TiVo Wins Appeal On Patents For Pause, Ffwd, Rwd 215
Lorien_the_first_one writes "After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."
STOP WITH STORY TAG (Score:4, Insightful)
For $DEITY sake stop tagging stories with story tag or the gets it!
To tag a story with story once is misfortune, to tag a story with story twice is annoying, to do it three its enemy action!
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For $DEITY sake stop tagging stories with story tag or the gets it!
To tag a story with story once is misfortune, to tag a story with story twice is annoying, to do it three its enemy action!
You're right. Obviously, they should tag stories with the "comment" tag and vice versa. Fucking ingenious!
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Or at least fix the damn options to turn tags off. I turned them off when they first came on the scene but now they return even though I haven't changed any options.
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Dish is still Echostar (Score:3, Insightful)
Dish Network is a product. Echostar Satellite LLC is the company. There is no former, only formal.
Go TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
Hang in there! (Score:4, Informative)
Direct and TIVO have inked another deal and there will be new HD hardware for Direct from TIVO coming in a year or so. FWIW - I left DISH for Direct to get TIVO and left Direct to FIOS to keep TIVO. Now I'm stuck on COX but I've got my TIVO!
Anyway, hang in there - relief from that POS "DVR" they provided you is coming!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/03/hell-freezes-over-new-directv-hd-tivo-on-the-way/ [engadget.com]
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nfortunately my move to DirecTV, and TiVo's change of focus to Cable and OTA only, I have been forced to use the DirecTV DVRs.
That's DirecTV's doing, not Tivo's. Rupert Murdoch shut them out because he thought they could do better in house. Now that Murdoch's gone, they can admit defeat, and are actually working with Tivo to make an DTV HD Tivo, to be released next year.
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Nope. That's Tivo's doing.
They would rather be part of the DRM cabal than give it's
end users free access to their content. This includes poor
support for alternative OSes, trying to obscure the content
you've bought and paid for and refusing to support the open
HD wire protocols out there.
Yes, it's Tivo's fault that they can't suport DirecTV HD.
I'm recording off of an HD DirecTV reciever RIGHT NOW.
Split hairs. Make excuses if you like.
I'm enjoying full access to my directv content now.
Re:Go TiVo (Score:4, Informative)
Tivo invented the DVR, period, and Dish infringing on their patents almost put them under. This is the whole reason we have patents, to let the guy that came up with the idea profit from it without being put under by big pocketed copycats. I'm really glad TiVo won this case.
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Not at all, but the DVR was not an obvious invention.
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If it is the same tuner that was offered in the 5500/6500 yes it could pause but when you unpaused it went right to where the TV show was at that moment. It was like the still button on a TV, there was no recording to the HD and then playing back from where you were. The only way you could record put-up a big window where the image no longer moved and the sound cut out. Then when you stopped the recording or ran out of memory (which was measured in minutes) the window would show each frame of what you recor
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DVR is not an obvious invention?!?!? You have to be kidding. It's basically just a MiniDV VCR, but instead of digital tape, they use a digital hard drive. That is a frakking obvious application, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere already had a 1980s-era Amiga recording live television to their HDD.
>>>Tivo allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television
I'm sorry but I don't see how this is any different than a DVD-recorder. It too has pause buttons, rewind buttons, and fast
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I'm sorry but I don't see how this is any different than a DVD-recorder. It too has pause buttons, rewind buttons, and fast-forward buttons.
But you can't use them while recording, thus the patent.
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The ReplayTV could pause or rewind live television, and it arrived on the scene the same time as Tivo.
Tivo can not claim exclusivity over the idea.
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ReplayTV actually beat Tivo to market. But the patent in question was applied for about a year before that. And the patent itself references the IDEA being conceived by another party in 1994.
Tivo and Replay TV each had patents on various parts of the DVR and IIRC they sued one another early on, but ended up settling with a cross-licensing agreement.
The patent is just for one method of implementing this IDEA. In fact, it suggests that another implementation could be pulled off by using 3 VCRs - though it wou
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The DVR is the very definition of an obvious invention:
Give the specification to any apprentice practitioner
and see how quickly they whip up a clone of the device
without even seeing anything more than a basic superficial
description.
Patents aren't supposed to give you a MONOPOLY on
the idea of a mousetrap. They are supposed to give you
a monopoly on the necessary details required to build
a mousetrap.
