All PVR

From Teleglass comes the T4-N Limited Edition Video Glasses. The glasses create a simulated 45 inch screen (as if sitting from six feet away), with a resolution of 640 x 480. Coolness abound, you can focus and adjust each monitor to reduce eye strain. As you can see by the picture above the audio comes from frame-mounted earbuds.

Just connect any NTSC viseo player and enjoy. They look stylish, unlike the competition, and it’s hidden components reside in the frame and nose-piece. Word on the street is that they cost $1150 per pair, but you’ll have to hurry, because there’s only 500 available.

Pink Tentacle via Teleglass

And now for something completely different… Athusa and Backyard Birding

The “mythical” Traveling Terabyte Gear

In reference to an entry published on Sept. 23 (“Hacker Sends War-Tough Marines a Befitting PVR�), I have received a generous update about the Traveling Terabyte Project. Go to www.travelingterabyte.org for all the official information.

This is an important project that connects us to our beloved Devil Dogs (Marines). It provides them a care-package that we can all share in to show support. Hopefully it gives the soldiers a bit of home when they’re abroad, and keeps them grounded when they’re in hell (Ooo-Rah!).

They are not yet taking donations (as this is a grassroots movement stemming from the generosity of one person, Deviant Ollam), though there should be something set up soon.

And, as a big fan of this project, I will also be posting updates and hopefully finding more supporters, at Athusa.net. Let make it work.

Very, very special thanks, and American gratitude to: AST Cell. As well as to all the people involved with this project.

“Deviant Ollam” is a New Jersey hacker/network engineer who saw fit to create the Traveling Terabyte Project (TTB). A program in which he sends hard drives, filled with popular movies, television shows and music, in Pelican cases, to Marines in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan.

Deviant said this about his revelation, “I’ve got this extra storage and thought ‘what could I do with it?’. It didn’t really make sense to put the disks into my already hugely ridiculous raid array.â€? So, why not send them to a few Leathernecks? Everyone needs a little inspiration (even tough-guys). But, shipping the drives to a war-torn country could’ve been an obstacle, “You can’t really put the drives in bubble wrap and throw them in the mail,â€? So he instead packed the equipment into the olive-drab cases with international power adapters and USB cables.

Once Marines receive the cases they often add their own files customizing and personalizing their gifts (becoming a snapshot of our modern heroes lives). And, like any grassroots movement, these drives have become a small overseas urban-legend. Eventually being delivered to the American embassy in Dushanbe Tajikistan, just to prove they exist.

Hopefully the Traveling Terabyte Project will get legs. I’m still searching for a donation website. If anyone knows of one, please comment. Anything we can do to remedy some of the stress of being in a war zone, is something we should do. They’re heroes.

From one American cyber-geek to another, thank you, ‘Deviant Ollam’.

More thanks to TG Daily for getting the word out on this project.

From Spycatcher of Knightsbridge, comes a pair of sunglasses befitting of “007″. As if from the dusty journals of “Q”, these sunglasses are not what they appear. Hidden inside the frame is a color video camera, PVR, and microphone (to film everything the wearer sees). And, that’s not all:

“The personal video recorder includes a built-in colour monitor and speaker, 32MB internal memory, which can be expanded by inserting a more powerful SD/MMC card and the ability to time and date stamp all video recordings.”

“Video system: NTSC/PAL
Resolution: 350 lines
Number of effective Pixels: 510×492 (NTSC) 500×582(PAL)”

Being like James Bond, will of coarse, cost you. In this case, (minus the Martini’s) the price is £816 or $1650.

In keeping with this week’s theme, here’s another all-weather HD LCD TV on which you can watch your PVR, spa-side. Produced by Aquivo, it’s so tough it can withstand the force of a fire hose. The reason? It’s constructed with a sealed aluminum frame and special tempered glass. Aquivo is one world’s leading all-weather LCD producers (based in the UK). They make LCD sizes from 25 to 55 inches. All HD or HD Ready.

Special Thanks To: Engadget and Shiny Shiny

BBC is planing to jump onto the TV over the Net bandwagon with their iPlayer pretty soon.
Sadly for US dwellers, like myself, looks like the iPlayer will initially only be available in the UK. BBC does have some excellent programming that’s worth watching, IMHO.

