Smart Home Blog

Here is a free service offered Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for media centers which based on Video Disk Recorder (VDR). Its interface is available in three languages: English, German and Russian. Just register a new account and follow by instruction to setup it in your VDR.

As I already mentioned the service is free but it has a small limitations. There is a possibility to take VIP account but it isn’t clear how to do it (it isn’t sold for money). But I suspect that free options should be quite enough.

If you’re owner of HTPC with Video Disk Recorder (VDR) and have enough interesting recorded media content you might use vdrtube to share it similar way as it’s done with YouTube. That VDR plug-in adopt video to display in Flash-player and build HTML structure to access it via web browser.

Plug-in allows to create themes. So, you can customize YourTube according to your desire. Also, there is a possibility to control access to your media content using Apache authorization functionality. Plug-in vdrtube is developed on Perl. It’ll be pretty easy to modify it if you don’t satisfy its work.

Actually, it’s a good possibility to share your video between relatives or friends. But personally I prefer to have plug-in which allows to watch YouTube video on TV using VDR or MythTV. But currently as I know only Windows MCE offers such feature.

LegendTV is one of the Google Summer projects. Its goal is to create an alternative to MythTV for Linux-based machines. LegendTV has an architecture similar to MythTV – apparent separating to a front-end and a back-end. The front-end will handle playback via a Java3D-based GUI. The back-end will offer similar functionality as many existing PVRs: scheduling, recording, file management etc. Currently the project author concentrates on Linux version. But following by Java slogan “Written once, works everywhere” or something similar, versions for Windows and MacOs are also planned.

I can be wrong but IMHO Java technologies are too heavy and resource-intensive for home using. I don’t think that the LegendTV can be work efficiently on Pentium II with 256Mb RAM as VDR can. Anyway, let see how that project will grow. Basically, it’s good to have reasonable number of choices to build home media center.

If you think that HTPC is too complicated and expensive the new product from Emtec might be interesting for you. Movie Cube -R actually an external storage (up to 500GB) but with amazing functionality. It allows to MPEG 4 playback and recording without PC! What you need to do is connect that media HDD to the TV using its video ouput and that’s it! You can record your favorite TV show or play video already stored on the Movie Cube -R. It has navigation buttons on the front panel and supports remote control.

The Movie Cube offers a simple way to connect your digital camera to download and store photos. It also can be connected to the PC via Ethernet or USB and used as ordinary external storage.

Emtec offers a several models of Movie Cube -R with different capacity: from 160GB to 500GB. The price is started from $300.00 which is quite reasonable for device with such features.

[via Engadget]

As you may know the free service which offered electronic programming guides (EPG) for many of the popular freeware PVR applications like MythTV, was discontinued by Tribune Media. So, basically owners of PVRs have two possibility. One is pay for EPG to Schedules Direct or CT TV or wait when some big guys like Google or Yahoo! offer similar service for free. The reason why EPG is not free is the license of its data.

Schedules Direct offers 3 months for $15 and plans to give a $20-30 per year in the near future. CTpvr asks $3.50 per month or $30 flat for a year. So, actually it isn’t so expensive to have possibility schedule favorite TV shows.

[via TV Squad]