neurological dryer lint

... but i want food for my mouth

so b's tivo was upgraded to an OS version required to use tivo2go. we started playing with it last night. it took me about 18 hours to pull 30GB of video from it to my desktop. here's my take:

good things
- you can watch recorded content from your Windows PC
- it's free

bad things
- you can't watch them in any other app besides Windows Media Player
- their proprietary .Tivo MPEG format is huge
- you have to enter a password every time you open a video
- you can't do things like change the brightness on the video (still can't believe that one)
- you can't burn them to DVD from your PC

and why is this, kids? that's right, DRM. frightened by pressure from the handful of large media companies that control the entertainment industry, Tivo locked down the video format. instead of making it a standards-compliant format, there's one app and one OS you can watch it on. rather than allow the consumer who has paid for the device and the Tivo service to do what they want, they maintain control and set the rules. legally, can they do it? yes. is it better than nothing? yes. is it right? is it beneficial to their business? n*&@#*a please.

well that's the case for now, anyway. within a few weeks of the release, engadget posted a howto on decrytping the .Tivo files into an MPEG2 standard format, which can be recompressed, burned to DVD, etc. it's a little hard to do right now, but it works (B tried it on his new redneck death show Dog The Bounty Hunter)... and i'm sure that under a month from now there'll be an easy drag & drop method to decrypt the files.

so being out of the office today made me realize i really need a mobile email solution. and this isn't just a 'i want a new gadget' thing - i actually need it for my job. something like the blackberry or the sidekick that doesn't require silly expensive GPRS airtime. doesn't even need to support exchange natively - IMAP will work. right now it's too costly to even just check my mail from my phone, and typing with the number keys doesn't work too well. i love the style of the sidekick, and it'll do IMAP, but you gotta use T-Mobile. cbwireless offers the blackberry, but only the older model that i'd never use as a phone. and the treos are also too pricey - the sidekick you can get for pretty cheap now. guess for now it's stopping at wifi hotspots and booting the laptop.