Patents are meant to encourage p
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Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
"In 1985, while working at Honeywell's Physical Sciences Center, David Rafner first described a drive-based DVR designed for home TV recording, time-slipping, and skipping commercials. U.S. Patent 4,972,396 focused on a multi-channel design to allow simultaneous independent recording and playback." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder [wikipedia.org]
Looks like Tivo was just copying somebody else's idea.
- They can not claim it to be their own.
Also of note: ReplayTV was released the same year as Tivo, and it too can pause or rewind live television via "independent record and playback". Once again, Tivo can not claim first implementation.
wikipedia entry is wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the wikipedia entry is wrong. They Honeywell patent is:
Title: Multiple independently positionable recording-reading head disk system
Abstract
------
A multiple independently positionable recording-reading head optical disk system. The system includes at least one optical disk having an arrangement of data elements. A plurality of recording-reading heads read and write data onto the optical disk. An apparatus for transporting the plurality of recording-reading heads over one side of the optical disk enabling each of the recording-reading heads to read data from or write data onto the optical disk independently of the other recording-reading heads.
--
This is not a TiVo. This is how to record onto optical media with multiple independent read/write heads.
This demonstrates why you should actually verify information in WikiPedia instead of quoting it blindly.
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Looks like Tivo was just copying somebody else's idea.
- They can not claim it to be their own.
A herd of patent lawyers and a judge have ruled otherwise. Hint: a random engineer isn't usually qualified to make judgments like this.
Also of note: ReplayTV was released the same year as Tivo, and it too can pause or rewind live television via "independent record and playback". Once again, Tivo can not claim first implementation.
The standard (then) is "first to invent", not first to market. These issues have been
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Honestly, the only "new" functionality in the Tivo was the "guide", and I'm not sure, but was Tivo really the first to offer a digital guide to channels?
From my point of view, everything about the Tivo was obvious and simply a migration
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Amigas, SGI Workstations, etc. with VIVO?
ATI TV?
Pinnacle capture cards?
They all predate Tivo.
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They didn't patent rewind/fast forward, and if you think that's what this is about perhaps you should actually read the patent.
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I'm allergic to reading you insensitive clod!
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It's not solid state; it's a hard drive.
I always assumed the pause/rewind/etc. stuff was a software layer (apparently it is not). I attributed Direct TVs lack of the few second jump back when pressing "play" from fast-forwarding as part a patent issue. I wonder...
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it. some of what they do isn't really obvious either - like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Whenever this story is talked about, and this has been a long running battle, everyone says the patents are "obvious" but honestly I do not think they simply patented something so obvious as the buttons found on a VCR. Instead they patented their circular buffer, the ability to watch while recording and pause without losing anything including audio\video synch. I mean really, if it was so obvious and simple why is it that every other damned commercial DVR out there sucks ass? DISH, FIOS, Direct, and all of the cable DVRs BLOW compared to the TIVO. Why is that if this is all so darned easy and obvious?
TIVO ain't perfect but they pioneered much of this and it's pretty good software. Time they got paid by all those companies that simply copied (poorly) what they did.
P.S. Yeah, I owned one of the competitor boxes that had auto-commercial skip too. A shame THAT got creamed :-(
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Funny)
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Actually it has been obvious for a few decades now:
$man rewind
int fseek(FILE *stream, long offset, int whence);
long ftell(FILE *stream);
void rewind(FILE *stream);
int fgetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
int fsetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
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Actually it has been obvious for a few decades now: [list of ANSI C <stdio.h> seeking functions]
TiVo's inventive step was to apply this sort of seeking to video frames rather than to a raw byte stream.
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Something like seeking the picture in flip book [wikipedia.org] or spinnng a zoetrope [wikipedia.org] to find the right page?. Seriously now, how else would you pull meaningful information out a pipe if the data wasn't "framed" in a structure of some sort. Televisions have been deinterlacing video signals for more than half a century now.
There is nothing new or non-obvious in TiVo's "invention" as far as handling of the stream. Sucking data in and putting it temporary storage so that it can be used more effeciently has been around forever
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Or does a video frame not come at a certain point in a raw byte stream?
Unlike bytes, which by definition are length 1 in C, MPEG video frames are not fixed in length.
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Unlike bytes, which by definition are length 1 in C, MPEG video frames are not fixed in length.
struct ured
{
data in
}c;
if(only);
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DISH, FIOS, Direct, and all of the cable DVRs BLOW compared to the TIVO. Why is that if this is all so darned easy and obvious?
