Tivo ever going to license their OS?

[techieunite]

I don't see why tivo doesn't license their OS or even their operating technology so that consumers can use it on other devices.

For instance, most people who have tv tuners in their PC use windows media center.

If Tivo were to sell/license their software to run the recording portion, they could make additional income as well as satisfy a need. The Software right now is excellent, has great search capabilities, is reliable, etc.

If they didn't want to license the entire os, they could at least release a program that could run on top of any flavor of winxp(home, pro, ect).

Since Tivo isn't making money off the boxes, only the sub, this makes perfect sense. Also, since Tivo isn't making much of a profit, it would open up additional revenue streams and get the Tivo name out there even more.

I have an LG LRM-519 media center extended with dvd-recorder and the recording quality is not as good as that of my tivos. Something about the encoding mechanism makes the recordings look pixelated even at highest quality.

What would be great if Apple and Tivo were to partner. This way you could buy a mac, install "tivo recording device" and have great recording capabilities.

Just an idea

[megazone]

First of all, they ALREADY license their OS. How do you think Sony, Humax, Pioneer, Toshiba, et al, make 'TiVo' boxes? And they license it to DirecTV, of course. And Comcast, which will be rolling out soon. Any CE vendor that wants to can license the TiVo software.

Second, software doesn't work that way. The TiVo software is highly specialized to run on specific hardware. It will not run on a x86 CPU in a PC, the TiVo currently uses a MIPS core CPU. It also uses specialized encoding hardware, etc. TiVo would have to do a wholesale rewrite to make the software work on a PC, on ANY operating system. But especially to run on, say, Windows, since it currently runs on a Linux kernel. Very different worlds.

Plus the PC market is already glutted with WinXP MCE, Vista coming, and BeyondTV, SnapStream, and now ReplayTV's PC offering (which is going to bomb, mark my words). Plus Yahoo's free Go DVR software, MythTV, FreeVo, and more.

[techieunite]

I'm glad that somebody actually reads these forums.

I guess you're right. I've read about the processors in side the tivos and I know that they are very slow. I was unaware that they are not x86 based.

Most Tivos only have 64,32, or less megabytes of memory. Since they are very specialized boxes, they don't need much more computing power I guess.

A media center pc can use all the processing power they can get. But those have to run anti-virus software, and other programs.

Go figure

[megazone]

I come and go depending on how busy I am. :-) But I use the forums ability to read all the unread posts so I catch up when I've been gone a while - which is when you see a ton of replies from me in a row.

The S1 had 16MB RAM, the S2 32MB, and the S2DT has 64MB. The S3 will probably have 128MB or more.

TiVo doesn't need that powerful a processor because it does more in hardware. For example, when you watch a video on a PC the CPU usually handles the video decoding using a software codec. That takes a fair bit of CPU power and RAM. (Sometimes the video card will handle video decoding in the GPU these days, but most boxes still use the CPU.) On the TiVo video decoding is handled by a dedicated chip. Since it is designed to decode video in hardware, it is far more efficient than a software codec.

Specialized hardware can be much lower powered than general purpose systems like a PC's CPU. The PC's CPU needs to be a jack-of-all-trades, able to handle anything. An MPEG decoded just decodes MPEG. That's all it does and it is optimized for it.

The more you ask a device to do, and the PC is king of general purpose devices, the more features and capabilities it needs to cover all those options. But that also raises the cost of the hardware. It is a tradeoff.