Bob Cringely used half of his weekly post to talk of a very interesting project about serving up video to Sony PSPs from a PC server, mobile, in his van, for his kids. Now this kind of thing gets to me, not because the forever smarter than me Cringely (seen the PBS specials, read the books - he just is) comes up with (or implements) the idea of serving on-demand video in the van to his kids, but because here is yet another creative use of off-the-shelf technology in the hands of a creative person.
Want some ideas for yourself to implement, go to http://www.makezine.com/ - this is the place for doing something with old Altoids tins and the Darth Vader mask you have laying around.
With all this creativity - why ain't some of these damn things products you can buy? Imagine a Hi-Def TV recorder that you don't have to sell you first born to afford and does things you really want it to do, like, I don't know, automatically skip commercials! Well this guy has https://monolithmc.com/ - and his sister sites helped me in making my own box (even though I did not go the Ubuntu route.)
And being the proud owner/builder of my own MythTv HDTV box that slurps up free Hi-Def off the air - I have two reasons why you would want one...
1) Auto commercial skip is the freaking bomb. You are watching a recorded program and the commercials just disappear. It has the 30 second skip button like a hacked TIVO but YOU DO NOT NEED IT!
2) Hi-Def program Archiving. What if you want to keep a program for a long time. Well, off air Hi-Def takes 6 to 8 gigs per hour of show. Depending on how much resolution you are willing to sacrifice, you can squish a program to a comfortable 750 megs allowing you to keep it without the space consideration. And you can get the box to do it automatically.
That just scratches the surface as to why you want want a MythTV Box. And that is enough to make an entertainment lawyer have many sleepless nights. And it is also probably why you don't see these things in Target.
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