Tivo has been adding internet based capabilities to their products recently. They’ve got the swivel search, pictures from picassa, video rentals, and even ordering domino’s pizza. Tieing your accounts together between the Tivo and the other service is the first hurdle. Some of the services, such as picassa, require you to repeatedly type your login and password using the Tivo remote control to get in to the service. Doing that once is down right aggravating, doing it multiple times makes the service almost unusable. Netflix/Tivo solved this in a nice manner. When you activate the service is gives you a short code and tells you to connect to Netflix.com/activate. Then you use your normal login to the website and enter the code, and the service is activated. Once that’s done there’s no need to do it again. That was very nicely done.

Netflix has an interesting collection of videos available for instant viewing. The Starz collection has a lot of somewhat older movies. There were a number of old favorites that I’m looking forward to sharing with my significant other. They also have a good collection of recent and older TV shows. Once you find programs you’re interested in you can add them to view instantly queue.  The movies/TV in that queue then become available on to watch instantly on your Tivo.

The Tivo displays the watch instantly queue in order. So you’re top movie in the queue shows up first on the Tivo. The Tivo displays the same summary information and picture that Netflix shows on their website and has menu choices to start playing. If you stop a movie and come back to it later menu choices to resume playing and start from the beginning are available, which is a nice feature. You also have an option to remove the movie from your watch instantly queue. For content which is actually multiple shows (like a TV show disc) the Tivo displays a folder with the shows in it.

Once you decide to start a movie it spends a brief period downloading. This is only a few seconds. During this time it also shows you the quality of the program being downloaded. The quality is changed to match the download speed of your internet connection. Since I have fibre networking to the house, I expect I should always be getting the best quality available. It appears that Netflix has HD and non HD content. That’s indicated by an HD logo when the show first starts downloading. There is also a bar graph that shows 1 to 10 bars for quality.

Fast forward and rewind work similar to the Tivo. There are three different speeds you get by repeatedly pressing the buttons. Playing the image during fast forward and rewind is rather tricky in a streaming application. Netflix/Tivo have decided to show you a smaller inset image that updates about once a second during fast forward or rewind. It gives you a rough idea where you are in the movie. You also have a time bar similar that shows you how long the movie is and where you are in the content.

On a more technical level, there was a clear difference between the quality of the HD and non-HD content. I added Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End to my watch instantly queue. When I started it, that showed up as an SD program and 9 out of 10 quality bars. I also wanted to compare that with some HD content, so I found the HD section on the Netflix website and added Heroes: Season 3. That shows as HD content with all 10 quality bars. From looking at a collection of movies and TV I added to my queue, it appears that 10 bars means HD, and that many of the movies aren’t encoded at that quality so I get 9 out of 10 bars instead. I examined the quality of several other movies as well. There is a blog post by Neil Hunt of Netflix describing their encoding.

The quality difference between 9 and 10 bars is substantial. 9 bars seems below modern DVD quality, and the compression artefacts are fairly obvious if you look for them. With that said, opinions vary, so a little perspective might help. I work in the film business in Hollywood and my company makes a product that is used to do quality control on uncompressed digital studio masters. I’m used to looking at the highest quality content available. Therefore I think I’m among the more picky viewers. The HD content looked very good. Although I could pick out the compression artefacts, the general viewer would be hard pressed to find them. According to Neil’s post the HD content is 720p. It’s encoded in SMPTE VC1 Advanced Profile at up to 3.7Mb/s. The SD content is the same encoding at up to 1.5Mb/s.

Overall I think this is a great implementation of video on demand. I’ve already added a number of programs to my instant watch queue. It’s great to be able to watch something right away without sending back a disc, and waiting a couple days. Of course, I’ve got a few suggestions for improvement. My first request is, of course, to get more content encoded for HD. The quality difference is dramatic. My second, is that it would be great to have a browsing capability for the entire library of instantly available content. The instant watch queue is great and I wouldn’t do away with it, but it would be nice to not have to go to a web browser to add shows to the queue. Finally, a much smaller nit, but I’d like to see the fast forward and rewind images update more than once a second. If you fast forward at any speed, that’s not often enough to get a decent sense of where you are in the content.

First let me say that there is a lot of hype around 3D right now. Hollywood embraces 3D every twenty years or so, but I believe the technology has finally gotten to the point where doing 3D really is feasible for the theater market. I define three key aspects to making 3D feasible:

1. The technology has to allow consumers to comfortably watch a full length film
2. The technology is priced reasonably enough that it can be deployed and used
3. There is a benefit to the film beyond the fact that is in stereoscopic 3D

Several technologies are involved in meeting these goals this time around that weren’t available last time. The first piece of technology is digital cinema. The film industry has been rolling out digital cinema as was to improve the quality of film prints and to reduce the cost of distributing film. The high end projectors that are being installed for digital cinema are also capable of display stereoscopic 3D movies if the theater owners add some additional equipment. Starting with the Disney release of Chicken Little in 3D in 2005, theater owners found that they could charge a premium for watching a film in 3D. Increasing revenue and increasing reasons for audiences to go to the theater are business incentives for studios to make 3D pictures.

