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Television Media Hardware

Nokia Enters PVR Market 207

Posted by timothy from the come-one-come-all dept.
Daaelar writes "Nokia has just recently announced their entrance into the PVR market with the realease of their Mediamaster 260 S. It apparently has PVR capabilities as well as the ability to receive small images via Bluetooth for viewing on a larger screen, i.e. your television. It also includes some built-in games, as well as a feature to record from a digital camera or camcorder."
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Nokia Enters PVR Market More

Nokia Enters PVR Market

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  • Bluetooth mobile phone cameras (Score:5, Funny)

    by prisen ( 578061 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:15PM (#6905976)
    Wow, if the pictures taken on a mobile phone didn't look bad enough..wait until they get transmitted to a 36" TV...yikes!

  • Link to non-flash and much more informative page- (Score:5, Informative)

    by ultrapenguin ( 2643 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:16PM (#6905985)
    here [nokia.com]. The flash intro linked in the article doesnt even provide any specifications.

  • Sounds good to me. (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Human Cow ( 646609 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:16PM (#6905988) Homepage
    As long as I can stick a flashing antenna or two on it, I'm game.

  • 404 (Score:1, Informative)

    by Dreadlord ( 671979 )
    the link in the story gives 404 error, go to nokia's home and click on " Nokia Mediamaster 260 S " link in the middle, this is the only way ican find to get to the product page.

  • Games! Rarr. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:18PM (#6906000)
    Screw the PVR capabilities. IT PLAYS GAMES!

    Only partially kidding...

  • no no no (Score:4, Funny)

    by rbolkey ( 74093 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:19PM (#6906008)
    this was supposed to be a microsoft article. It's sco, riaa, microsoft, not sco, riaa, nokia.

  • "My fellow Americans--" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:20PM (#6906017) Homepage
    With the Nokia Mediamaster 260 S, you can pause live TV, answer the door, and continue watching right from where you left off.

    Ah, the satisfaction of putting the Commander in Chief on hold.

  • Hmm, so (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Are they a little bit worried about the way in which their indescribably inept, frankly insulting marketing campaign for the N-Gage might have alienated a large part of the exact same target market likely to be buying a PVR?

  • Knowing Nokia.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It will be flashy but work poorly and if it somehow falls onto the floor it will break into 5 or 6 different pieces...

    • Re:Knowing Nokia.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jedrek ( 79264 )
      Say what? Nokia pretty much owns the european mobile market for one simple reason: they've spent the last 5 years making some of the best mobile phones on the market. They were doing pretty well until they released the 3110, 5110 and 6110 - after that, they just took over.

      Their biggest selling points: ease of use and battery life. You might not remember what mobile phones were like before the Navi-Key. Most phones had one button to connect, another to disconnect, a menu button, a help button, etc. Nokia to
      • Hmm here in the states I never cared much for my Nokias (granted the only two I've had have been a 5190 and an early 3something). I always felt like they got crappy reception. And they had NiCd batteries so if I didn't wait for them to die completely before I charged them I'd get like 15min of talk time. I can't count the number of times both of them would just be dead in my pocket when I'd talked for like 10 minutes. I swore them off then and have been biased ever since. Although admitedly the recepti
  • Does this thing require a mountain of licenses from the MPAA?

  • From the brochure (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:26PM (#6906070) Homepage
    Why not play between programs? The Nokia Mediamaster 260 S has games built-in so you and your family can play

    Man, what would my family do without those built-in games? Interact?

    Nokia classics, such as Snake, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Card Deck

    Dude! Nokia invented Tic-Tac-Toe? I have all sorts of overdue kudos to give them!

  • But.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by burnsy ( 563104 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:27PM (#6906072)
    But does the Nokia go the other way, from the DVR to my Nokia handset?

    With my Windows Media Center, I have DVR functionality where I can transfer recordings directly to my Smartphone/PPC. I can also burn them to DVD for archiving. This is where MCE beats TiVo.

