ReplayTV 4000

Anyone know much about the ReplayTV 4000 DVR? Hey Empeg guys, you hear any stuff about this other SonicBlue product?

It looks fantastic ... digital recording, big drives, ethernet connection, transmitting programs without commercials. Not a Tivo product; no subscription fees .... sounds great all around.

My questions are ... does it run linux ... Tivo encourages active hacking on their linux driven product ... Anyone know if Replay does the same? Is there a growing following for this product?

Also ... *if* sonic blue drops this product due to law suits (no commercials, transmitting programs via internet) what happens to those who already have one? *If* sonic blue dies entirely what happens? If it's linux hackable, I wonder if you could redirect the tv guide functionality to a Tivo service or another television guide service (free?)

It sure looks like a lot of fun, but I'd hate to blow the money and have it become worthless. I'd also hate to buy what amounts to a computer and not have the ability to hack it.

Greg C.

We have a couple of RTV4000's in the office - it is a cool product, although not currently available in Europe (we have a PAL-NTSC convertor and no programme guide).

It currently runs VxWorks, not Linux. We (the Cambridge team) are going to become involved in developing certain aspects of software for it next year, and I'll leave you guessing what that could be.

Sorry, I can't comment on anything lawsuit related - I'm sure you understand why. I also don't want to get involved with "what happens if SB go under" speculation. They pay my salary and I'd rather like to be optimistic about the companies future!

Rob

I agree that the capabilities of the Replay 4000 series are very cool. I would get a lot of use out of sharing shows between the two TiVo's in my house. The automatic commercial skipping is reported to be about 80% accurate. Not perfect, but good enough to make it a useful feature. And besides the current features, a networked device with full A/V capability, a big hard drive and updatable software has a lot of future possibilities. I really like how SB is positioning the product.

Unfortunately, Replay is still plagued by what is, IMO, a fundamentally flawed scheduling algorithm. It's explained very well in this TiVo vs. Replay review. In particular, read sections 13-15. These are the heart of a PVR. TiVo's paradigm is simple and effective. Replay's rules are byzantine and lead to a lot more confusion and missed recordings. Replay's fundamental design smacks of something that was too literally derived from one overriding use case.

If you are interested in Replay you should check out the board at AVS Forum.

-Dylan

Ugh, VxWorks. From what I've seen so far that one is not very easy to work with and *WAY* expensive! We've tossed it here at work and are using RTLinux now. Well we are hoping to use RTLinux :-) Still some porting to finish off.

Some screen shots:
http://homepage.mac.com/jtleavens/replay/

Just in case anyone was wondering...The ordering process for the replay has not improved much over the empeg experiences previously mentioned...

I ordered one. No major problems (although its not here yet), but the confirmation email is useless. no tracking number, broken link to check status.

I will keep you posted...

The automatic commercial skipping is reported to be about 80% accurate. Not perfect, but good enough to make it a useful feature.

Well, yes and no.

I have a VCR with automatic commercial skipping that is about that accurate. Unfortunately, 80% accurate doesn't mean it skips 80% of the commercials and lets the other 20% through... it means that 20% of the time when it is supposed to start or stop skipping it doesn't do so. This means that about one time in 10, it continues to skip past the end of the commercial break and into the programming you had intended to watch. By the time you dig out the remote and stop it, you have to rewind maybe three or four minutes and try to find the beginning of the programming.

I actually found it was easier to just advance manually past the commercials. And with RePlay's high FF speed (60x? 80x?) you can literally skip a commercial break in three or four seconds.

tanstaafl.

I see where this is heading. Blipverts...

That shouldn't happen with the RTV4000 - it either identifies a commercial break or it doesn't, it won't fast forward ad infinitum like a VCR.

Rob

Actually, what they should do is the opposite of blipverts. They should have time-expanded commercials so that when you fast-forward through them, they seem to be in real time. Of course, there would be no sound, and there would need to also be real-time ads on at the same time, but they could split-screen somehow.

On the other hand, seeing all of us couch potatoes exploding like ZikZak addicts would be very cool. But I can't imagine that SonicBlue would fare even as well as Network 23.

