Since I’ve been pretty busy I haven’t had a chance to keep up with all the tech news recently, and one of the items that’s slipped through the cracks is the Hauppauge HD PVR USB device. I last reported on it a few weeks ago when it had been delayed, but in the meantime it has gone up for pre-order and some software support has been announced. Zatz Not Funny, BrentEvans Geek Tonic, and PVR Wire @ TV Squad have all been covering this:
- BEGT: Hauppage HD PVR available for pre-order @ $249
- ZNF: Hauppauge HD PVR specs
- ZNF: SageTV Says HD PVR support is coming
- ZNF: SnapStream & Elgato evaluating possible HD PVR support
- PVR Wire: Free GB-PVR already supports HD PVR

And I think that catches it all up.

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at how time-shifting via TiVo and place-shifting via Slingbox are changing the TV landscape and the social aspect of TV viewing. “Today my TV is not your TV, and you can never assume the same people are watching the same thing at the same time or in the same way.” And he expresses feelings that are likely common to most DVR users - not wanting to go back to pre-DVR TV viewing, of the power to watch the content you want when you want, and the large behavioral changes their bring to our TV-related habits. But what I found most interesting is his list of five major lessons learned from the first years of DVR use. Give it a read.

Back at CES Hauppauge announced their HD PVR PC USB add-on, which will allow PCs to record high-definition content from component input into H.264/AVCHD video. Originally slated for ‘1Q08′, which ends today, it was pushed back to ’spring’, and now Brent Evans at Zatz Not Funny reports that it “should hit the market toward the end of May, early June.”

Additionally, the $249 add-on will not initially work with Windows Media Center, due to the latter’s lack of H.264 video support. Though support is planning for sometime later this summer. Brent hypothesizes that H.264 will be included in the ‘Fiji’ Windows Media Center update, which is now entering beta, and appears to be supporting the DirecTV HD PC tuner. DirecTV is, of course, using MPEG-4/H.264 for their new HD channels.

According to Advertising Age the results of over three years of research by Information Resources Inc. into DVR and non-DVR households shows that DVR households purchase new packaged goods products 5% less often than non-DVR households amongst IRI’s ‘Pacesetting’ brands and that roughly 20% of all brands showed a statistically significant reduction in volume. A handful of brands actually saw a slight sales increase in DVR households, but it wasn’t statistically significant. But it is an indication that not all brands will necessarily suffer from DVR ad-skipping.

The research also shows that moving ad money away from TV can help mitigate the impact of DVRs. The brands that spend 20% of more of their media budgets outside of TV showed no significant drop in DVR households. The study also provided some insight into DVR users’ habits:

Overall, IRI panelists watched 42% of the programming on CBS time-shifted, compared to only 10% on the Food Network and 18% on Lifetime. While 34% of programming originally airing on Fridays was time-shifted, only 15% of Sunday shows were.

As network executives have suspected, the study showed people were far less likely to fast-forward through network promos than ads– indicating that creative appeal does make a difference. More than 60% of viewers, for example, watched network promos in the first pod position at normal speed vs. fewer than 45% who watched other ads.

There is some more interesting information in the article.

EngadgetHD is conducting a poll as to the best HD DVR. I think you can guess my vote.

I initially reported on Gefen’s HD DVR during CES, and then again last week when Zatz Not Funny got their hands on one. The real standout feature of the box is the HDMI input. That’s pretty much unheard of. HDCP is normally felt to preclude recording from HDMI. But Gefen claimed they were compliant as they preserved the HDCP flags on their HDMI output.

However, there was a wee loophole. The recordings on the drive were unencrypted. If you pulled the drive and connected it to a PC you could copy the raw H.264 files, as Dave Zatz discovered. A perfect HD piracy tool. Well, CNET News.com reports that Gefen is closing this loophole and will begin encrypting the drives. Why didn’t they do that from the start? Well, they had this to say to CNET:

Gefen did not anticipate that users would void warranty to crack the unit and use the internal drive in this fashion. The company is currently in the process of encrypting every internal drive of every HD PVR so this situation will be corrected.