In previous incarnations of 3D you would wear a pair of paper glasses with red and cyan filters. That allows only red light to enter one eye and anything but red to enter the other eye. The left and right stereo images are then processed so that one has only its red values, and the other has the green and blue values. Your brain then reassembles the images in to 3D. This process is called anaglyph 3D. The big advantage of anaglyph 3D is that you can display the images using standard film/print technologies. The downside is that it is a really awful 3D image. Creating the image requires throwing away have the information available, and because it isn’t the way your brain is used to seeing 3D it can lead to eye strain and headaches.

The digital cinema systems use a different technology (most commonly based on polarization) to produce stereoscopic 3D. In this case two separate images are displayed at a rate six times the normal film rate. Three of those images are images for the left eye, and three of those images are images for the right eye. That’s called tripple flashing and helps produce better quality images with less flashing. Polarizing filters are attached to a wheel that is synchronized with the projector. Each time a left eye image is display, the wheel applies one polarizing filter, and each time the right eye image is displayed the wheel applies the opposite polarizing filter. The glasses you wear match those filters and make sure the correct image enters the correct eye. Unlike anaglyph 3D these images are full color and have a high refresh rate which makes them much more comfortable for the viewer to watch. The downside is additional cost because more hardware and a silver screen are required by the theater owners.

I said the most common solution is polarization. That is the technology used by RealD who has deployed the most theater systems. Dolby has a different technology based on color bands, but the end result is basically the same for the consumer.

I mentioned that the roll out of digital cinema is being driven by studios wanting to lower the cost of distributing prints. I also mentioned that theater owners are finding that they can charge a premium for presenting 3D. That helps cover the cost of the stereoscopic 3D display system. Finally, the studios need a way to make 3D movies in a cost effective manner. In the past every 3D movie created their own 3D equipment which is expensive and time consuming. New technologies (including systems my company builds) are making that process easier. Digital acquision, on set previewing, and commercially available solutions are lowering the barriers to entry. When you place all these factors together you get a reasonable economic model for 3D feature film production.

We’ve covered the first and second criteria that the films are comfortable to watch and that there is economic model for the technologies deployment. That leaves the final criteria that there is some additional value beyond just being a 3D movie for doing it. That’s the one that I don’t believe is handling very well yet, but there’s an economic reason for that, and the situation is improving.

Almost every major theatically released stereoscopic film released to date has focused on the 3D as a feature of the film. These films where spears poke in your face, and things jump out of the screen at you, are designed to be more like theme park rides than traditional movies. The viewer goes to these films primarily to have the 3D expereince and the story is primarily a path to lead you between the 3D events. That can be fun, and there is a place for that, but that’s not focusing on the story which is the value of good movies.

This is somewhat driven by the encomics of 3D films today. There are only about 1000 3D capable theaters in the US. Those theaters get to charge a premium for showing 3D films, but they need to have a lot more of their seats filled to make the same revenue as a 2D film showing in many more theaters. Therefore they really need to have an “in your face” 3D experience so that the 3D viewers get their monies worth. Unfortunately, every time something pops in your face, it takes you out of the story. The object is no longer in the scene but instead in the theater. Instead of just watching the story the viewer is waving their arms trying to touch the object.  It’s a fun theme park ride, but not a narrative film.

That situation is going to change. By the end of next year there should be between 3500 and 5000 3D theaters (depending on who you ask and how well the roll out goes). That is going to allow 3D films to reach a wider audience, fewer of whom will be there only for the 3D theme park ride. The novelty will wear off and more 3D films will have rely on story to effectively fill the theaters.

This is very much akin to the early days of special effects. Every effects film made effects the central focus of the film, and the story guided you between the explosions, car chases, and aliens. Although those sorts of films still show up every summer, almost every film today has some special effects and you barely notice. They are just another tool used to tell the story and the same thing will eventually happen with 3D films.

When stereoscopic 3D is designed to keep the 3D effect near the screen plane and not in your face, the 3D experience changes from being a theme park ride to being  immersive. You feel like you’re in the movie watching it as a spectator. It adds to the enjoyment of the story just as surround audio does. U2-3D and the Hanna Montana concert both showed that. Viewers felt like they were in the audience of the concert.

