Hasta La Gadget!

The jury’s still out on whether inbuilt DVRs are good for HDTVs, but LG’s obviously hot to trot on the whole idea. Nearly a year after first introducing sets with an integrated Time Machine, the outfit is hitting back with two new big-screen plasmas that each posses a 160GB internal hard drive. The X Canvas 50PS70 (50-inch) and 60PS70 (60-inch) panels also boast 600Hz dejudder technology and can record overflow onto external drives connected via USB 2.0. Additional details (price, screen resolution, availability, etc.) are scant, but we’ll be sure to keep an ear to the ground.

[Via Akihabara News]

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Storage

LG’s 50PS70 and 60PS70 plasmas get 160GB Time Machine functionality originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 May 2009 08:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We love DVRs, but sweet crackers, why must they be all the same? Same look, same features, same UI. Thank jeebus someone is approaching DVR a little differently. Check out what Moxi has been cooking up. From reviewer, Terrence Russell:

Digeo’s Moxi HD DVR sports a slick, Emmy-winning (seriously) user interface and all the commercial-skipping accouterments of competitors like TiVo. It even ditches a monthly bill in favor of flat pricing. And due to a recent firmware update, the Moxi also grants access to online video and music.

But the big difference is the UI. That aforementioned Emmy? Totally deserved. Digeo outfitted the Moxi with a stunning full-HD user interface, full of slick transitions and responsive performance. Unfortunately, sleek visuals don’t conquer all. Basics like surfing through the program guide (or accessing a previously recorded show) took a lot of hunting and pecking through a menu tree. Though we never truly got lost in the Moxi’s dazzling menus, there are a few tasks that grew tiring. Finding pre-recorded shows and getting them to play took searching, highlighting, selecting Play, confirming that you selected Play, and then finally watching.

$800 • moxi.com

You can read the rest of the review of the Diego Moxi HD DVR right here.

People are always eager to point out cool technologies that America ignores, but what about the ones that we—and only we—use? Enough with the grousing: Here’s what we’ve got that they don’t.

TiVo
For a long while, TiVo was the undisputed king of TV recording. Other DVRs have come a long way in the last ten years, but they’re all late to the party, and still playing catchup: The TiVo name is now permanently tattooed into the public’s consciousness, synonymous with recording shows and backed up by still-impressive hardware.

But the fact that TiVo has attained a near-Kleenex level of brand recognition in the US doesn’t mean a thing overseas. As of writing, the service is only available in a few other places—Canada, the UK, Mexico, Taiwan and Australia—where it has been met with limited enthusiasm. While the US, with its huge, old, fragmented cable industry, offers a fantastic opportunity for a meta-service like TiVo, smaller countries with one or two dominant pay-TV providers—which have their own increasingly formidable DVR alternatives—are tougher nuts to crack.

The Kindle
This choice might seem odd—or at least inconsequential—on account of the steady stream of new e-reader hardware available all over the world, but Kindle exclusivity is actually a technological feather in America’s cap. Why? Because the source of the Kindle’s importance isn’t its hardware, but its connectivity and the service it’s tied to.

Anyone can slap a case around a panel of E-Ink and add an off-the-shelf Linux OS—and plenty of companies have. But being linked wirelessly to a massive library of legal downloads, bestselling books, magazines and newspapers, is what will make a reader great. For now, the only mainstream reader that can claim such a feature is the Kindle, and the only country that can claim the Kindle is the US. Not that it can’t go global—similar services for music and TV, like the iTunes store, have found ways to deal with tricky licensing and gone global—it’s just that it probably won’t for a while.

Push-to-Talk
Without a doubt, this is the technology that feels the most American on this list. Intended primarily for the workplace, push-to-talk technology has tragically seeped into the mainstream, subjecting millions of innocent mall shoppers to that incessant, inane chirping, and the shouting at the handset that accompanies it. Who hasn’t been inadvertently pulled into the middle of a heated, long-distance argument about novelty Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches flavors while waiting in line at Walmart? Well, pretty much anyone who doesn’t live in America—and not just because they don’t have Jimmy Dean, or Walmart.

As it turns out, PTT’s Amerophilia can be explained by little more than poor marketing. According to ABI Research:

In other world regions MNOs have failed to market PTT successfully to business users or have opted to market to consumers, and it just hasn’t taken off.

Nextel, which was inherently crippled by a proprietary network technology that wasn’t built out in any other country but the US, found success with PTT by pitching handsets to businesses as turbocharged Walkie-Talkies, not by marketing them directly to consumers, most of whom would have trouble imagining a more efficient way to make themselves look like brash assholes.