Maybe they blow because they didn't use TIVO's patented technology?
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Hey, I loved my TiVos too (and prefer them to the DirecTV injustice I have to endure).
Seriously, though, the reason TiVo did it first is because back when they did it, 10GB of hard drive space was both huge and expensive. They happened to implement these features _on a hard drive_ first. VCRs could do everything a TiVo could do except during live TV. It's not for lack of want or idea, but the simple fact that they area sequential access medium. One might say that the 7 second tape delay used in radio statio
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And I'm pretty sure, despite the crap summary, that those are NOT the functions that they patented.
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Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
It was called a VCR - it's been around for years
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Again, VCRs did this for years. The intent was to rewind past the point where you hit the button, and the tape that kept going due to the spinning reel inertia.
NOTHING in that patent is new or novel. Changing from analog tape to digial media is an obvious enhancement to the VCR and should never have been granted as a patent.
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>>>if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot.
That's not a Tivo "feature" but an MPEG2 bug. Since MPEG2 only captures a full frame every few seconds (on low-bitrate EP mode), the Tivo can not start playing immediately. Instead it must travel backwards along the bitstream until it finds a full frame. This is what causes that slight rewind motion.
My Panasonic ReplayTV does exactly the same thing. Ditto my DVD recorder. Ditto my D-VHS tape, albeit in
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No it's not. Every other DVR I've used just stops for a moment when you hit play, and starts from that point - It's physically impossible to get the Time Warner DVR to stop when a show starts back up coming out of commercial.
The process ends up looking like this: FF->FF-> wait a few seconds, oops, it started, hit Play->Rew until you get back to the black interstitial, then Play again.
On the Tivo, when your brain registers "Okay the show's back on", you hit play, and it snaps back about 5 seconds
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P.S.
This is slightly offtopic, but still related: If you use your TiVo or other DVR to record off-the-air television, they will stop working on February 18, 2009. You either need to upgrade to a new ATSC-compatible recorder ($$$$), or buy a digital-to-analog converter box (~$20), or subscribe to cable (ouch).
Thanks Congress.
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>>>TiVo and other DVRs will NOT cease to work.
Well no, not technically. If you are an over-the-air viewer (like me), you can always just record the white static of non-existent analog signals come March 2009, but why would you want to do that?
Picky, picky.
I stand by my previous post.
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> Instead they patented their circular buffer
Which was used by 90% of IO-interrupt-driven modem protocols ever since the early days of dialup modems
> the ability to watch while recording
At the command line of any decent linux distro or unix implementation, enter the command "man tee", without the quotes. It'll mention...
"tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files"
> pause without losing anything including audio\video synch
ever
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> the ability to watch while recording
At the command line of any decent linux distro or unix implementation, enter the command "man tee", without the quotes. It'll mention...
"tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files"
cat /dev/dsp > /tmp/audio.out & /tmp/audio.out ...or
sox
cat /dev/video0 > /tmp/directv.out & /tmp/directv.out
mplayer
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Because the ideas *are* obvious and the difficulty is in the implementation. Which is why people get so annoyed with the IP holding companies holding real innovators to ransom.
My Sky+ box can do record and play simultaneously but it makes mistakes. Once or twice I have been watching a few minutes behind the live broadcast, accidentally hit the Sky button (which returns to the live broadcast), and been unable to rewind back to where I was.
Logically it sounds simple, but once you get into all the different
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Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
This does not make it non-obvious. In fact it was and still is obvious. Circular buffers are obvious and guess what, have been used in broadcasting since the magnetic tape.
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Much of this DVR technology is "obvious" now but when TIVO first began building these boxes there was no one out there doing it.
It was obvious when they applied for the patent.
HELL, it was probably implemented with some other form of multi-media when they applied for the patent.
This is the problem with trying (and gaining) a patent on what is essentially a basic feature of modern operating systems.
Once you have the necessary hardware (bttv or ivtv) then the rest can be prototyped with shell scripts.
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Strangely, despite multiple passes through the court system and who knows what else through the patent system these things are holding. Now I KNOW our patent system has issues but do you REALLY think that something that is so "obvious" and found "everywhere" wouldn't have been appealed by the army of lawyers and millions of dollars being thrown at this case and the previous ones? Really? Seriously? Like just maybe TIVO really did do something that no one managed previously? They did crosslicense with Replay
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I mean really, if it was so obvious and simple why is it that every other damned commercial DVR out there sucks ass?