Because the technology is so new, cinematographers are learning what works and what doesn’t in 3D films. They are learning to be carefully about the transitions between shots where drastic convergence changes can cause eye strain. They are learning how to effectively use the new technology. They are learning a new language for stereoscopic film making. It’s another transition in the industry, just as adding sound, adding color, or adding surround sound took additional education, so will making good stereoscopic 3D. Eventually stereoscopic 3D should become a standard tool available for making any film.

The bottom line, and getting back to 3-D TVs, is that Hollywood is making a big investment in stereoscopic 3D and that is going to drive better content. As more of that content is produced more people will want to watch it at home. Manufacturers will finally have content to show on their 3D televisions, and a reason to produce them more widely.

That was a long setup to why 3D TV is coming. Now let’s address the specific items that Stacey references in her article.

The Entertainment Technology Center has always been an interoperability center for studios and content creators. They are most well known for managing the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), which standardized how content players and projectors work to display content in a digital cinema. It brought together studios and system vendors and allowed them to agree on what they needed. That effort was a sucess in the US and that’s part of what has allowed digital cinema to be rolled out to theaters today. It’s no surprise that they are continuing that roll in defining a stereoscopic 3D system. The ETC has never been involved with consumer devices.

There are several ad-hoc efforts to provide 3-D television for the home. Texas Intstructments, the makers of the DLP chips, added stereoscopic 3-D as part of their features last year. Every rear projection DLP set made in 2007 or later is 3-D capable. There’s also a company called dynamic digital depth that has been working with consumer electronics vendors to incorporate their 3-D technology in consumer devices. They also sell a set of 3D glasses for use with various 3D capable televisions. Samsung has mad a major effort to create 3-D capable displays, both using TI DLPs in their rear projection TVs and by adding 3-D support to some of their plasma televisions. These efforts allow you to buy a 3D capable and make it work, but without a standard it is a difficult process.

These sets are 3D capable, but what does that really mean? 3D capable means that the set can display stereoscopic 3D images. In most cases that means you connect some additional hardware, you wear active shutter 3D glasses, and if you feed your display properly formatted 3D content, it can display stereoscopic 3D. That’s all well and good, but here’s the steps a consumer has to do to watch 3D:

1. Buy a 3D capable TV
2. Buy a set of 3D glasses and their controller
3. Connect a PC to the TV
4. Buy and load 3D software to run on the PC
5. Buy properly formatted 3D content to run on the PC
6. Put on the glasses
7. Run the software
8. Enjoy the content

Yeah, right. There’s no way the typical consumer is going to handle that. To make matters worse, there are several different ways that content can be encoded to work with the set. Right now that means you need some specialized software or hardware to format the content for the display. Not only that, this only works for things like DVDs, it doesn’t help it all for broadcast content.

What we’d really like is for there to be a standard for the distribution of 3D content. Then I could put a 3D disc in my blue ray player and have 3D content on the screen. I’d like to turn on my cable/satellite/over the air tuner and pick a 3D channel and watch that as well.

Defining that standard is the work of SMPTE. In fact, they put a recent press release that they have created a task force to standardize stereoscopic 3-D Mastering for Home Display. The results of that task force should be standardization needed to make 3D successful in the home. SMPTE does take a while to create standards. Once that’s ready the blue ray players, televisions, and cable receivers will need to support it. My guess is that changes required will be minimal, and that the formats will mostly match what is happening ad-hoc today. For those of us with a 3D capable set that probably means buying a 3D converter box to connect to our television.

With the work of SMPTE and the ramp up in Hollywood I look forward to consumer 3D in the home to be feasible in the next 18 months. I’d say the hype is appropriate. The results will be amazing. It will just take some time for the content creators, the distribution systems, and the consumer electronics manufacturers to all get on the same page. Tim Sassoon, an expert in stereoscopic 3D in Hollywood, was recently asked “What films would be better without 3D?”, his response was “Anything that would better in real life with one eye closed.” Stereocopic 3D is a more natural and immersive way to view a scene and will be used to create more compelling content in the theaters and the home in the not to distant future.

In the film industry we do have many problems that parallelize very well. Physical simulations is one example that people are often familiar with using parallel processing. Rendering is an extremely good example because we can often get parallelism not only within a single image, but because a film is made up of many images, we get additional parallelization by processing multiple images at the same time. My company, Digital Ordnance, builds a high performance image capture and play back system. We take advantage of both CPU and GPU parallelism quite heavily in our systems.

But, the thing that struck me about the post, is that concept that large numbers of cores are applicable to a wide audience. I’m really not convinced that’s true.