Video On Demand
iTunes has gone worldwide and services like BBC’s iPlayer have brought the Hulu model overseas, but America still has the best VOD situation in the world, bar none. The problem is simple: Even countries with a healthy entertainment industry import a tremendous amount of American TV, often well after it was originally broadcast. This regional disparity seems kinda stupid in the age of the internet and VOD, but it’s just as severe as it ever was.

European or Asian viewers have to wait for painful weeks or months for a domestic channel to license, schedule and dub international American hits like Lost or Mad Men, and hope, assuming their stations have a VOD service, that the show eventually finds its way online. As an ad-supported service and a product owned by the networks who profit from the above arrangement, Hulu’s reluctance to stream content to countries is understandable, but the despair is deeper than that: You can’t even pay for TV if you want to. People without American billing addresses are barred from VOD services like Amazon’s Unbox, and will find their iTunes video selections sorely lacking.

Satellite Radio
Since is smells distinctly like a waning technology, satellite radio might not do much to stir your techno-patriotism, but goddernit, it’s ours. The US has far more satellite radio subscribers than the rest of the world combined, all through the remains of Sirius and XM, now merged under the lazy moniker of “Sirius XM”. Why? We have lots (and lots) of cars.

Satellite radio actually has roots as a proudly international service—after all, it is broadcast from frickin’ space—having been developed in part by a humanitarian-initiative company called 1Worldspace, which was established to broadcast news and safety information to parts of the globe without reliable terrestrial radio infrastructure. They still exist today, but they broadcast to fewer than 200,000 subscribers, mostly in India and parts of Africa. Satrad’s American success can be solely credited to our auto manufacturers, who eagerly installed satellite units in new cars for years, healthily boosting subscription numbers (but not necessarily car sales). With no comparably pervasive car culture to take advantage of anywhere else in the world, satellite radio is a tough sell.

When I hooked Digeo’s Moxi HD DVR up, I told my wife it’s like TiVo, and she said, “Then why don’t we just use TiVo?” After several weeks testing it, I have no good answer.

If you’ve never heard of Moxi or Digeo, you are forgiven. Although the company has been making set-top boxes for almost a decade in one form or another, this is the first time Digeo is selling a Moxi box to consumers directly. There are rollouts of similar-looking Moxi cable boxes in smaller markets across the US—the chance is slim that you have one, but if you do, you’re damn lucky, because they are a hell of a lot nicer than any of the crap Motorola or Scientific Atlanta DVRs that cable companies usually foist on their highest-paying customers.

But the question here is unfortunately not, “Is Moxi better than a cable box?” even though the answer to that question is, “You know it.” The question is, why should I buy one of these instead of a TiVo? And the answer is, at the moment, you probably shouldn’t.

Price Breakdown
When the news came out, some people bitched about the price, but the truth is, Moxi HD does sit somewhere between the two comparable CableCard-compatible high-def TiVo models. It’s got a 500GB hard drive, bigger than the 160GB on the $300 baseline TiVo and smaller than the 1TB found in the $600 TiVo HD XL. Once you factor in service, it’s pretty much exactly on par:

• Moxi HD is $800 up front, or four $200 payments, or 20 monthly payments of $40.
• TiVo HD is $300 plus $300 for three years of service up front (more if you pay a la carte)
• TiVo HD XL costs $600 plus the same service pricing, so if you pay for three years of service up front, it costs $100 more than Moxi

In the rear, they are very much the same. Both Moxi and TiVo deliver HD video over HDMI, take a CableCard tuner from any cable company, and can have expanded storage by way of a drive attached to the eSATA port. The difference lies in the interface, and in the internet-based services that each box offers at the moment, always subject to change.

Note: I realize that I have left out CableCard-compatible Windows Media Center PCs. As a fan of the Media Center platform, I didn’t do this by accident. It’s just that we have yet to see a cool-running quiet set-top PC marketed widely to average users for a reasonable price that can compete with TiVo or Moxi. When that product comes along, you better believe it will be in the running.

Interface
The company that builds the Moxi has been talking about their interface since the beginning of time, and even brags about an Emmy it won for it. I can see why. It’s a fun interface, a refreshing change from candy-colored ca-plop ca-plop ca-plop TiVo menu that you might well be sick of by now.

The interface operates a bit like Sony’s Xross Media Bar PlayStation interface, with icons running along a horizontal bar. Whenever you pause on an icon, Recorded TV, for example, you instantly see a vertically aligned list of choices, in this case, all the programs you’ve recorded, grouped by show and listed in alphabetical order. Point to a particular show grouping, and suddenly each episode appears to your right, and you can move over to them and select the one you want. In most cases, it’s a fluid experience.

My beef on the interface is that there are things you must learn that aren’t readily obvious, and are not helped by the design of the remote. The Zoom button turns out to be the most important button on the whole thing, but you wouldn’t know it from being so tiny. Zoom brings you in and out of the overlaid Moxi interface, unlike the centrally positioned Moxi button, which does, well, something.

