is?

 

Read this site: http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/

Best setp-by-step instructions there are.

 

Yep!! that's where I learned too...Itz the Tivo capacity upgrade bible...lol..

 

Great place for TIVO upgrades... www.weakknees.com

I just upgraded my 140HR TIVO Series 2 to a 315 HR with this kit...

http://www.weaknees.com/details2/as160t541.php

 

Weakness is very good! They are well known in the Tivo community..!!

 

I have a 5504 and love it. It doesn't auto skip commercials for u, but 3 clicks of the fwd-skip and it skips all of them. I have it setup w/ DVArchive so I didn't upgrade the 40GB hd on my replay, just offload them to the 200GB HD on my network server.

 

I've been meaning to hack my replay for a bigger hard drive, I think it tells you everything you need to know here:
http://www.replayfaq.com/

 

Ask Vasu...he knows a lot about replaytv. I'm sure he would help you out.