My biggest complaint is that for the typical home or business users computers are faster than they need to be. Most users are surfing the web, reading email, running some office applications, and maybe playing some light games. They’re basically doing one task that’s limited in performance by human input. For them pretty much any modern computer has more than enough power. They’d be better suited by having reliable disk storage (RAID), better screens, or cheaper systems, than they would be having faster CPUs. I’m sure there will be some killer app in the future that will set a different baseline for computers (maybe good speach recognition for example), but until that happens they don’t need faster computers.

I think that handles the majority of the computer users out there. But let’s move on to the other case of users who really do need powerful machines.

First, we need to recognize that adding more cores often comes at the cost of slower clock rates. The total number of cycles per a second if you combine all the cores is greater, but the speed of each individual core is slower. That means that to take advantage of all those cores, you have to have a problem that parallelizes across multiple cores. If your software only runs on one CPU you get slower not faster.

Second, we reflect on Ahmdal’s Law. Ahmdal’s law basically says that the speed up you get by parallelizing a problem is limited by the amount of time that must be done serially. For example, if you have a problem where 90% of the computation can be done in parallel, and 10% of the computation is spent managing the CPUs, distributing data, and collating results. As you add more cores the time spent on the parallel part of the computation goes down, but the serial computation remains fixed (or sometimes gets worse, but we’ll talk about that later). As you approach an infinite number of cores, the parallel processing time goes to 0. But that 10% of the time remains constant. That means that if 90% of your compute time can be parallelized, no matter how many cores you throw at it, it will never run more than 10x faster than one core. If your code is 99% parallizable, then you can not get better than 100x faster. That’s the best case, but the situation is actually worse than that.

We already mentioned one of the issues that limits that performance. As you increase the number of cores, the speed of the cores typically decreases. I realize that Ghz isn’t really a good metric, but for this exaxmple, I’m going to use it. I can buy a 3.2Ghz single core processor or I can buy a 2.0 Ghz quad core processor. That quad core gives me 8 Ghz. that should be much faster than 3.2Ghz, right? Well, let’s look at my 90/10 problem above. Let’s say it takes 10 seconds on the one processor. If we ran that on one of our 2.0 GHz cores, it should take 3.2 Ghz/ 2.0 Ghz times longer which is 16 seconds. Now we know that 10% of the time 1.6 seconds is contant, the other 14.4 seconds we’ll assume parallelizes perfectly across the 4 cores for a time of 3.6 seconds. Our total time is therefore 1.6 + 3.6 = 5.2 seconds. We had 2.5 times the computing power but we only got a 1.9 decrease in compute time. Ahmdal’s law and slower cores used up the rest of that performance.

Now I’ll add another problem to the mix. As Ahmdal said, your performance increase is limited by the time spent in the parallel part of the process. As you add more cores, the time spent managing them goes up. Consider that your problem has to be devided among all the CPUs and the results need to be put back together. The more cores you have the more data you need to move around. Sometimes a data structure needs to be updated by one core at a time to avoid each core writing on top of each other. The more cores you have the more time each of them spends waiting for their turn to write the data structure. These problems are hard to describe in detail, but they do contribute to the time spent doing serial processing. So in an ideal world 10% of your compute time would be spent on serial data regardless of how many cores are involved by in reality the percentage of time goes up as the number of cores goes up.

Finally, I’ll describe the lockstep or partitioning problem. In our example 90/10 example I assumed that the 14.4 seconds would be split perfectly among the 4 cores. It turns out that in many cases splitting a problem up perfectly is very difficult. Let’s take a familiar parallel processing problem like rendering an image. If we had four cores we might just split the screen in to quarters and have each core handle one quarter of the screen. In most cases that would work fairly well. But let’s say my image is blank in one corner and has a bunch of mirrors in another corner. In that case, the core handling the blank section will get done quickly. Where the corner with the mirrors takes more work to calculate and takes longer. Since you can’t display the image until all the cores are finished, that means you end up waiting for the slowest core. You might argue that you could break the image in to more pieces, to make the partitioning more fair, and you’d be right, that does help. You might also devise a clever way that when one core finishes early it takes some of the work from a core that is running more slowly. Again, a great idea that will help. But neither of these solutions solves the problem. These extra steps add overhead which slows down the general case, and in the end you still have some cores finishing before others. The time spent with idle cores lowers our overall performace improvement.

One other problem, that’s tangentially related to these discussion, is that how you parallelize your code is often dependent on the target system. If I know my code is going to run on a machine that has 1000 cores, then I’m going to break my problem down in to very small pieces. In doing so, I add a lot of overhead. If I use that same technique on a system with only four cores, then that extra overhead is much more expensive. Applications do their best to partition their problem in to the right size for the number of cores they have, but that isn’t easy and isn’t always perfect. Parallelizing your application for one platform is hard enough, and parallizing it for a wide range of platforms is much more difficult.

