TiVo Gets Huge Horsepower Boost

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:23:06 -0500
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From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Subject: TiVo Gets Huge Horsepower Boost

TiVo Gets Huge Horsepower Boost

By Katie Dean
02:00 AM Feb. 17, 2004 PT

TiVo and other digital video recorders will get a serious boost in
horsepower later this year as manufacturers start selling DVRs that
can record high-definition television programming.

Several of the new, more robust high-definition DVRs will sport
250-GB hard drives -- enough room to store 30 hours of
high-definition programming or about 200 hours of standard broadcast.

The beefier hard drives are necessary because signals for
high-definition TV, or HDTV, carry far more information per frame
than standard TV. For example, one HDTV standard in the United States
(1080i) calls for images that are 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels,
refreshed 60 times a second. By comparison, standard analog TV in the
United States is 500 dots by 525 dots.

But while the huge storage will please consumers, another "feature"
of the new generation of machines may not: Under pressure from
Hollywood, the manufacturers will include copy-protection schemes
that will prevent users from sharing recorded programs or playing
them on other devices, like a PC.

The content will be protected by two mechanisms. The first is Digital
Visual Interface (or DVI), which shuttles digital signals from the
DVR to the display. DVI  works with High-bandwidth Digital Content
Protection (or HDCP), which encrypts that signal and ensures that
only an authorized device can display the content.

...

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61988,00.html

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