Las Vegas (Nevada) - Several Web sites have posted rumors about an impending partnership between Tivo, the video recording and scheduling service, and satellite TV providers, DirectTV and Dish Network. All three companies market digital video recorders and rumor has it that they will partner up to provide mobile content. While there are no official statements, it’s easy to see how this makes sense.

Well, CES is just a week away and it looks like the rumors have started, right on time. I don’t know about this one though, the tension between DirecTV and TiVo has been very public for a while, as DirecTV has stopped production of the TiVo-based R10 DVR and replaced it with the NDS-based R15. (The TiVo unit is still in stock but you have to request it specifically.) I suppose a partnership with Dish could be part of a settlement of the patent violation lawsuit TiVo still has pending against Echostar/Dish. It seems more likely that facts are getting confused. TiVo has TiVoToGo to support mobile content. Dish Network has a portable media player that can connect to some of the DVRs. And DirecTV just announced that they’ll be announcing (yes, really) a mobile solution at CES. Right now it seems more like three independent solutions and not a partnership between the three companies. Still, thought I’d share the rumor, it makes life interesting. I’ll be ‘reporting’ from CES personally January 5-9.

Offer behind the cut - 3 free months service on top of the standard rebate.
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TiVo wireless G USB network adapter

* Easily connect your TiVo Series2 DVR to your 802.11g or 802.11b wireless home network
* Enjoy TiVoToGo™ and Multi-Room Viewing transfers, Music and Photos, Online Scheduling, and more
* Eliminates the need for a phone line, if used with a broadband connection
* Optimized wireless performance with your TiVo® Series2™ DVR
* Real brushed metal base; flip-up antenna with TiVo badge
* For use with a TiVo Series2 DVR only. Not for use with a TiVo® Series1™ DVR (with no USB ports) or DIRECTV DVR with TiVo®. Not intended to be plugged into a PC or Mac.

More photos on this page.

Thanks to ZatzNotFunny for mentioning it.

And for those who want more details, ChuckyBox at TiVoCommunity.com posted this link to FCC documents which show the docs, the internals of the adapter, etc. (I’ve had that link for weeks, but I agreed not to share it until TiVo announced the adapter officially.)

This is the chipset being used.

Pioneer Electronics announced its first Blu-ray Disc drive Tuesday, the BDR-101A, which will store as much as 25GB of data when it goes on sale in the first quarter of 2006.

Also:
Pioneer plans to unveil at the International Consumer Electronics Show its first Blu-ray Disc format optical disc drive for personal computers, it said this week. The drive will go on sale in Japan at the end of January pending the completion of two licensing issues, the company says.

It sounds like the release is pending two items:
- Finalization of AACS, which both BD and HD-DVD rely on. It was supposed to be finished by the fall of 2005, and is still incomplete
- Finalization of the licensing terms for the BD logo

The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years

Number one is the Sony Walkman and number two is the Apple iPod - hard to argue with either of those, they produced a sea change.

And at number three is a tie - TiVo and ReplayTV, for changing the way we watch TV and introducing DVRs.

At WeaKnees, we’ve been getting endless questions about the new DIRECTV DVR Plus - the R15, and asking us to compare it to the TiVo-based DIRECTV DVR R10. The question generally boils down to: Which is better? In an attempt to give you the information necessary to answer that question yourself, we’ve written up a comparison of the units, with an emphasis on details of the new non-TiVo R15 since most of our readers and customers are somewhat (if not very) familiar with TiVo DVRs.

It is a decent comparison, and the R15 doesn’t come out looking very good overall - though it has a couple of interesting features. They have more coming.

MythTVfs:

This is a FUSE (http://fuse.sf.net/) server that was designed to communicate with a MythTV backend server. It creates an overlay filesystem that encodes TV Program metadata (title, episode, description) into a filename so that system that do not natively talk to MythTV can still get information about a given show. The initial design goal is to make it compatible with the in-filename metadata extraction capabilities that will (hopefully) be in future versions of Galleon (http://galleon.sf.net/).

Thanks to EBF on TiVoCommunity.com:

If you go to the To Do List and find a show that will be clipped (marked with a * next to the time). Select the program and pick Change Recording Options. Under Start/Stop Recording you should see that the show will be clipped. Change this to Start/Stop On Time. Save your changes. You should then see the conflict confirmation screen offering to clip the other show. Now the other show will be the one clipped instead!

That’s a pretty neat trick. Especially when the end of a program is going to be clipped - usually better to clip the start of the next instead.

TiVo released the 7.2 software a couple of months ago, and that introduced network Guided Setup, which completely eliminated the need for a phone line. However, the retail channel is still packed with pre-7.2 boxes. But there is a way to tell if you’ll need that phone line or not without opening the box and booting the TiVo:

There’s two ways to tell if the box contains the 7.2.1 update, which does not require a land line.

The first way is to look at the UPC label. If it’s marked “SS” in front of the UPC code then it contains the latest software version.

The second is to look at the text on the carton messaging around the phone line which will mention different requirements. The carton text reads:

You get: Instructions, TiVo Remote, Cables, TiVo DVR.
You’ll also need the easy-to-use TiVo service plus your existing phone line or broadband connection. You’ll need to activate and connect to the TiVo service through your existing phone line or via your existing wired/wireless home network* and broadband connection.

Remember, if you’re setting up a new unit on a network you need a supported adapter: http://www.tivo.com/adapters or http://www.tivo.com/getready