That shouldn't happen with the RTV4000 - it either identifies a commercial break or it doesn't, it won't fast forward ad infinitum like a VCR.

But... that's the problem. There are two aspects to identifying a commercial break: Finding the beginning of it, and finding the end of it.

Unfortunately, the networks don't send a digital signal down the line, saying "HERE is the beginning of a commercial break that will last for 3:30" To find the beginning of the commercial break, the machine attempts to parse the difference between commercial programming and entertainment programming. This is traditionally done by watching for several black frames in a row to denote the beginning of the break, and similarly for the end of the break. If the black frames are not there at the beginning (for instance, if the person doing the switching at the TV studio changes to the commercial source very quickly, anticipating the beginning of the commercial break) then the machine (be it Replay or VCR) won't skip the break. If the black frames are present at the end of that break, the machine will then think that is where the commercials start -- and will start skipping entertainment programming instead, and may well continue to do so until it finds some more black frames, although I believe there is circuitry or programming that prevents it from ever skipping more than about five minutes in one session. Similarly, if the entertainment programming contains scenes that are dark enough (X-Files is notorious for this) the machine will think it is the beginning of a commercial break, and will begin skipping.

80% accuracy just isn't enough under these circumstances. It means that about once an hour the machine will either fail to skip a commercial break, or will improperly skip entertainment programming.

tanstaafl.

Doug,

You still seem to be talking about how your VCR operates. The Replay box has the benefit of being able to analyse entire chunks of video at a time (i.e. it has direct access to a recorded show, unlike a sequential VCR) and the algorithm is far more sophisticated.

When we discussed this with the applications manager at Santa Clara he claimed that the failure condition is to not skip commercials - i.e. it won't skip programme content.

The feedback I've heard is that this works very well - often better than the 80% that we claim. I haven't heard of it skipping content.

Rob

Do you own and use a RTV 4000...? Or is this just theory about the RTV 4000?

Calvin

Do you own and use a RTV 4000...? Or is this just theory about the RTV 4000?

Entirely theory, I must confess.

I was assuming that the RTV 4000 uses the "Commercial Advance" (tm) technology. If it does indeed use some other way of finding commercial breaks, then all bets are off! I just wasn't aware that there was any other method. Can someone elaborate?

tanstaafl.

Can someone elaborate?

The idea is as follows:

Your VCR is a sequential-read mechanism. It can only look at a single frame of the videotape at a time. It's got no idea what's coming up, only what it currently sees in the current thing that is on the screen.

So, as a result, the VCR only has half of the needed information in detecting commercial breaks. It can only make a guess when the commercial break STARTS but not whether it ENDS any time soon, hence it gets faked out several times during each X-Files episode when the screen is black.

A hard-disk device like the Replay, on the other hand, can look at the ENTIRE SHOW as a whole unit. It can look at the patterns of black frames as a group. Based on what it knows about how commercials fill network shows, it can make a much better educated guess as to what's a commercial and what isn't. And here's the critical part: Because of this, it's able to choose to err on the side of caution, and if it's not sure about a segment, it won't even start a commercial-skip at all. So the 20% error becomes 20% commercial still present rather than 20% program material skipped.

See?

I have one of these now, but I have 'only' been using it for several hours. (It takes time for the content to collect). It does use "commercial advance (tm)" technology, but i would bet it has been elaborated in some way to accept the additional info that a DVR device can gather (like Rob said).

I would estimate it better than 90% accurate. In 6 hours of watching it made 2 mistakes (missed one commercial and advanced 15 sec in the middle of show). When the commercial skips you actually see about one second of it - just long enough to realize what its doing. In my estimation its accurate enough that I wouldn’t consider turning it off - which can be done easily form the remote or set by show (like xfiles).

Just to close the loop on the poor email notification...I called the 800 number and found them quick to anwser and to be very helpful.

Maybe things are turning around....

It can watch for volume or compression levels, it can watch out for a change in color histograms from the show to the commercial, etc.

Calvin