  • Convergance again? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:28PM (#6906085) Homepage Journal

    Wasn't this one of the problems in the dot-bomb? Haven't companies learned that it's better to be really good at one thing, and stay out of markets for which they are not suited, rather than be mediocre and lose money hand over fist? Not that I have a problem with companies trying to innovate, but I just wonder how wise this move is for them.

    • Being Nokia, though, they can *afford* to lose money hand over fist on this project, without being unprofitable. They also have a strong brand which they can use to market the thing (the flip side is that if they screw it up, they damage their strong brand).

      I think the main problem with dot-bomb companies was attempts at dumb single business plans (pet food on the web). Amazon diversified from what they were good at (selling books) into other markets (CDs, then electronics, then gradually absolutely ever

    • Wasn't this one of the problems in the dot-bomb? Haven't companies learned that it's better to be really good at one thing, and stay out of markets for which they are not suited, rather than be mediocre and lose money hand over fist? Not that I have a problem with companies trying to innovate, but I just wonder how wise this move is for them.

      You are so right!!! Just imagine how much better off nokia would have been, had they just continued making tires and stayed out of this silly phone business.

    • Re:Convergance again? (Score:4, Informative)

      by evilandi ( 2800 ) <andrew@aoakley.com> on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @04:02AM (#6907846) Homepage
      stay out of markets for which they are not suited

      Er, mate, Nokia have been making superb digital TV set-top-boxes for the European market for donkey's years. Mobile phones are the new market for them, they've been making STBs for longer than that.

      Ask anyone about the UK's digital terrestrial system [freeview.co.uk] (multi-channel digital TV through an aerial- no subscription, no cable, no dish required) and everyone will tell you that Nokia is one of the top three brands- faster channel switching, faster menus, faster multimedia content, and it doesn't crash.

  • The important info - how many tuners? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by updog ( 608318 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:33PM (#6906107) Homepage
    There's no information anywhere with the most important information about the box: how many tuners it has. You need more than one tuner, if you want to watch one program while recording another. And, I wonder if it has good electronic program info (with program information, times etc). The technical specs are extremely weak: System Resources * Processor: 32-bit / 166 MHz * Flash memory: 4 Mbytes * SDRAM: 16 Mbytes * Display: 720 x 576 * Colors: 256 You can't really do too much fancy stuff with a 166MHz processor and 16MB (!) of SDRAM.

    • Re:The important info - how many tuners? (Score:5, Funny)

      by molarmass192 ( 608071 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:54PM (#6906215) Homepage Journal
      Sounds alot like the guts of a Tivo system. As for being weak, all the heavy lifting (encoding/decoding video) is done in hardware, not software, so you don't need a huge amount of processing power. However, that would explain the exciting selection of games including tic-tac-toe and snakes, yeehaw. I'm throwing out my PS2 as we speak!

    • It only needs one (Score:2, Informative)

      by tessaiga ( 697968 )

      You can watch other channels while recording using the tuner in your TV. That's how people used to tape shows on their VCR while watching another on the TV.

      Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously. Which would be kinda sketchy anyhow due to limits on how fast the hardware they're listing could do video compression on more than one stream.

      • Re:It only needs one (Score:2, Informative)

        by gpw213 ( 691600 )
        Not really. If you read carefully, you will see that this box is a satellite receiver. Your TV tuner will not hook right up to your dish. If you want to record one show and watch another, you would need a second satellite receiver box.

        Also note that there is only one input from the dish. Dual-tuner DirectTV-Tivo's have two inputs, one per tuner. While I have never really understood why this is required, it does make me tend to believe that this box is only single tuner.

        Finally, the hardware specs a

      • Multiple tuners only comes into play if you want to record multiple shows simultaneously.

        Unless that tuner in your TV is a satellite tuner (which it is not) that ain't gonna help you. You need multiple tuners if you want to record one show while watching another live one.

      • Re:It only needs one (Score:3, Informative)

        by raynet ( 51803 )
        Except there is no need for compression because the video is already in mpeg-2. And you would need more than one reciever to record multiple shows unless you have multiple video streams in the frequency you're watching/recording.