So, either Gefen is run by truly oblivious individuals or they’ve managed to avoid reading every tech blog in the world. The very first thing we geeks do is violate the warranty and open the box up! See also my TiVo reviews with internal photos. Gefen was really surprised that someone a) opened the box, b) tried connecting the drive to a PC, and c) posted the results online? Really? I’d be surprised if someone didn’t do that with a new product! Since the boxes are not network connected, I don’t know how they’ll address units in the field. They may release a firmware update users can load over USB or SD - but they can’t force anyone to do so. If you run out and buy one now you might just get one from pre-encrypted stock. I’m just saying…

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I need to visit Gefen HQ. I have this old bridge over the East River that I’m looking to sell.

Back in October, 2006 Apple filed a patent application for a ‘Search user interface for media device’ which describes a search interface on a media device, which sure sounds like an Apple TV variant, with a remote control which resembles an iPod Nano with the click-wheel interface. Here’s the abstract:

A search menu includes a search input field and input characters rendered on a multi-dimensional displacement surface that rotates in response to a user input. A highlight region intersects the multi-dimensional displacement surface and highlights input characters while the input characters intersect the highlight region according to the rotation of the multi-dimensional displacement surface.

Don’t you love patent-ese? But perhaps the most interesting aspect are the images included with the patent. They show what looks very much like a TV Guide-style EPG for live TV.

AppleInsider uncovered the patent application, and they have some of the images posted in their write-up. It is easier to see them there than in the US Patent Office interface. Interestingly, the remote is meant to be a fairly intelligent device, with a display and local storage. It would download the EPG data so that you could take the remote with you and decide what to record, and then when you returned it to the device it would sync and setup the recordings. That seems pretty complex, and frankly of questionable utility, for a remote - but it does make more sense if the ‘remote’ could be a real iPod, doesn’t it?

The filing also includes a hybrid search which would search both the EPG data and the iTunes store for content - which sounds just like TiVo’s Universal Swivel Search, which searches the local EPG, as well as broadband content from TiVoCast and Amazon Unbox.

As with all patent applications, this doesn’t mean Apple is actually working on a product that does this, just that they had the idea and felt it was worth patenting - just in case they decide to do it, or someone else does and they want to collect licensing. But the lack of DVR functionality is the glaring omission from Apple TV, so many people expect that Apple will address that at some point.

Picked up from CNET News.com.

I last mentioned Gefen’s HD DVR during CES. Well, Dave Zatz at Zatz Not Funny got some hands-on time with one. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of money for very little functionality. It carries a hefty $999 MSRP, yet it has only an 80GB drive and lacks any USB or Network connections. It also lacks an EPG - recordings are scheduled by time, or manually initiated. It isn’t even time & channel - it doesn’t control an external source, it just records whatever you feed it. It has four inputs - composite, S-Video, Component, or HDMI, and it has an HDMI output. It does have an SD Card slot, so you can record directly to SD Card to take recordings on the go with an H.264-enabled PMP.

It does appear to record from HDMI, despite of HDCP. But it looks like the loophole is that it takes the digital HDMI signal, decodes it to analog, then encodes the analog signal on the fly as H.264. So there is no true digital copy being made. It looks like a very narrow range of features and capabilities. To me the most interesting thing is, as I said before, the first availability of consumer level chips capable of encoding HD on the fly, albeit high-end consumer level. As the pricing on these chips comes down we’ll likely see them used in more gear, and it’ll really be interesting when a real, full-featured product like TiVo makes use of them.

A new report from Nielsen, reported in Brodcasting & Cable, reports that DVRs actually increase TV viewing - which is probably not a surprise for DVR owners. Comparing viewing by 18-to-49 year olds in November 2005 to viewing in November 2007, when DVR use had increased, Nielsen found a slight increase in viewing throughout the day. It was 3% higher at 9pm, and 5% higher between 11pm and midnight. Users take advantage of their DVRs to watch more programming, but on their own schedules.

Nielsen categorized DVR owners into three categories, based on how much they time shift programming.

Heavy shifters, mostly women aged 18-49, are heavy TV viewers and shift nearly one-half of their total viewing using DVRs.

Medium shifters watch slightly more TV than an average person and shift about one-third of their programs.

Light shifters — which Nielsen classified as being 70% of DVR households — watch less television than normal people and shift about 10% of their shows, mostly to catch episodes they may have missed.

If heavy shifters shift ‘nearly one-half’ of their viewing, I must be depleted uranium. 100% of my TV viewing, at home at least, is via TiVo.

Via EngadgetHD.