The problem with crappy DVRs is crappy GUI designers, or crappy executives who tie their hands and push crap out the door into the helpless, captive market.
There is nothing TECHNICALLY preventing my Dish HD DVR from being pretty good, as far as I can tell. It was just designed by a sadist with ADD and a head injury.
The hardware under the awful GUI can record 3 HD streams (1 OTA + 2 sat) while playing back 1 HD and 1 SD recording, and do it without getting laggy. That ain't bad. (Did they steal that technolo
USPTO Patent 6,233,389 (Score:5, Informative)
It's about the TiVo Multimedia time warping system [google.com] patent.
Tomek Z. (Score:3, Funny)
It's great nobody patented car turning right yet. Imagine all those left-turn only cars...
Re:Tomek Z. (Score:4, Funny)
They call that NASCAR.
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I know you are being funny about only left turns in NASCAR but there are typically two to four road courses a season. But you know how every third race or so there is some driver that crashes for inexplicable reasons? He got dizzy ;)
How the hell?? (Score:5, Insightful)
How in the hell can you hope to patent this?
Is this really a novel technology, or a slapping together of a bunch of existing things in a fairly obvious manner. I mean, really, the very first applications on the internet that allowed streaming video and audio supported pause, rewind, and fast forward. I distinctly remember pushing pause on things to allow the buffer to fill up over a slow dialup line. Sometimes, the slow dialup line would enforce a pause for you. ;-)
Other than the fact that it's TV, I don't see this as being any different from real player or a bunch of things which predated it.
This patent really should be vacated, I just can't see how "a buffer with forward and backward access" is actually a novel invention. I'm of the opinion that if you can show any application which streamed multimedia ever had pause etc then the whole patent is invalid.
Cheers
It was novel at the time. (Score:2, Informative)
Being able to pause a live video stream on the home TV? Then fast forward to catch up to the live stream? No one else was doing that in the late 90's.
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If I was doing it with any form of media prior to Tivos patent, the ability to buffer and play an incomplete stream as a concept should be void.
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
If Tivo truly patented this before anyone demon
Re:It was novel at the time. (Score:4, Informative)
As I understand it, if Tivo used a different technique of doing on TV than was used in other media, it's patentable. If Dish used a different technique of doing it on TV than Tivo did, Dish should be okay. But if Dish just copied Tivo's patented technique, then Tivo was right to stomp them.
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Maybe, but without knowing the details, unless it is more than "patent for a circular buffer with random access", then I just don't get it.
Essentially, once the concept of a buffered stream with pause, rewind, fast forwar
Re:It was novel at the time. (Score:4, Informative)
What's the technique difference?
Realplayer (before tivo): video bits get sucked off the internet (which may be digitized in real time on the other end) and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Tivo: video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Dish (after tivo): video bits get sucked off a video digitizer and stuck into a ring buffer, pointer streams data off buffer, decodes and displays it. You can move the pointer around the buffer.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I fail to see how using a ring buffer to store video is worthy of a patent.
The inventive step vs. RealPlayer (Score:2)
Realplayer (before tivo): video bits get sucked off the internet [...]
Tivo: video bits get sucked off a video digitizer [...]
Maybe I'm dumb, but I fail to see how using a ring buffer to store video is worthy of a patent.
Unlike video in RealPlayer, video on a TiVo DVR is 1. digitized locally and 2. ring-buffered in rotating magnetic media, not solid-state RAM. If I remember correctly, the buffer in RealPlayer was usually small enough to fit in RAM, which is why you usually couldn't buffer more than a minute.
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Bah, digitizers that streamed to disk were out way before tivo. I remember throwing an old one for a mac in a dumpster around the time tivo came out.
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There definitely were some major differences between streaming video on the internet and on TV at the time that certainly could have technological implications.
Bandwidth, for one thing -- the TV video stream has a lot more data. Also, the TV stream is being captured, digitized, compressed, and put into the buffer all in real time by the re
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Perhaps.
Although if that "invention" was ever valid, I think that
it has already been made obsolete. That's the problem with
subjecting these kinds of devices to patents. You apply a
19th century idea to something that doesn't need centuries
of inventive effort. In the end you cause much more harm
than good.