Even with all the nay saying there are some applications or portions of applications will be able to use more cores effectively. There are exciting projects that we’re undertaking where we use as many cores as we can get. But there are also bottlenecks where you want one core to run as fast as possible. It would be interesting to work with an architecture where you had a few really fast cores and many slower cores. The exact balance would vary by application, but it would provide a unique way to handle the serial and parallel programming aspects. That’s a problem for the hardware architects to chew on.

I also believe that specialized cores (such as GPUs) are interesting solutions. They work very well for our application, because we’re doing a lot of image processing, but perhaps specialized cores that performed matrix operations quickly might be useful to other clients. The downside to these non-standard cores is that programming them to take advantage of their power is often difficult. The tools need to be put in place that make it just as easy to use these special cores as it is to use a standard core.

Finally, compilers need to get a lot smarter. They need to determine when there is parallelism to exploit and to automatically generate the code to do it. To do that, you need to be able to characterize these cores well enough that a compiler can decide whether the performance improvement would be more than the overhead. Again if we consider that the you might write the application for a wide variety of platforms, that would require that this sort of optimization be done at run-time. How much just in time compiling would need to be done?

All these cores in a variety of designs is making for a very interesting computing landscape for the years to come. I hope we continue to make the most of it.

Worse than that, I generally don’t want to share all my social activities with everyone I’ve ever met, even on one social network. Maybe that makes me weird, but I don’t tink clients I do business with, need to see pictures from a party I’ve thrown.Maybe only my family should see pictures of my father in the hospital. No social network I’ve joined (and has enough of my connections to be useful) let’s me control what type of contact the person is and easily give them different access rights.

The reality is that I have a real collection of contacts on Linked-In. I’ve found it useful for keeping track of where people I know are currently working and it gives me their current email address so I can reach them. I don’t tend to long on to Linked-In very regularly. Basically I go there when I’m looking up a contact, when someone I know sends me an invitation, and every once in a while to look for new contacts I might have missed. Of course, it’s easier to let them come to me, than it is to chase them down.

All the interest in Facebook got me to join that as well. Now I get a duplicate set of friend requests. Then I also get a ton of requests to be a vampire, ninja, warewolf, race car, etc. Those are big time wasters. All the fun boards etc seem to show is silly content.  My front page has gotten so huge with everyone’s updates that it isn’t really managable. I read today that Facebook is coming up with a new interface, but I think that misses the point. I’m not sure organizing the junk is really worth it.

Rather than just bitching, what do I want? Well I think linked-in basically works. It stays out of my way. It has useful information I can reference. It isn’t too hard to deal with the updates. I think we need a good single sign on system so I don’t have to register with every service out there. Instead I use my single sign on, and your service sets up my account automatically the first time I try to use it. Single sign on also lets me create one friend network. Now when I connect to a new service it knows who my friends are and connects them up autoatically according to a user preference. With those changes, everything gets simpler and more useful for the user. Then my final request would be for services to do a small number of things really well, instead of trying to be the wrapper around everything. Then I can decide what features I want to use, and all my friends can see my content without having to join. Personally, I’d probably stick to a few things like a blog and photo/video sharing, but that’s my choice. if you want to play all the Facebook games, then you can join that too.

I think that would make the world of social networking much easier to deal with, and more flexible. It does go against the money flow. Getting everyone locked in to one service that all your friends are on, is really about extracting the dollars. My suggestion would spread the cash around, so developers won’t like that as much.

I had a question on my last post about how things have been since I ditched the Fios HD DVR and switched to to the HD Tivo. I thought that was worth another post.

At this point, I’m a couple weeks in with my switch to the HD Tivo. My girlfriend and I are extremely pleased with the results. The Tivo just works. It is quick and easy to schedule. It records everything I ask. It’s an amazing difference.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the Tivo has been totally perfect. We record and watch a lot of TV. There have been two cases since we got the box where the HD Tivo has stuttered during playback. I tried to watch a show and it would stutter and stop. I tried the obvious things to get it to reset and they didn’t work. Finally, I rebooted the Tivo and the program played fine. During both of these times the HD Tivo was recording two other shows. Of course, it’s pretty standard for us to be recording two shows and watching a third during any evening and it works fine, so it’s only been these two cases where this occurred. Sounds like a bug, but it’s been infrequent enough that it doesn’t upset me, but I’m hoping Tivo fixes it so I can say the experience has been perfect.
A few other thoughts on the current Tivo setup:

20 hours of HD isn’t enough. Tivo or Fios DVR, I want a larger disk. I’ve heard that the e-sata ports on the Tivo are active, and with a few tricks you can add an external drive. That would be perfect. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll add a 500GB eSATA drive and it’ll be great.