      • Re:It only needs one (Score:2, Informative)

        by arafel ( 15551 ) *
        The DVR boxes don't do recompression. Usually the incoming stream just gets laid down on disk - either as raw transport data or as packetised data - and it's just replayed later.

        (That's skipping a whole mess of detail, but...)

  • I hope this is better than their firewall offering (Score:4, Informative)

    by General_Corto ( 152906 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:33PM (#6906109)
    The company I work for ordered several Nokia firewall devices [nokia.com]. They list for about $35,000 US.

    Not one of them worked.

    We ended up having their top tech staff in the country give us a visit, with everyone wondering why a six figure purchase should be quite so DOA. At first, there was a lot of head scratching, but it turned out that the machines had a variety of hardware and some software problems.

    Allegedly these systems are well tested prior to shipping. At that price, you'd hope so! I hope they test these PVRs well, otherwise they're in for a world of support pain.

    • Re:I hope this is better than their firewall offer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by canning ( 228134 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @10:47PM (#6906515) Homepage
      This can happen to anything. I ordered an APC UPS for a data center and this thing was a mess. First it had the wrong badging on it (said 8kVA instead of 4kVA) and after the electrician wired the data center for 8kVA i noticed the mistake. The elctircian wouldn't hook it up as 4kVA because of electric code issues. We had to ship it back and after much deliberation (APC says this never happens) they shipped us the 8kVA UPS at no extra cost. The only problem was that the 8kVA model they sent us was dead and APC was shocked. They said this never happens. The third they shipped was alright.

      At my present company we use Nokia firewalls / checkpoint VPN software and we've never had a problem with them.

      This type of stuff can happen to any company.
    • OK, well, this might have been your experience, but to be honest, I know of much more people who had an excellent experience with Nokia routers. Some said that they are considered some of the best available, in fact. I wouldn't vouch for one or the other opinion, but fact is, you are the first case of nonworking equipment that I have ever heard of, in contrast with tens of positive feedback.
  • The LocustWorld meshbox was doing this back in march. BBC did a story about it. [bbc.co.uk]

  • I'll bite... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:37PM (#6906142)
    I would like to buy a replacement for my VCR, but have been holding out for a few reasons.

    1. If I'm going to get another device that has a TV tuner in it, it will have to be ATSC as well as NTSC (satellite ready would be nice, but not entirely necessary);

    2. I'm not keen on additional charges for watching/recording TV (I'm already paying way too much for cable TV as it is). I have seen other Tivo like devices, but the quality has been lacking. RCA makes one, but it's from RCA. The Home-Theater PCs are way too expensive and the quality is worse than a VCR;

    3. I'm not impressed by the current array of DVD-recorders that are on the market. See point one above. Also the quality of recordings is a joke. You'd think that for $600 or more it would be a leap ahead of VCRs in terms of ease of use and versatility.

    I'm sticking with my old VCR. Doesn't care about macrovision or blue-coatings. Gives me just as good a picture as TV recorded on DVD at a fraction of the price.

    • Re:I'll bite... (Score:3, Informative)

      by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 )
      FWIW, you might want to look at the DirecTivo- Tivos integrated with a DirecTV tuner. I have the Hughes HDVR2 (they changed the name just recently to SD-something) with dual tuners.

      1. It records the original data stream off the satellite, so playback is as good as the original. There's no high, medium, low quality settings on this one. There's about 35 hours on this model, which I find is way more than enough.

      2. With DirecTV, the monthly Tivo charge is reduced to $6. Personally, I make good living, so t

    • Re:I'll bite... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tessaiga ( 697968 )

      I'm not sure I see what the problem is with replacing your VCR with a PVR. I'll try to address your first two points (I haven't looked into DVD-recorders, so I can't say much about the 3rd):

      1. Your VCR also has a tuner in it. Assuming by "replace" you mean you're going to toss out your VCR and stick in a PVR, the total number of tuners you've got is still the same.