Intellectual property interferes with future creativity.
That interference may be based on legitimate ideas in
terms of derived work. Or it may not. In the latter
case, patents on the obvious will muddy everythi
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Actually, the fact that you can point to 2 separate companies
coming to market at exactly the same time does show that it
was infact obvious. It wasn't necessarily obvious to Joe
Sixpack. That's not the standard. It was obvious to the
relevant inventors.
Patents are (should be) for someone who is clearly first
past the finish line. There should be no photo finishes
at the patent office.
The idea is obvious, but .... (Score:2)
Sure, the notion of fast forward, pause, and reverse is obvious, but the methodology and working device was, at the time, non-trivial it took some work to get it good, and dish network did "steal" their technique.
Now, are all patents bogus? I tend to think so. There is too much historical account of inventors "rushing to the patent office" to beat their competitor. Now, too me, that seems terribly unfair, one will get the benefit of their research, and another will not.
On the other hand, if you spend a good
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Or occasionally the better funded business makes up something and then those evil free software lovers come and STEAL the idea of close buttons, scroll bars, and a menu to access the software on a computer in one location. They even stole 'file managers' and 'media players' and 'email clients'.
Damn you GNUheads!
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Sure, the notion of fast forward, pause, and reverse is obvious, but the methodology and working device was, at the time, non-trivial it took some work to get it good, and dish network did "steal" their technique.
As other people have pointed out, they are essentially describing a DVD PLAYER.
That's all that a Tivo ultimately is. It's a DVD player but minus the optical media.
Playing MPEG2 or MPEG1 is pretty simple. There were tons of PC applications to do just this when this patent was filed. Once the TV signal is converted to MPEG2, everything else is trivial.
Infact, you can rip content off of a Tivo and treat
it just like any other video file. You don't even
have to transcode it if you didn't have to deal
with Tivo DRM
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Funny you bring that up. They call it a patent.
I was indirectly discussing the pros and cons of the patent system, of course it is a patent. Did you even go to high school?
The question is: what should be patentable? What shouldn't? It is not an easy question. Those who are quick to decry patents, sometimes agree with the general principle when presented in a sympathetic example.
Most all patents, IMHO, are bogus. They don't seem to embody any real investment and thus do not really enrich the society or promo
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The trap here is that when someone first comes up with an idea it is new and innovative. However fast forward a few years later when everyone has seen the device and thinks it's pretty obvious and they think that having a patent on it is stupid. I mean look at the light bulb - piece of material suspended in a vac with juice run through it till it glows like mad - obvious right? Sure, now it seems obvious but when it was invented they had to work like heck to get it to last for more than a flash! Same thing
There is no spool. (Score:2)
Do not try to rewind the TiVo. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spool.
TiVo calls those functions "Fwd" and "Back".
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But TiVo runs (and contributes to) Linux. And these were defensive patents. That makes them okay, right?
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If the specific implementation is not novel or new, then its not valid. I highly doubt that Tivo invented a completely new non obvious method of recording MPEG video streams.
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I read the patent - it's groundless, non novel and not unique.
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When it was patented years ago you might be surprised to learn that apparently it was new and innovative. Certainly Direct and DISH have been surprised to learn such a thing when they have tried and FAILED to challenge the patents.
Surely since you have greater insight than their army of lawyers and experts you should contact them to offer your services. For this I am sure you would be paid quite well when you win this case and have the patents removed from the books.
Good luck in your new career!
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What I don't get is how the videodisc instant replay stuff they used back in the 1970s or early 80s didn't completely kill this patent through prior art. It's not like this is the first time a ring buffer of recordable video media has been used to pause a live video signal and play it back (optionally in slow motion, even). The networks have been doing this literally for decades. The only thing novel about this patent is that the ring buffer is stored digitally and compressed on the spinning platters (an
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This coming from someone with little to no ideas that need protection from others.
Actually I'm an engineer with my name to several patents, so your supposition as to my intent is completely false.
Re:Fucking patent trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, topposting because the knee-jerk patent-troll comments below are annoying.
The patent: Multimedia time warping system [google.com]
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. (borrowing from BLKMGK's comment below [slashdot.org]) Combination of software and hardware (circuit implementation) to get the function working.