The good news is that some shows can be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days, in addition to iPlayer’s Live streaming features. I presume this will let you catch up on your shows while flying, for example. I also hope that downloaded shows will offer premium quality, since player is no longer constrained to just live streaming, but this remains to be seen.

Here’s the complete news announcement from BBC.

Oh, and make sure to check out this excellent WebTV offerings review from major players, linked from that article.

BBC, live streaming, WebTV

I found a video that serves as an introduction to PVRs targeted to U.K. viewers.

It’s really about how to choose a PVR, and gives a general overview of features you can expect to find. Good for newbies only, however.

Virgin Media said that it was changing the name of its personal video recorder (PVR) from TV Drive to VPlus box. Marketing Week in the U.K. says that the name now will compete with rival company BSkyB’s Sky Plus service.

According to the article:

Sky refuses to comment on Virgin’s use of the “Plus” name, but executives are said to be amused at the cable company’s “nerve”.

Sky’s PVR launched in August 2001 and recently announced it had over 2 million PVR customers.

U.K. satellite television provider British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) said this week that its Sky+ PVR passed the 2 million mark this week. Two million users is an interesting figure, since Tivo last reported that is has about 4.4 million. Is the U.K. more PVR-friendly than the U.S.?

Some history: Both Tivo and Sky released their DVRs around the same time in the U.K. The Sky+ DVR was introduced in 2001 and it was slow to catch on. BSkyB spent about £20 million marketing the new PVR and now it seems to be leading the way in PVR ownership and subscribers in the U.K. Last year, BSkyB added a cool feature: allowing subscribers to schedule to record shows via their cell phones. (Tivo, are you listening?)

In the meantime, TiVo launched in the U.K. in 2000 but after manufacturer Thomson, dropped production Sky+ began to dominate the PVR market.

In a press release this week, BSkyB said that a video-on-demand service would be coming in 2007, so users can see the week’s best of shows on-demand.

BSkyB also announced research results of their viewers’ TV watching and recording habits. Apparently, drama is recorded most frequently by customers, accounting for 39.3% of all time-shifted viewing. Other genres that did well are documentaries (14.9%), entertainment (13.0%) and movies (9.5%) although news and weather accounted for just 0.6% of time-shifted viewing.

Surprising, time-shifting accounts for an average of 12.2% of total viewing through Sky+ boxes. That seems low, considering I almost exclusively use my PVR to record everything and watch it later without commercials.

The good folks at Pocket Lint have posted a review of the Sharp TU-R160H Freeview Personal Video Recorder (PVR).

It goes for £230 (about US $450) has 160GB (or 90 hours of content). But the review says that there’s “nothing here that most rivals don’t at least equal for around the same price or less” and has “below average picture quality”.

Unfortunately, it also can’t record two channels at once.

As a reminder, Freeview is a free digital TV service in the U.K.

The folks at Pocket Lint point out that Hauppauge released a triple tuner TV card, the WinTV HVR-3000. It can receive analog TV signals, satellite and Freeview, a digital terrestrial TV system in the United Kingdom. The HVR-3000 costs about £100.

So, yes, it’s only available in the U.K. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a Tivo with three tuners. I think my TV viewing would probably triple.

Imagine buying a PVR that claims to have 100 hours of recording time, then when you take it home, you discover that you can only use 50 hours, with the other half only available for content chosen by the content provider. Sounds lame because it is. In this case, the BBC says it has the right to do this.

Imagine running out of space because of some programming that you don’t want to watch. Imagine not being able to record your favorite show because your PVR is recording something the BBC thinks you should watch.

Freedom to record anything you want is part of what a PVR is all about.

Hopefully the BBC is honest about what it labels this when it comes out from testing their new PVR set top box and service. Why not just call it a 50 hour PVR, instead saying you get “bonus” content? And 50 hours is just way too much storage for unwanted programming.

I think Tivo does a good job with its suggested recordings since they are first to be deleted and don’t take priority over your own shows.

Hopefully, the BBC will change its mind.

From: PVR Wire.