Back in July word came out that Pioneer had developed a 400GB optical disc based on Blu-ray. This ability to grow to high densities is one of the primary reasons Blu-ray was superior to HD DVD, IMHO. And the best news was that Pioneer claimed the new discs could be read by existing Blu-ray drives. But nothing had really been heard since the first articles.

Now DIGITIMES has spotted the disc being exhibited at the IT Month fair currently taking place in Taipei, Taiwan. As before it is a 16-layer read-only disc, 25GB per layer just like Blu-ray. And they’re working on a 500GB, 20-layer version, with a 1TB target by 2013. The current version is targeted for 2008-2010, with rewritable discs in 2010-2012.

Spotted via Gizmodo.

The good news is it sounds like TiVo is finally embracing HME and encouraging developers, the bad news is this is TiVo Australia. As regular readers are likely aware, I’ve repeatedly expressed frustration with the way TiVo has handled HME in the US. I’m happy to see TiVo Australia encouraging HME developers, and I wonder if that signals any change for the US as well, though I’m not getting my hopes up. I also wonder if this means there’ll be an update to the HME SDK, which has long languished.

The currently available SDK was last updated over a year ago, on 10/2/2007, and that’s an experimental release. The last official release was over three years ago, on 10/31/2005. The SDK is woefully out of date, even the experimental release has iffy HD support and there is no support for recently added features, like streaming video, which are possible as the hacker community has reverse engineered how to do it. I do hope the Australian developers will get an updated SDK so they can create some great applications, and they won’t be hobbled by the same lack of support as US developers. The good news is any application developed for Australia will probably work on US TiVos as well, so hopefully we’ll see some cool new applications.

Picked up from Gizmodo Australia.

Press release:
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Through November 23rd you can save an additional 25% off the already low prices on Blu-ray discs at DeepDiscount.com. Simply enter one of the below discount codes when you check out.

From PS3 Fanboy by way of Gizmodo.

The codes:
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A clever little short horror film from arieScope for Halloween - The TiVo.

Picked up from Gizmodo Australia.

As with the Slingbox PRO-HD two weeks ago, since I work for Sling Media now it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to review it, but the SlingCatcher officially shipped yesterday. Instead of reviewing it, here’s a roundup of coverage I’ve seen:

Sling Community - Blog
Sling Community - Review
Sling Community - Review: SlingPlayer for TV
Sling Community - Review: MyMedia
Sling Community - Review: SlingProjector
ZatzNotFunny
Engadget
EngadgetHD
Gizmodo
CNET - Crave
CED Magazine
Obsessable
SlashGear
NewsFactor Network
HD Update
SFGate
Wired
Register Hardware
TG Daily
Stuff.tv
TechWhack
Electronista
Silicon Alley Insider
Electronic House
Pocket-lint
PC World
BLORGE
BroadcastNewsroom
Sci-Tech Today
Gearlog
TrustedReviews
Coolest Gadgets

Both the Slingbox PRO-HD and SlingCatcher MSRP at USD$299.99, but the best deals I’ve seen on both are from PROVANTAGE - currently Slingbox PRO-HD for $241.70 and SlingCatcher for $240.47.

Normally I’d review something like this myself. But I not only work for Sling Media, but I’m the Beta Manager on the Slingbox PRO-HD. So that really wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead here’s a roundup of coverage I’ve seen so far:
SlingCommunity - Blog
SlingCommunity - Review
Zatz Not Funny
EngadgetHD
Engadget
PC Magazine
CNET Crave
CNET - Review
Washington Post
Ecoustics

EDIT: And more coverage:
The Gadgetress
Engadget
EngadgetHD
jkOnTheRun
Gizmodo
Obsessable
TG Daily
TWICE
Silicon Alley Insider
TVPredictions
TechSpot
SlashGear
Multichannel News
ZDNet - The Mobile Gadgeteer
TheStreet.com
Electronista
Electronic House
Boy Genius Report
eHomeUpgrade
ZDNet - The Toybox
Obsessable - Product Page

I’m, shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

Well, OK, no, I’m not even mildly surprised.