NO, your VHS/Betamax player did not have this first, unless it could record the show and play it back at the same time, allowing you to watch different segments of the show while it kept recording. IIRC, Tivo was in negotiations with Echostar/Dish before Dish released a DVR. Tivo let them see a demo unit under NDA. Dish suddenly broke off talks with Tivo, and shortly after came out with their own DishDVR hardware. Sure enough, components infringing on the Tivo patent were found in the hardware.
This kind of crap is exactly what the patent system is supposed to prevent, or at least provide recourse for. The system is working correctly in this case. I'm a Dish subscriber, and love using DVR (even though DishDVR is far inferior to Tivo) because the TV service is the least expensive available where I'm at. It'll be interesting to see if prices change when this settles down.
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...and was patented by David Rafner of Honeywell, before TiVO existed .... ...or you could get a PC based PVR and pay nothing for a tivo alike with more features no restrictions and nor subscription required?
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or you could get a PC based PVR and pay nothing for a tivo alike with more features no restrictions and nor subscription required?
Unless, of course, you need television listings, which you can't get for free anymore. So there goes that idea.
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NO, your VHS/Betamax player did not have this first, unless it could record the show and play it back at the same time, allowing you to watch different segments of the show while it kept recording.
I wrote software to do this with a couple of Pioneer magneto-optical laser video disk recorders back in about 1996 (I can't remember the exact date but beyond any doubt it was before October 1998).
My implementation actually only allowed a delayed playback (of up to 30 minutes) but it would be trivial to have had t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Found a link to the device I was using:
http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/pioneer/pioneer_vdr-v1000/pioneer_vdr-v1000.htm [laserdiscarchive.co.uk]
So it was half the price I remembered.
As well as being able to use both heads in playback mode you could use them in record/playback, playback/erase and erase/record.
My system started with both machines with erased disks. It then started recording on machine 1. Once the disk was full it continued recording on machine 2. Once the second disk was full it returned to machine
Re: (Score:2)
MythTV, or just get the thing to take the video feed from cable to your PC and record away (they're like 50$ cards IIRC). Infinite recording, and no monthly fee. Why pay Tivo to do it free?
I've got both a sweet MythTV system and Tivo (actually two Tivos) and I have to say, I still like the TiVo better. It's worth the $20 I pay for the two of them. Plus, pretty soon, Myth TV users will be paying *something* per month for listings, which have become harder and harder to come by for free.
Where to buy a MythTV in person? (Score:2)
MythTV
A PC is louder and more expensive than a TiVo box, and the guide data still costs money per month. Besides, I've never seen a PC with MythTV in big-box retail stores in the United States.
and given you are an intelligent slashie
The median home user is not.
Re: (Score:2)
yes, the trivial wouldn't even make a sound...
Re:Something, Something, Dark Side... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple - they didn't. Read the patent http://www.google.com/patents?id=IeoIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,233,389 [google.com]
Talks about circular buffers for viewing and recording at the same time, maintaining audio synch, running the clock FWD and back while moving through the data. To say that they simply patented being able to pause TV is pretty disingenuous!
I short, summary is trolling crap per usual to get everyone up in arms. Real patent is a bit more complex. Granted much of this seems "obvious" now but back when TIVO first did it it was FAR from really obvious. It was going to get done by someone but back then on the hardware available it was pretty slick!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure when TiVo first had that feature, but I have a friend who worked as a software engineer on a Sagem DVR that had that feature back in 2000 or 2001, and they believed to be the first to do that at the time.
I don't remember the outcome of it though, I don't think it actually got released to the market.
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at the patents in the link provided - they are back in the 1990s....
Re: (Score:2)
TiVo didn't patent just being able to pause TV only because Pause Technologies, Inc. already did.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPATRE36801 [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. If Dish did just copy Tivo's method, then Tivo is in the right.
Re: (Score:2)
Show me a VCR that can continue to record live TV and allow you to view, pause, fast forward and rewind it at the same time.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
But a Mac isn't a VHS recorder.
You're talking about another issue, not the issue of "rewind, pause, fast forward" as functions in themselves which this patent isn't about, but whether the technology in this patent is actually valid. Which probably goes beyond "pause, rewind, fast forward of live TV", and indeed it specifies how they do it (buffers, etc).
If you can show a system from 1996 that invalidates this patent, then I'm sure that Dish networks would be willing to pay you well for your time to help the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
As everyone has already said, this is a hardware patent.
TiVo found a way to fit a flux capacitor inside their boxes.