Tivo capability in a PC

[steve bryan]

There is now a working TiVo-style product available product from 
Creative Labs for about $100. So instead of trying to cobble on an 
ethernet connector and bypass the intentional obfuscation of the 
captured signal you get access to everything just as we expect with a 
PC (as differentiated from consumer electronics boxes). Of course the 
image is on a PC monitor rather than your TV (unless you have the 
necessary ingredients of a HTPC) but the results are very nifty. 
Because it does the mpeg-2 encoding in a dedicated chip there is 
almost no burden on the main processor (around 5% has been reported). 
You can easily be playing "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" in the 
foreground and not even realize it is recording in the background 
(you need to leave the program running in standby mode in the system 
tray). You could be viewing other recorded programs while recording 
or even do the standard TiVo trick of viewing earlier parts of a 
program while recording the later parts. This really seems to be the 
realization in a $100 pci card of a 'digital' TV product first 
introduced in the early nineties based on a SGI workstation (anyone 
remember the name of that product?).

I wouldn't say there is nothing to be improved in the scheduling 
software or the steps needed to make the files available to other 
applications but this is the real item. There is also no interface to 
any of the electronic programming guides. However, in every other way 
this is even better than the revamped ReplayTV or hacked TiVo. I've 
not seen the product in a store yet but it can be ordered directly 
from Creative Labs.
--