Your being a bit harsh on TiVo. TiVo has clients for both Mac and PC that will allow you to download content from your TiVo to your computer. I know on my Mac that I can burn that content onto a DVD (or blue ray) and watch it anywhere I like. I’m pretty sure that capability is also available for the PC.

TiVo is also quite open to hacking for the more technical minded folks. TiVo, the company seems to be OK with this as long as folks aren’t trying to hack around the the one thing that makes them money, that being the TV schedule. A quick Google of “TiVo hacks” will keep your inner geek wound up for weeks.

No, what I meant was let your boss record it on his DVR and then have him bring his DVR into work and play the movie directly from his DVR onto a television. That seems like the cheapest and simplest solution to me.

Ah, your boss has Uverse too, eh? I put hours into trying to figure out the same thing shortly after getting said service. Ugh. I also, just two weekends ago, ran a shitload of cable down through the basement and back up again so I could watch tv in my computer room (I only have room for a tiny-ass tv in here, and I just like it for background noise, so I couldn’t justify another $5/mo.). Someday, when I have extra money again (*sigh*), I’ll be going with a non-provider box, but for now… :(

@ Victoria:

Back when the Passion of Christ came out, my aunt borrowed a shaky-cam bootleg from a friend so that grandma could watch it. I found the mix of religion and unethical copyright infringement a bit ironic, but no one else seemed to notice. Piracy is a social problem – not something you can legislate away or fix with thechnology.

@ aleks:

I’m fairly sure they use some sort of proprietary format. Not to mention that the device is likely leased from the ISP so opening it up would probably void warranties, and etc…

@ s1n:

I guess that could have potentially worked, but I don’t own a DVR, and I don’t think anyone else who did actually wanted to bring it to work and leave it in the conference room for a week. :P

Why don’t you just bring his DVR into work and hook it up to the TV. The DVR functionality should work whether you get a cable signal or not.

1) Why didn’t you physically pull the HD out of that DVR, then plug it into your handy-dandy ESATA port/Open your desktop’s case and plug into IDE/etc, and liberate content till the cows came home? Do they use some proprietary bullshit format?

2) MythTV. My personal favorite open source DVR software: runs great on ubuntu, plays nice with el cheapo video hardware, and (for very power users) renders obsolete all this cable company bullshit.

well, we’re still the Old World :) my dad owns a DVD recorder with a built-in HDD that is automatically recording the channel it’s on all the time. My mom makes me download torrents of movies she likes – they also have a home hd player, so I use a large USB drive to transport those movies for her. But, we’re all pirates that way :)

@ ths:

Nice! Things like that definitely exist, and a lot of people are making use of them. But, they are not ubiquitous. Most people in US have either Tivo, a DVR from their cable provider or nothing.

Not to mention the fact that extracting recordings from a device that allows this, and converting them to playable format is beyond most people – unlike the VCR’s which were rather uncomplicated and even older people could be reliably trained to record TV-shows manually.

I have 2 satellite DVRs from a german company “comag”, one single-channel PVready (i.e. with USB connector for external media, price was ~70 Euro 3 years ago) and one dual-channel with harddisk *and* USB (still available at e.g. amazon for ~200 Euro “Comag PVR2 /100 TWIN PVR 400GB”).
The recorded content can be exported as .dvr files to external media, and can be converted to .ts files (ts=transport stream).
VLC can play .ts files, or you could convert .ts to .avi or other video format with a java program called “ProjectX”.

There’s an OSS project for Linux called VDR – video digital recorder, promoted by c’t magazine. If you have a TV card supported by Linux (e.g. Brooktree chipset) this is great stuff! You can add as many TV cards as your PC hardware supports to record and/or view multiple channels simultaneously.

@ Liudvikas:

The biggest problem with this is that to make this happen for the internet, they would have to make our computers work the way DVR’s do – ie be completely useless. And you can’t do that without wrecking the internet, and ruining the personal computer and basically just throwing away a significant part of our GDP. Our government is perfectly willing to help them do this though, because they pay for their campaigns.

Last time I checked the internet media companies contribute close to 20% of GDP, whereas hollywood and music industry put together only average under 5%. And yet our politicians are more than happy enough to essentially switch off the internet and wreck the online economy because of the fat paychecks they are getting from their RIAA and MPAA owners.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

The half that doesn’t pirate does not exist in my experience. It all boils down to methods and availability. Technology-clueless people who can’t figure out torrents buy bootleg DVD’s off the street. Those unwilling to spend money watch shady streams. Those who do neither benefit from piracy of her family members and peers.