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.�? 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,�? 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.

Need an external hard drive for movie storage? Look no further, Western Digital has come to the rescue. Introducing “My Book Essential Edition 2.0″, a hard drive the size of a paperback book. Contained within it’s cover is 1 TB of disk space, and a 2.0 USB port. It’s a plug-n-store device for all your PVR needs, and it costs $349.

The Diamani DUO line of LCD’s from Viewsonic has been launched. It’s a unique hybrid of TV and computer monitor. There’s a 19″ version for $349 and a 22″ version $399. Both sporting slim, sexy HDMI inputs, as well as HD tuners. They’re also equipped with VGA inputs. And to address your analog desires, there’s component, RCA, and S-video inputs. It’s the “be all to end all” of TV’s… I mean monitors… I mean… where was I? Oh yeah, It’s fine time someone tried to invent something useful for the practical man.

Electronista

At HGTV Marketplace, they’re offering a 4 seat spa with a motorized 61″ LCD HDTV. It’s a custom order through Catalina Spas, so there is no price listed. But, I’m sure if you have a vivid imagination you could conjure up a price close enough to what they’re asking. Who says the US economy is bad?

I want to write about two seemingly separate things today, but I am sure you’ll recognize the underlying similarity.

Lets start with Tivo. There are really two ways to enjoy prime-time shows pre-recorded for your convenience. Method One –Choose few of your favorites, tell Tivo to auto-record the season for you, and watch at your leisure. Method Two — Choose all prime-time shows (or over 80%), use dual tuner Tivo (or 2 dual-tuner Tivos) to record them (usually while watching the 3rd or the 5th prime-time show meanwhile). So then what? When on earth do you find the time to watch all these shows? Pull All Nighters, all week? Spend whole weekend watching? Do you really need to watch Everything? Is it humanly possible?

With ever increasing Amount and Quality of media, in the age that most anyone with a camera can produce quality content, I think we need to start learning that you can Not catch them all!

I think we all need to realize that the purpose of Tivo is to Liberate you from TV dependency. Gone are the days that if you don’t watch it live, you don’t watch at all. No longer do you need to choose whether to live your life on your terms or be bound by TV schedule into a strict routine.

Which one is you?

And now I want to touch on the other subject, as promised.

Your probably noticed by now that this blog ain’t engadget, or kotaku or anything like that. My goal isn’t to bring you every and all imaginable news from the world of PVRs, at the average rate of 5 stories an hour. I really doubt that many of you care that Tivo added some new TivoCast content, or that Fox partnered with Brightcove for some Web TV. And if you do care, I am sure you subscribe to several other PVR blogs and you will read it there anyway. One of my missions, is to sift through the noise out there on the Web and bring you the best and most important stories that are changing the Media landscape as we know it. Of course I am also here bring you some useful PVR DIY guides and other prudent information to make your PVR adventuring easier and richer.

So, what’s with the long post, you ask? I felt it was important to put this information about this blog out there, while also taking this opportunity to remind you to use your Tivo responsively.

Enjoy life, folks!

Tivo, Brightcove, Life Balance

Yes, Joost just added Paramount Pictures channel. There are several movies currently available already, and of course I tried one already.

Clockstoppers, a Nickelodeon Studios movie, is a great teen movie I sat down to watch with my kids. And I have to report, it was totally Ok on our 19″ LCD. During few scarce fast moving scenes, there was visible compression artifacts, but overall, it was really fine. In fact, my kids didn’t complain at all!

Very few titles are available right now, but I am sure more will be added in the future.

With Joost being free, and staying free, this seriously changes landscape of Movies on demand on the Internet. Soon you will be able to do a quick search in Joost library of movies, hopefully from multiple major distributors, and simply watch on-demand.

These sure are exciting times!

joost, paramount pictures, on-demand

Still deciding on which flavor you prefer? 

Don’t trouble yourself too much. Babelgum is actually another newcomer in the Internet TV category, closely resembling Joost, and based on similar P2P technology, as I understand.

I downloaded and played around with their first beta recently. Overall, the experience was positive, though the content available on Babelgum at this time is extremely limited.

Every step of the way it reminded me of Joost, but I did notice some interesting differences. First, I felt that the video quality is a bit sharper, though it’s hard to tell in my very unscientific eye test.

Babelgum attempts to more closely replicate TV viewing experience. It starts with providing a mini remote-control that appears on the left side of your screen and continues through to ‘Channel Surfing’ like experience. There are only few “core” channels, that are more like Categories than anything else.

Another interesting difference is a DVR/PVR like feature, where you can choose to “record” a video you are watching. This adds the watched video to Your collection, later accessible as a big Tivo like list. In fact, the show isn’t being recorded at all and the whole thing is more like Bookmarking video. When you do activate it from Your collection later, it streams then, in a same P2P fashion as everything else.