      2. Why have a VCR at all if you're not planning to record TV? No one really buys VCRs anymore to watch movies on VHS; DVD's the way to go

    • New TV sets are starting to be introduced with "digital cable ready" tuners. That means that they can receive digital cable channels without an external converter box. Hopefully this feature will be included in future PVRs.
  • As opposed to "fakelease"?
  • Sorry to sound lame..

    I've tried getting MythTV working twice in the last year, the first incarnation with RedHat and the 2nd with debian. Despite being able to get web/mail/samba/netatalk and various PHP applications (nuke/forums, ect) I still can't get it to work.

    Someone should work on making a MythTV distro or liveCD (not me, cause I can't get it to work) Has anyone started or made such a distro yet? I really want it, as i'm sure many others do.
    • Have a look at KnoppMyth [knoppix.net] Haven't tried it yet as I didn't have any trouble getting MythTV working, but it might be what you're looking for.
    • I periodically peek at the MythTV site, and it strikes me that the biggest obstacle to Myth TV is the apalling small list of reliable, inexpensive MPEG hardware on PCs and the fairly bad support that does exist has for Myth TV functionality (tuners, TV in and out, MPEG hardware capture) under Linux.

      Somebody (and NOT Hauppage) needs to make an inexpensive MPEG2/tuner card with:

      DVD-compatible MPEG2 capture and playback at various bitrates

      MPEG2 engine usable for accelerating video file conversion to MPEG2 i

  • What's a PVR? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Makarakalax ( 658810 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @09:49PM (#6906194) Homepage
    Ok, so I could probably find out what a PVR was easily by googling, but instead I'm going to make a suggestion and see what people say.

    Why don't Slashdot stories have abbreviations surrounded by ABBR or ACRONYM tags? This way you can insert a title="Expanded form of Acronynm" inside the ABBR/ACRONYM tag and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE) a little tooltip will pop with the fully expanded acronym displayed!

    In Mozilla ABBR/ACRONYMs are even highlighted with a special dashed underline to alert the user that this particular acronym can be decoded without the use of ones imagination.

    Here's an example or two. [w3schools.com]
    • and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE

      Didn't work for me on OSX with Safari.

      So it doesn't work for M$ and it doesn't work for Apple (the default browsers for those OS's). What's the motivation, again?

      Don't get me wrong, links to a geek dictionary would be welcome, but an html feature that 99% of browsers don't support (and maybe >90% of /. reader's browsers)...

    • Re:What's a PVR? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Koyaanisqatsi ( 581196 )

      That is a VERY GOOD suggestion, thanks.

      And I would like to add, from your reference, that if using the acronym tag, even IE (granted, 5+) will display it, although withouth the nice dashed underline Mozilla puts out.

      Example: (hold mouse over to try)

      PVR

      Code for the example:

      <acronym title="Personal Video Recorder">PVR</acronym>

      Now for the problem: I just found out the hard way that Slashdot strips-out the acronym tag, d'oh! Editors, take note, this is something usefull!!!

      • even IE (granted, 5+) will display it, although withouth the nice dashed underline Mozilla puts out.

        This could be fixed by adding this to your CSS style sheet:

        acronym { border-bottom: dotted 1pt }
      • I saw this done recently, and was able to do it in a /. post after View/Source-ing the post that did it. Let's see if I can find it...

        Yep, there it is. It uses the same 'title="xxx"' format, but just inside a "A HREF" link. So, for instance, the acronym could link to the acronym site and also have the popup explaining it, to view quicker. (I also like boldfacing my links, it helps them stand out better.)

        "It apparently has PVR [acronymfinder.com] capabilities as well as ..."