Button confusion is combined with redundant motions or inconsistent behaviors. For instance, sometimes the back button will get you out of things, but sometimes it will not, and you are required to hit OK. You can move forward (right) or back (left) along the main icon menu, but if you pause, you can no longer move right, because that takes you into a new menu, so you have to left-arrow your way out if you want to keep looking at the icons. Hitting OK when you land on an icon is a no-no as well, since that takes you to secondary options: The thing to do when you get to the icon you want is to freeze. Usually. If you’re confused by all this, welcome to my first week with Moxi.

You can get over a lot of the confusion by learning the behavior, but I don’t remember ever having to learn TiVo behavior, or even having to look at the TiVo remote, which I have to do a lot with Moxi. My final frustration with the interface is one that may be remedied soon. There isn’t great customization. I don’t know how to sort recorded shows by date, and there are too many icons in the main menu for things I couldn’t give a fig about, and there’s no way, at the moment, to hide them.

Note: I shot that one-handed while a cat was pounding into my arm, begging for lunch, so pardon the helter-skelter framing.

Services
The big deal with set-top boxes these days—not just cable boxes but Blu-ray players too—is connected services. Everybody wants Netflix, Amazon On Demand, Rhapsody, Hulu, YouTube, your mom’s private video stream (just making sure you’re paying attention). Officially, Moxi only has Rhapsody and Flickr at the moment, but unofficially, by way of a special Windows background-server app, it has all of the above and more.

PlayOn (normally $40 but Moxi gives you a “free” product key when you buy one) lives on your Windows PC, using it to access Netflix and Amazon as well as Hulu, CBS, YouTube, ESPN and CNN, to grab video from the services and pop it up on the Moxi screen. Now, as you might imagine, some of it looks like ass, and because of the double bottleneck—internet-to-PC then PC-to-Moxi—quality suffers and there are lots of hiccups. But in theory, with the ideal all-ethernet setup, you can immediately make your Moxi do more than a TiVo can now.

PlayOn The Moxi also yanks vids and stuff from your PC or other servers on your network. Like anything else, though, there’s limited file compatibility, and I’m not a fan of the interface. I could get it to see H.264 video on a network drive, but it couldn’t play them. And although the manual says you can stream H.264 video from a computer that can decode them first, I couldn’t find any of the media files I had on the PlayOn test PC for some reason, probably because it didn’t have Windows Media Connect or other server software running. (Side Note: Don’t be like me—don’t rip your DVDs in H.264.)

I think even if the PlayOn service worked half as well as it had inside my head, I’d be happy, but the Moxi service in general still felt buggy, like it was still in beta, even though I am assured that it is not. In addition to the expected occasional trouble with CableCard (some as a result of my moving houses), I have experienced more mysterious problems. Even now, the system occasionally restarts spontaneously, and I can’t go two days without noticing chunks of time missing from my favorite shows, like they’d been hand recorded by Richard Nixon.

Other connected perks do work nicely. Like TiVo, you can program it over the web, and that worked instantly, so much so that it was my preferred way to add shows, because I could just type in their names, and pick recording preferences afterward. I will give a special shoutout to the Ticker, which, once you figure it out, lets you browse news reports and other text feeds while watching shows. It’s great, but I’m still not comfortable turning it on and off. (Apparently, more practice is needed.)

So I end as I began, with a strong interest in Moxi and the need for new TiVo competitors, but with the gnawing feeling that however much Moxi can advance, TiVo has a head start it will be able to exploit for years to come. I love that there are more entrants to this field—Moxi’s “enemy” as it were is not TiVo but the total crap cableco DVRs that both are striving to replace. That said, though, you can only have one, and I think I’m going back to TiVo, old-school menus, silly sound effects and all. [Product Page]

In Summary

Interface look is refreshing change from TiVo, with lots to do while watching TV PIP

PlayOn capability technically means it has the most web video options available; Ticker great for news, sports and weather

Price up front is daunting, even though it’s on par with TiVo pricing when you factor in service

PlayOn server software not the easiest to work with, only runs on Windows, and internet connection can be very sluggy.

Remote button layout is confusing; important buttons are not clearly identified

We don’t know exactly what the next generation of TiVo hardware will be like, but if these survey screenshots are to be believed, we have an idea what they might be called. EHD reader Justin tipped us off to a recent online survey road testing new names like TiVo eVO, TiVO OmniBox, TiVo Series4 and TiVo OnDemand for new hardware with the TiVo features we’ve come to know and love plus video on-demand access. Squaring off against competition like the Roku player and Xbox 360, peep the gallery and see how these roll off the tongue, or suggest innovation and environmental friendliness.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

TiVo survey hints at new name, direction for Series4 boxes originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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