According to Register Hardware, Palm is delaying Palm OS II, aka Nova, again. Palm OS II was originally expected on phones in 2007, then delayed until 2008, then late 2008. Now they say it’ll be ‘finished’ by the end of 2008, but we won’t be seeing any handsets using it until the first half of 2008. And, frankly, I wouldn’t place any bets on it. I’ve been a Palm OS user since 1998, but I’m not sure Palm is really relevant as an OS vendor anymore. They make some great Windows Mobile based devices, if I were in the market for WinMob the Treo Pro would be a top contender, but the existing Palm OS is terribly out of date. And now they’re going to be launching a new OS into a market full of WinMob, iPhone, Symbian, and two major Linux platforms - LiMo and Android. As a third Linux platform I don’t know that they’ll be able to garner developer mindshare. I really would rather see Palm take Android and work their magic on it as they’ve done to WinMob.

On the bright side for Palm, one of their major competitors, Windows Mobile, is also facing a delay. CNET reports that Windows Mobile 7 will be delayed from early 2009 to the second half of the year. That could be good news for Palm as WinMob 6 is starting to age and WinMob 7 promises a number of significant improvements. The delay means Palm’s Nova won’t be going directly against WinMob7 - unless it is further delayed, of course. The delay is also good news for Android, which, unless you’ve been under a rock, you’re probably aware launched today with T-Mobile’s G1. We should be seeing more Android phones and the WinMob delay gives Android more time to grab market share.

Picked up via Gizmodo.

I’ve been swamped with work so I haven’t been able to do more than skim most of today’s coverage of the Android launch and read a few of the reports in full. I have mixed feelings. The platform itself looks solid to me, but I think I’ll wait to see some more phones using it. I don’t like the G1’s lack of 3.5mm headphone jack, I can’t believe they left that off after the backlash against other phones. But that’s HTC and not Google or Android. And some of the features I’d need, like Exchange support for work, are being left to 3rd parties. I am 100% sure the hole will be filled, and can actually appreciate that approach - no native app makes the market more attractive to developers - but I’ll have to give it time. Still, I like what I see and think that with a little polish (this is the 1.0 release after all) it will probably be my next phone OS.

Panasonic has announced a new uber-box for the Japanese market. It is a combination 320GB DVR and Blu-ray & DVD recorder. But that’s not all, it also has a built in VHS deck. So you can dump your fuzzy VHS tapes to DVD, or Blu-ray to really capture the fuzziness in high quality. It isn’t completely clear from the translated AV Watch Japanese text, but it sounds like you can also record to VHS - though not from the tuner. You can also dump content to the hard drive, and then transfer from the drive to media. All this can be yours October 1st for the equivalent of $1,450 - only in Japan of course.

We need an HD DVD and Betamax combo deck just for the Epic Fail factor that would represent. (This system supports Digital Audio Tape, Digital Compact Cassette, and MiniDisc - it can’t fail!)

Picked up via Gizmodo.

I’ve said before that Blu-ray player pricing would drop this fall as we head into the holiday shopping season, and it sounds like Sony will be kicking off the trend in September. HD Guru, citing an unconfirmed report by Consumer Electronics Daily, says that Sony will cut the MSRP on their BDP-S350 by $100, from $399 to $299, on September 28, 2008. The BDP-S350 is a full-featured, Profile 2.0 / BD-Live player.

Sony will also reportedly introduce the previously announced BDP-S550 with an MSRP of $399, instead of the expected $499 price point, in mid-October.

The price reductions will certainly result in competitive pressure on other vendors.

In fact, HD Guru reports that Funai will cut the MSRP of their NB500 from $299 to $249 to remain competitive. The NB500 is a Profile 1.1 / BonusView player sold in the US under the brands Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania, Insignia, and others.

Since these are the MSRP prices the players will almost certainly be available for less online, and even at retail. While the NB500’s MSRP has been $299, it has been selling normally at stores such as Wal*Mart and Best Buy (under the other brands) for $280 or less. So the cut to MSRP will likely result in a further reduction in retail pricing.

I expect that this is just the beginning of price cuts for the holidays. With the inevitable sales, there should be some good deals on Blu-ray players. And the price cuts on BD-Live units will finally make them competitive with the PS3, unless Sony also cuts the pricing on those. While an entry-level PS3 remains $400, with the BDP-S350 at $300 (and less online) it becomes an option to consider.

From HD Guru via Gizmodo.

When I reported on the release of the 9.4 software for the TiVo Series3 & TiVo HD on Tuesday, I speculated on whether the update also included the promised YouTube support. Well, that question has been answered - it is in there, and Dave Zatz got a look at it and to keep things circular, he posted a video of it to YouTube. Since this was only announced on March 12, 2008 it is nice to see it coming out so soon.

