[lguvenoz]

Here's an interesting interview from this past March with an MS executive on lots of stuff including some info on Vista and DirecTV...

http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/02/the-clicker-a-sitdown-with-microsofts-joe-belfiore-part-i/

The information on CableCard is a little distressing to those of us that like our very custom home-grown systems, but we'll have to see what D* comes up with. The most worrisome is that the CableCard discussion states that their technology will only support a single stream per device so you would have to have a card for each stream... ugly stuff that I can only hope D* won't do to the PC community.

 

[Earl Bonovich]

Just as an FYI to everyone out there... look around before you go out and drop $250 on a wireless bridging solution, or even $100 on the "game adapters".

I picked up two Airlink AP411Ws for $20 each at Frys in Houston when they were on sale (there have been new APs to come out since I did it). They can do point-to-point and point-to-multipoint bridging. Also you can get several different types of AP hardware and increase their functionality by running OpenWRT software on it. It takes a little doing, but you can take cheap hardware, change the firmware, and enable features of units costing much more.

FYI:
At Buy.COM

Linksys WET54G (Wireless Bridge) is $93
SMC's is $68

Still not as cheep as the phone line networking, but...

 

[Marty B]

ViiV's technical details are horrible, I think on purpose to force you to buy an expensive box. You can buy a ViiV motherboard/CPU combo in a build your own scenerio. It is essentially the same thing as when AMD branded 3dNow and Intel MMX to boost performance. There is a hardware component that is needed for the software to make the appropriate calls.

Yeah theres always a catch. Why not just make it work with any computer that has the horse power?

 

[ajwillys]

So .....


Am I the only one googling to figure out how I can "fake" my HR20 into believing my PC is "Viiv Certified" and send my music over the network? Can't be hard.

 

[Sixto]

Yes, but it probably won't be until later tonight at the earliest

Hi Earl ... the HR10 is slowly catching up to the Series3 ... there might be an HR20 next to my Series3 to begin testing/comparing soon ...

 

[Marty B]

So .....

Am I the only one googling to figure out how I can "fake" my HR20 into believing my PC is "Viiv Certified" and send my music over the network? Can't be hard.

If you find anything, do tell

 

[tfederov]

If you find anything, do tell

I second that!

 

[ajwillys]

If you find anything, do tell

I don't know if this topic is off limits or not so I won't post any links but it looks like my early searches have yielded a Linux Media Center with "Full integration and compliance with Intel's ViiV devices" called "Elisa Media Center".

It's still in very early beta but I think it will pick up quickly if/when Viiv starts getting popular. Personally, my machine will be tri-boot adding this by the end of the week

Moderators, if this is off limits, feel free to delete and I won't mention anymore.

Edit: Looks like it runs on top of any Linux/Unix/Windows machine so no need to install new OS

 

[VideoVeteran]

So .....

Am I the only one googling to figure out how I can "fake" my HR20 into believing my PC is "Viiv Certified" and send my music over the network? Can't be hard.

I think the main barrier will be support of DTCP-IP (Intel's copy protection system). AFAIK only ViiV computers support that. Try a google of DTCP-IP.

 

[Tom Robertson]

I think the main barrier will be support of DTCP-IP (Intel's copy protection system). AFAIK only ViiV computers support that. Try a google of DTCP-IP.

While I agree it will be a huge barrier, it does appear that DTCP-IP is a consortium license of five companies: Hitachi, Ltd., Intel Corporation, Matsu****a Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Sony Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation. What I don't know is how opensource projects handle the licensing fees (upwards of $50k for mass distributions.)

Cheers,
Tom

 

[RobertSeattle]

Sounds almost like a product Rokulabs had out several years ago. It's been discontinued - just wasn't enough demand back then.

www.Rokulabs.com

 

[lguvenoz]

While I agree it will be a huge barrier, it does appear that DTCP-IP is a consortium license of five companies: Hitachi, Ltd., Intel Corporation, Matsu****a Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Sony Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation. What I don't know is how opensource projects handle the licensing fees (upwards of $50k for mass distributions.)

Cheers,
Tom

The problem is that this will be a huge hurdle for Intel and anyone else to overcome. Given that companies like Microsoft are putting a lot of effort into similar technologies that are not tied to the brand of chip (things like Output Content Protection in Vista) I would be curious as to what would motivate anyone to support something like DTCP-IP?? Probably the same number as flocked to MicroChannel Architecture of the PS2....

 

[Meklos]

Yeah theres always a catch. Why not just make it work with any computer that has the horse power?

Because the content providers are super worried (with good reason) that someone might be able to construct a digital copy of the content you are viewing. From just perusing the VIIV architecture, it looks like the requirement is that the data be encrypted not just across the ethernet, not just between two programs, but all the way from one particular chip to another particular chip on the motherboard.

Basically it's an attempt to make it to where even if you wrote a player program to look just like the legit player, your program couldn't fork off a copy of the decompressed data to another part of memory and buffer it to a file on the hard drive.

That's why it's only on particular hardware. It's only the VIIV-certified hardware that has this crypto capability in hardware. And if it's not in hardware, they're not going to trust it.

 

[machavez00]

so once again the Mac addicts are frozen out

 

[Earl Bonovich]

so once again the Mac addicts are frozen out

So when are you all going to learn your lesson....
(Just Kidding)

 

[bret4]

I don't get it. Why would I want to do this on my TV when I can already download music and photos on the internet? Never heard of VIIV before this thread. Can you do more with it than just photos and music?

I wish they would just spend more time fixing bugs.

 

[Earl Bonovich]

I don't get it. Why would I want to do this on my TV when I can already download music and photos on the internet? Never heard of VIIV before this thread. Can you do more with it than just photos and music?

I wish they would just spend more time fixing bugs.

Part of the ViiV features, is to allow your HR20 to connect to YOUR PC, and display those pictures you downloaded (from where ever), on your TV.

As well as music files.

 

[bret4]

Just checked out Intel's site and saw that you can do games and video with VIIV. That would be cool if you could use it to download video like VOD. Maybe play some games on the TV. Something to do when there is nothing on the 200+ channels I have now.:lol:

 

[raidersiowa]

Hi Earl ... the HR10 is slowly catching up to the Series3 ... there might be an HR20 next to my Series3 to begin testing/comparing soon ...

I just built a Athlon Duo Core 64 bit system with Vista Ultimate final release. I am going to be very upset with Directv if I have to buy more equipment to make this work.

 

[Tom Robertson]

I just built a Athlon Duo Core 64 bit system with Vista Ultimate final release. I am going to be very upset with Directv if I have to buy more equipment to make this work.

Welcome to the forums! :welcome_s

I expect there will be "something" that will solve the customer pressure, but I don't know what yet.

Cheers,
Tom