For me, two tuners isn’t enough. I said we watch a lot of TV! Now I’ve got two HD tuners in the living room, and a standard def Phillips Series One Tivo in the bedroom. That’s got us covered. I’ve also got a MythTV box with an HD receiver that I might set up with an off the air HD antenna, just so I can get HD in the bedroom instead of just standard def.

The handling of the different HD modes and aspect ratios is really nice. I’ve selected a fixed mode for the 16:9 TV with gray bars for 4:3 programs. The Tivo also supports zooming the 4:3 content. That way letter boxed programs can fill my 16:9 TV correctly. My Sony XBR does that correctly, so I don’t really need that feature, but if I had the HD Tivo connected to the cheapo HD LCD in the bedroom, it would be great. That set doesn’t handle zoom correctly.

I haven’t really used the internet access features. The games on the box are just filler. The universal swivel search is sort of neat. It’s sort of interesting to track the relationship between various films and actors and such.

If anyone from Amazon or NBC is listening, why the heck do I have to configure one click purchasing in order to watch free programs? I tried to download one of your free premier episodes, until it told me I had to go to Amazon and configure one click purchasing to do it. I understand doing that for the episodes that cost money, but make the free downloads easy! Then if I like it, I’ll configure the one click purchase. Instead I gave up on the process, and I won’t use Amazon Unboxed.

As I mentioned, Verizon doesn’t have multistream cable cards, so they had to put two cable cards in the box. I’m not sure if they’re treating those as separate rentals at $3.00 a piece, or as I heard from someone else, it’s really just an outlet charge, and therefore only billed once. I guess I’ll know when I get the next bill.

Since I have an original Phillips series one Tivo on a lifetime subscription, I’m using the multi-unit discount for my HD Tivo. That saves me $6/month. That’s a nice benefit. It’s a shame you can’t get both the pay-up-front discount with the multi-tivo discount, but that’s OK.

I got rid of two FIOS HD-DVRs and replaced them with one HD-Tivo, and one stand def box. That’s quite a bit of cost savings. The setup in the bedroom is essentially free, because I use my old Tivo which is paid for, and the standard def FIOS TV box which they include if you sign up for a year of service. That’s lower quality, but it’s an OK trade off for the bedroom TV.

I’m very pleased with how I’ve got things setup. I think it’s clearly a better solution than the FIOS HD DVR. It removed a ton of frustration. No regrets at all.

I would set up a recording, I would see the light going on saying that it was recording, but when you came back to the recording later it said the recording was 0 seconds long. If you tried to play it, you’d get a message saying that the DVR failed to record the program. At one point I caught it while it was failing to record a program. I stopped the recording and tried to manually do the record, but it continued to create a 0 second long recording. The second major problem was that the guide data from Verizon was very inaccurate. I discussed that in a previous post, but the amount of work I had to do to make sure shows were recorded as I wanted or to delete ones I didn’t want was a big hassle.

Beyond that the little things became a big irritation. The remote was awful. It’s huge and complicated. Several of the operations are inconsistent as to which buttons you press. For example some times you have to press the exit button to leave an operation and other times you have to press the stop button. I had one of the DVRs connected to an LCD TV using HDMI. Before the IMG software that worked fine at 1080i, afterward I got a bright green line on the side of the image. If I dropped the resolution to 720p it worked fine. But that also appears to be a problem with the DVR software. Another big annoying issue was that it would jump to a different screen when a recording ended. IE, you come to the end of a program (but not the end of the recording) and start to browse your recorded programs to decide what to watch next. If the recording ends at this moment, the screen would change and you’d be forced to deal with the program that just ended. As I said in a previous post, most of these are annoying glitches.

We had a few hiccups during the install. The first issue is that Verizon doesn’t appear to have multistream cable cards. That means I have to have two cable cards to use my dual tuners. I’m also suspicious that they’re going to bill me for two as well. pissed that they are billing me for two cable cards instead of one. It’s only $3/month each, but if that’s true they really don’t have an incentive to get multistream cards since they make twice as much revenue by having two.

The second problem is that the installation took a really long time. The installer did all the steps he was supposed to, but it didn’t get us a picture. Then he went through his tricks for fixing it and we still had no luck. After a lot of swapping cards and resetting things, he finally decided to try and activate the second card. That went smoothly. Then after a bit more delay the first card came up. He didn’t know why. My only thought was that the first card might have been doing a firmware update, which can take a while, but we didn’t see any indication on the user interface if that was the case.