Finally, Babelgum promises to offer Custom channel, where content will be automatically matched to your likings, though it’s unclear to me how will they figure out what it is we like…

Babelgum has no deals with major content providers, and instead plans to focus more on high quality Indie produced content. It plans to remain completely free for viewers and plans a revenue model similar to Joost.

You can check out Babelgum by downloading their beta right here.

babelgum, webtv, internettv, joost

We love Veronica Mars show, which migrated onto the recently formed CW.

So, to remind you to watch Veronica Mars with us, and as a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post, did you know that Veronica is available in full color online streaming on the new CW?

Yep, the good folks at CW also use the high quality Move Networks streaming technology, so the quality is most impressive.

I know everyone loves PVR and watching on big TV and such, but this really changes things. We tried some time ago to catch up on some shows, sitting in front of my measly 19″ LCD. I must say, I felt that the experience was positive and even more intimate. There’s something special about two of us sitting close to the screen, which just isn’t there on the big couch/recliner where we normally watch.

But, maybe it’s just me, or maybe you don’t have a PVR or big-screen TV, or even cable/antenna/tv altogether. You can still watch America’s favorite TV from the comfort of your wireless laptop on the porch, or public WiFi down the street.

It’s just shame that CW chose to only include few recent episodes on their site. Hopefully this will improve in the future.

UPDATE: Veronica Mars was canceled? Shame… Hopefully there are some better shows in the pipe, we’ll see.

WebTV, CW

ABC Full Episode Streaming has been available for some time now, but the specialized high-quality streaming ActiveX component installation was not available for Windows Vista users.

ABC’s streaming is, dare I say, best in the industry at the moment. It offers highest quality video (try it in Big size, or even Full Screen!), via the ActiveX component technology that they licensed from Move Networks.

The good news is that Windows Vista is now finally supported. I tried it out this weekend, and it’s working as advertised. I did run into a minor quirk with the initial installation of Player in my Vista. After install, while the player worked flawlessly, other IE Tabs started having some behavioral issues, including inability to download or run files from the Internet. But, quick Vista restart resolved these issues, so even though officially restart isn’t required, I highly recommended it.

In related news, ABC’s Full Episode Streaming is promising to bring us High Definition streaming quality, hopefully in time for their Fall Season. This is really exciting, and I am looking forward to that, and will keep you posted.

Oh, and you do have to be physically located in the USA to make it work, as far as I know. So, if you are, and you are on Vista or XP, or even Mac, launch your ABC Player and catch up on your favorite shows, including May’s blockbuster Season Finales.

ABC, WebTV,  streaming video, HDTV 

We already brought you some coverage from the rapidly evolving category of Video Search. Those were examples of specialized video searches, such as educational videopedia style searches.

But, for more generic searches, such as when you are looking for specific video clip of presidential debate, or of kids dumping into walls, there are myriad of generic video search engines cropping up.

Some even combine Social aspect of supposed ‘crowd wisdom’ to add to the mix.

My favorites remain Google Video Search and the all time classic YouTube search, but your mileage may vary, depending on type of video you’re looking for.

Here is some more perspective from WebTVWire on this hot topic.

youtube, video search

Joost is rumored to be launching soon. They have released another beta few weeks ago, called Joost with Friends. It didn’t add that much, and I found the upgrade experience to be a bit negative.

In this day and age of auto-updates, I had to do everything manually. On my attempt to login, I was greeted with ‘You must upgrade your version to login, we have made many corrections” message.

I then had to manually locate download URL from Joost web site (which isn’t that public, since the software is in beta still), download new installer and proceed to uninstall old/reinstall new version.

I am sure it is one of those things they are working on still, they are in beta after all.

Looks like major companies really like Joost premise, since they are promising to offer their premium shows there. No talk yet about bringing HD to Joost, I wonder when that will happen…

Check out good summary of Joost news from TechCrunch.

joost, internet tv, web tv

Our household has been fortunate to participate in NetFlix Streaming for about a month now. We basically got an extra Tab in our NetFlix account to watch movies On-Demand. The selection of “Watch Now” movies is very limited still, with most being documentaries, but I am sure it will grow.
You can actually watch streaming (and only streaming for now, no downloads) movies up to dollar amount of hours of your monthly subscription. For example, we pay about $18 per month, that gives us 18 hours of on-demand movie watching per month. This is in addition to NetFlix sending out their DVDs in their usual rotation.
NetFlix is doing limited beta/roll-out of this, as I understand, before making it available to everyone.

But the latest buzz is around next version of NetFlix On-Demand movie player. It’s incorporating new Microsoft technology called Silverlight, making it into handsome, and fully featured, full-screen movie player.
Good folks at Webware bring us a video preview of this upcoming wonder.
I do hope that Silverlight will further improve the quality of on-demand streaming, to bring it not just to DVD quality, but perhaps even higher

[via Webware]

sliverlight, Netflix, WebTV, InternetTV

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