9.4 enables native H.264 decoding on the S3 & HD, required for YouTube support. What is not known is if there decoding support has been extended to other areas as well, such as video podcasts. If so, it could eliminate transcoding on a PC via TiVo Web Video, at least for video podcasts in H.264 - which is many, if not most, of them. I’m hoping the H.264 support does apply to other video sources, it would make life much easier. TiVo Web Video is OK, but not ideal.

Speaking of, allow me a small digression…

I realize I never did pull together a review of TiVo Desktop 2.6 as I’d said I would. I’ve been pretty busy and it got away from me. And, honestly, I’ve had so many problems with it that each time I think about writing it up I just get upset again. I recently had TiVo Web Video forget all of the podcasts I’d subscribed to, twice in two days! I noticed it wasn’t transferring anything after a couple of days, and when I checked the config file it was back to default - all the subscriptions gone. So I restored them and it started transferring again, so I went to bed. The next day it had stopped, and the file was wiped out, again! I wiped everything and started from scratch and it has been working for over a week now. And this isn’t the first time this happened, early on it lost all the subscriptions too. Of course, since TiVo Web Video, unlike TiVoCast, doesn’t just start with the most recent recording and move forward, but insists on downloading and transcoding back episodes as well (default is 5), it would re-download and re-transfer everything. It literally takes a few days for my PC to suck down all the backlog (I subscribe to a number of podcasts) and transfer it. So when this happens it is a major pain in the posterior.

And it doesn’t clean up after itself, I found over ten gigabytes of abandoned downloaded recordings sitting the the Downloads directory. Recordings it should’ve deleted after transferring to the TiVo. It just slowly uses up the drive. The leaking seems to vary - right now there are two files from back on 7/8 totally about 50MB. But all it takes is a few long-form HD podcasts to be missed and it adds up fast. Those are just a couple of the problems with it. Don’t get me wrong, having it is better than not having it at all, but it is far from a stable solution, let alone ideal. But I digress, I really should make myself write up all the issues and such.

Back to the topic at hand..,

So anyway, I would really love to see TiVo allow the S3/HD to download H.264 podcasts directly, bypassing the PC. Heck, as an interim even if they downloaded to the PC but skipped transcoding and just transferred to the TiVo as-is it would speed things up a great deal. Transcoding really slows things down.

Dave got a look at what is apparently a pre-release version of the software, so the final release could vary, but probably won’t. YouTube is added as another option under the TiVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video menu item. It looks like the screen has been retitled from ‘Video Downloads’ to ‘Broadband Video’, which may be a reflection of the fact that TiVo is now streaming video and not just downloading it. The ‘Movies & TiVo from Amazon Unbox’ link has been changed to ‘Amazon Unbox TV & Movies’, which I think sounds better. And just below that, slotting in above ‘Brows Other Videos’ is a new link entitled, simply, ‘YouTube’.

The only sub-option at this time is ‘Watch YouTube Videos’, and once you select that you get into the YouTube HME application interface proper. The color scheme reminds me of the current Music Choice application. Within the application you can select Featured Videos, Most Recent, Search, Top Favorites, Most Viewed, or Top Rated. Each selection then has sub-selections. The interface looks pretty good, and you can even rate the videos 1-5 stars, just as you can online.

From Dave’s video I don’t see a way to link this application with your YouTube account, which would be nice. I’d like to be able to pull up the subscriptions I have on YouTube from my TiVo. And to have ratings from one location be reflected in the other. Being able to subscribe or favorite a video on the TiVo and having it show up online would be nice. But this is the first release, and from what I can see it looks good. This could always be a future enhancement.

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this I was looking over some other blogs and over at Gizmodo I saw that TiVo will indeed be adding the ability to login to your YouTube account, in an update due eight weeks out.

Dave also tacked a quick look at the Tuning Adapter and Network Remote Control screens at the end of the video. He says we can expect the official press release later today, and the application may start showing up on TiVos with 9.4 as early as today (Thursday) as well. TiVo has a new page on their site as well: http://www.tivo.com/youtube

Now that TiVo has support for H.264 and streaming video, I’m hopeful we’ll see more features using them. Aside from the aforementioned video podcast support, TiVo could support Amazon’s upcoming video streaming service, HD video downloads (most HD downloads use H.264), perhaps even streaming video between TiVo units, or from a PC to a TiVo.

I’m still waiting to receive 9.4 myself, can’t wait to play with this.

(And no Dave, you’re not the only one still waiting for Tekzilla. )