Of course, our HD Tivo is great. The interface is clean and easy. It works fine. We’ve had it connected to an antenna for the last couple days while we waited for our FIOS appointment and everything worked great. When I first connected it to the network, many of the on-line functions didn’t work. We couldn’t log in to Yahoo for example. The next day all of that was fine and some new items showed up like swivel search. I’m guessing the Tivo did a software upgrade over night. The convergence between the internet and the television on the Tivo is very nice. It’s a shame the netflix agreement didn’t work out. If I could download my 3 DVDs to my Tivo and not use the mail, that would be a really nice solution.

I’m looking forward to a nice smooth working DVR, instead of a lot of frustration.

The new IMG itself is very nice. They’ve made huge improvements to the interface. It’s prettier. It requires fewer clicks of the remote to get around. The wait time for the interface is reduced, and very few places leave you wondering if the box received your command. The down side is that the interface is still inconsistent. There are places where you can press stop to leave an operation and other places you need exit. Some times left arrow backs you out of one tab in their interface, and in other places it will return you to video. There are still places thover that take 5 seconds to respond. But it’s a huge improvement over the old guide.

The quality of the guide data hasn’t improved. There are still way to many generic entries. You can’t rely on new/repeat flats. etc.

But the really killer is that HD-DVR software itself has now gone south. The 1080i signal on one of my flat panel displays now has a bright green line down the side. There also seems to be a problem where the DVR fails to record shows in some cases. The entry is created saying a show was recorded, but if you look at the length of the recording it is 0 seconds.

The bottom line is that now I can’t rely on the guide data or the recorder itself. This is completely unacceptable. To add insult to injury, this article the price of the HD-DVR is going up from $12.99 to $15.99. I don’t know if that only applies to new subscribers or will be applied to existing ones, but either way that’s a problem.

Over 3 years, my two HD-DVR’s cost $1151. Two HD-Tivo’s cost $560. Two 3 year subscriptions (one with multi Tivo discount) cost $382. (oops can’t use the multi-year discount with the multi-tivo discount) $549. Renting two cable cards from Verizon $252. Total $1234 $1361 and I own the Tivos, I get multi room viewing, and it actually works. It seems like a much better solution. Most of the cost is up front, but I’m also insured that the rates don’t increase. Since you can’t use the multiyear discount it’s less money up front. That seems like a much better deal.

A VCR can record a show at a particular time and let you watch it later. But my Tivo does more than that. First, I tell my Tivo to record a program, not to record a time slot. There’s a lot of benefits to that. If the show airs multiple times a week it catches them all. If the show moves it’s time slot for a special event, it handles that. If the show airs multiple times it knows which ones I’ve seen and which ones I haven’t. If it airs multiple times and can’t record it the first time, it can catch it the second. All of these are critical features of a DVR.

All of these depend on having good and accurate guide data. Unfortunately, the FIOS guide data doesn’t meet the basic requirements to work with a DVR. With my Tivo it was common for me to tell it to record only the new episodes of a program. My FIOS DVR had the same option, but I found that was a really bad choice. Several of the programs I wanted to record showed up as repeats when they were new. In fact, in one case it was the series debut! So I decided I really can’t use the record only new episodes option.

They give you three options for recording programs. 1) New only 2) New and Reruns 3) New and Reruns with duplicates. Since new only doesn’t work, I fall back to option 2 and record new with reruns. Then we run in to the next problem. If a show airs multiple times during the week, it is marked as a rerun, but the DVR doesn’t recognize that it’s a duplicate. So the show gets recorded again. I have to manually delete the scheduled recording or erase the recording. Since the space on the DVR is limited to begin with, it really is better to remove the scheduled recording if you can catch it.

Another one of the recording options they provide is whether to record the show only at the specified time or any time it airs. In theory the later would be a useful choice. If I want to record a program, but there are higher priority shows that are keeping the DVR busy, then the system could record it when it aired at some unusual time. That would be nice, but it’s practically unusable because of the poor duplicate detection. Many of the shows on the smaller networks are aired 10 times in a week, and the DVR would record all 10 episodes. Since it only holds 20 hours of HD, that’s half the disk space.

Then we move to another guide issue. The guide should not only track new and repeat episodes, but it should tell me what the show is about. This is particularly useful for news programs which have a single name “Dateline”, “20/20″, or “60 Minutes”. Instead they some wisecracker has written the guide entry that is used many of the times the show airs. For example:

60 Minutes — The granddaddy (and the Rolls-Royce) news magazines, it set the standard for all that followed, and has kept on ticking on CBS since Sept. 24th, 1968, with its familiar format of three stories (most of them hard news) and a commentary or two.

