The fine folks over at the Freevo project released their latest stable version, 1.6.0, on Saturday. Of course with the usual stability & performance increases, there are also a couple of new features.
Some of noteworthy fixes include some code to clean up a few remote control problems, a few caching issues seem to have been fixed, and there are also a few interface tweaks. As far as new features goes, a few new plugins have been added, multi-tuner support is now built in, and there are more skins available to add some life to the Freevo interface.
Although Freevo may not be as popular as some of the other homebrew solutions, it has so far with stood the test of time. However it still seems behind in a few areas, especially when you consider that it only recently received support for more than one tuner card.
As with any software upgrade, you may want to watch out for new issues that may arise. Since the release, things have been fairly quiet on the Freevo-users mailing list but that's not to say that it's bug free.
Out of the 234 PVR Wire readers
who responded to our poll on how they were going to watch the Super Bowl, most were planning to watch it live rather
than rely on their PVRs to isolate them from the commercials. Nearly 40 percent said they would watch the big game
live, followed by 27 percent who were planning to delay their viewing by minutes.
Only 7 percent said they
would delay their viewing for another day. But not everyone was going to watch the game: 26 percent said they had no
plans to watch the Super Bowl this year. It looks like the Super Bowl may be one of those rare events where the
networks can count on live eyeballs and a PVR audience that keeps the fast-fastforwarding to a minimum. The only other
program that may attract similar loyalty is the Oscars.
It's been almost a full week since we published our PVR poll. The response has been great! On Sunday afternoon, we were at 489 votes, so yesterday I asked for more votes to take it over 500. Now the total is 547 -- and probably still growing.
The winner, at 50 percent, is TiVo. But when you add the standalone TiVo's 275 votes with the DirecTV TiVo's 72 votes, the total of Tivo users is 63 percent. So nearly two-thirds of our readership own a TiVo, which helps us decide which news items are more important and which tips and hacks will be the most widely received.
Still, 37 percent of respondents own something else, so we're not going to forget about you! And I imagine that some of the other 63 percent wouldn't mind trying or owning another kind of PVR if they saw it was better or more convenient.
ReplayTV received 57 votes, or 10 percent of the votes. Dish Network had 6 percent, Comcast came in at 29 votes for 5 percent, linux solution MythTV had 24 votes for 4 percent and Windows Media Center had just 20 votes for 4 percent of the vote. Another Linux program, freevo, had three votes for 1 percent. Interestingly, 33 voters, or 6 percent of the total, don't own a PVR.
You've got to love it when someone spends time on a project for the sheer joy of doing it. That seems to be the case with the gentleman who gutted his old VCR and turned it into a PVR. Specifically, he took a spare computer and the drive from a DVD player and installed them inside a dead, gutted VCR. The plan was to run the open-source PVR software freevo without upsetting his wife by positioning a computer near the TV set.
He calls the project "VCRVO" and has extensive photos and instructions at his Web site. While the project is cool, I'm glad I'm single and can do any thing I want, aesthetics be damned.
Here's PVR Wire's first shot at a podcast. It's really a 29-minute telephone interview, but I guess anything that's converted to mp3 format nowadays is called a podcast.
I interview Ron Petralia, vice president of sales at Hauppauge Digital Inc., a manufacturer of computer products that have PVR functions.
Operation Do It Yourself officially begins this week.
This is my months-long effort to build, install and test alternatives to TiVo. I'm already beginning to get in some of the necessary equipment and software from manufacturers and software providers that have been gracious enough to lend me review units.
I've already installed and tried out eyetv 200 from elgato. It's for Macs and it's basically a simple TiVo-like device that plugs into your Mac via a FireWire cable. It uses the Mac for hard-drive storage. I hope to have a review of it online within the next few days.
The fine folks over at the Freevo project released their latest stable version, 1.6.0, on Saturday. Of course with the usual stability & performance increases, there are also a couple of new features.
It's been almost a full week since we published our 