Dateline NBC — NBC’s ubiquitous prime-time news magazine, the one that finally succeeded after more than a decade of attempts (and the one that has aired in many time slots on the network).

Thank you guide writer. Knowing the history of the program really doesn’t help me decide if I want to watch that particular episode. Frankly the tone of some of the entries is quite obnoxious. If I worked at Dateline I’d be upset. From the point of view of a user, these guide listings are virtually worthless.

Without good guide data, most importantly the unique episode numbers and the new/repeat flags, the FIOS DVR loses a lot of value. It’s a frustrating experience getting it to record the shows I want.

There is light at the end of this tunnel. Verizon is talking about their new interactive media guide (IMG) becoming available this summer. Since it’s August, I hope that means this month. I’ve looked at their website and the new IMG looks impressive. If it is backed with better data, then there may be hope. If not, the fancy glitz is just going to make me more annoyed. I also have to point out that it is possible that the guide data is perfect and it is actually the DVR itself that is misinterpreting the data. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look that way to me, but if that does turn out to be the case I’ll owe Verizon an apology.

The next installment, is on the DVR itself. Another stumbling block to FIOS’s TV service.

For the last three years, I’ve been getting my TV service from DirecTV. It’s easy and convenient. They have a lot of different programming packages. I tend to stick to the enhanced, but non-premium packages. So for $60/month I had their plus package with a DirecTivo. While that worked well enough, I couldn’t see paying another $10/month for HDTV, and replacing my Tivo particularly with how bad DirecTV compresses their HD. DirecTV is adverting that they will have more than 100 HD channels by the end of the year. The problem is that there aren’t that many HD channels out there even if you assume several new ones pop up this year. So how are they going to do it? The only way they can do it is by counting all the sports channels (their Direct Ticket packages) in their 100 channels. Those are channels I don’t care about. So I decided to give FIOS TV a try.

The FIOS package including the rental of 2 HD DVRs costs about the same as the DirecTV. I get 30 HD channels in Los Angeles. All the local networks here in Los Angeles have multiple channels. The rest of the package is basically the same channels as included with DirecTV. The quality of the HD signal is great. We’ve got good strength off the air HD. So I’ve compared the signals and it really looks like FIOS isn’t degrading the signal in any way. I have to say I’m very happy with the FIOS service.

There are a couple of other pluses to the FIOS package. Since it runs over the standard house cable, it means I can set up the equipment anywhere I want. DirecTV ran their own cables to any rooms I wanted. That meant that I could put the gear exactly where I wanted, but the rooms that weren’t wired were completely out of luck. I’m going to patch the DirecTV wiring in to house cable wiring and get the use of all the wiring in the house. The other interesting bit is that the FIOS TV boxes are actually IP connected as well. They have a couple widgets that show traffic and weather, they also have a home media center that lets you stream music. The widgets aren’t really useful, but the IP connectivity really is the right answer and has lots of potential.

That covers the basics of the DirecTV to FIOS switch. The next installment is going to cover the Tivo versus the Motorola 6416 HD DVR. I really love my Tivos, and you can read about how the new DVRs stack up in my next blog post.

I had been using SpeakEasy DSL for a number of years. They provided good reliable service. They’re techs were knowledgeable and handled calls quickly and efficiently. My only complaint was that it was expensive. A 1.5Mb/s down 768k up service was $80/month. They did include a static IP, very flexible use terms (you can every resell your connection), shell accounts on a server, and other goodies. So I give SpeakEasy a thumbs up as I wave goodbye.

I have to say FIOS has been fabulous. For $45/month I get 15Mb/s download and 2 Mb/s upload. I use it all the time for my home office. I really do get those data rates from good web sites and it has been reliable. They block port 80, so you can’t run a web server on your connection, but that seems to be the only minor downside. Everything else is great. To make up for the the few things I was missing I got to DreamHost account for $10/month which I’ve also been happy about.

DreamHost has worked out well. They’re inexpensive, but they offer a very flexible service. They give you a lot of storage and a lot of bandwidth, plus a shell account, a good domain hosting interface, and a lot of one-click install software. You can run as many domains out of it as you want.

Finally, I got a PDA phone with internet service a little over a year ago. Although that is pricey and sort of a hassle to use, it has been great for increasing my connectivity. I get my email on the phone. I can SSH in to systems from the phone. My PBX sends me an email when anyone leaves a voicemail. I can check that and response from my phone. The phone means that I’m never really away from the office. That’s great for my responsiveness, but not so great for having a life.

That does it for internet service. My next post is going to talk about FIOS TV service compared to DirecTV.