        Well, in testing all I'm getting for the "

    • MSIE ????? Couldn't you use a ABBR-tag???
      • PVR is an acronym [reference.com], not an abbreviation [reference.com]. For the purposes of popping up some little help text describing the expansion of "PVR", either would work, but for non-visual user agents, or user agents that want to do something a little more intelligent than this, it's important to distinguish between the two, as they are fundamentally different.
    • You can also "spoof" the look in IE with the following CSS. IE supports the tooltip, just doesn't show the underline or indication that there's something there.

      acronym {
      border-bottom: 1px dotted;
      cursor: help;
      }
  • Seems as though Nokia has an entire line of Mediamaster [nokia.com] products. Also notable is the inclusion of RS-232 ports on the products. That means you can control them off a computer or other devices. Anyone know if Nokia makes such control devices?
    • Software tends to get developed for new models as they are released. See Linux-based software for the 9000 series here [xs4all.nl]. Most of the stuff is for Windows (see here [tripod.com], for example) and written in Europe. Also here [wafer-card.com]. "MMedit" is a good word to Google on.
    • Actually, these ports are usually not supported when running the original firmware.
      The first thing you should always do with any Nokia Mediamaster box is to re-flash it with hobby software that runs faster and supports the hardware.

  • Haiku (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08, 2003 @10:33PM (#6906422)
    Nokia what you do?
    You once made phones that are poo
    DVR is too

  • Intended for European Users (Score:4, Informative)

    by -tji ( 139690 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @10:43PM (#6906492) Journal

    The information on TV reception mentions Analog and Digital reception. For Digital, they talk about DVB digital Satellite TV, which is used in Europe. In the US, we use a terrestrial broadcast mechanism (ATSC).

    Zenith/LG has an . But it doesn't do satellite.. [zenith.com]

    Tivo has been rumored to have an HD/ATSC DirecTivo for forever. Who knows if it will ever come out.
  • Then you'll have to remove the HD before you can change channels.

    (for those of you scratching your heads at the joke -- The nGage phone/hand-held game device is so badly designed that you have to remove the battery in order to change game cartridges)

  • What's this facination with PVRs? Who's still finding enough on TV to justify the purchase of such a device? DVDs, CDs, books, magazines, video games -- who has time?

  • FYI (Score:2)

    by Kjella ( 173770 )
    Nokia already makes satellite tuners. Slap a HDD on that, and pretty much have a PVR already. So it's not exactly a huge leap.

    Kjella
  • Seriously, from the list of features, it sounds like "one of their cell phones, one of their cell phones, one of their cell phones, OOOH a PVR!" It seems as though they may not pay enough attention to the meat and potatoes, and instead ported their cellphone to a PVR encoder...

  • European TV rules. (Score:4, Informative)

    by JonMartin ( 123209 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @02:05AM (#6907460) Homepage
    Not what is on TV, but how you get it. In Europe there is a standard that all digital (cable and satellite) signals use. There is a standard for decryption units/cards. When you sign up for service with FooTelly(tm) they give you a card. You can then stick that card in any third party decoder box (like this Nokia) and it will work. Great for competition and do-it-yourself-ers (check this project [cadsoft.de] out).

    But not here in North America. Nope, everything here has to be proprietary. We have to "let the market decide" (translation: "let the corps screw us over"). The result less competition and little innovation. I am guessing Europe is at least three years ahead on TV tech and they are pulling away because they picked ONE standard and ran with it.

    • Re:European TV rules. (Score:3, Informative)

      by pe1chl ( 90186 )
      You may have misunderstood the situation in Europe.
      There is a single DVB standard, the encryption is standard, but the entitlement management isn't.
      There is a single standard interface to content access modules (it is very much like PCMCIA) and you will have to install a module in your receiver that in turn accepts a smartcard from your provider.
      There are several systems in use (Mediaguard, Viaccess, Conax, Cryptoworks, Nagravision, Betacrypt to name a few).

      Receivers exist that support all systems without

  • They made this years ago (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raynet ( 51803 ) on Tuesday September 09, 2003 @02:46AM (#6907599) Homepage
    The Nokia Mediamaster 9600 digital satellite reciever had SCSI connector. You could plug a HDD or PC to it and after OS upgrade (DVB2000) you had a perfect PVR which recorded nice MPEG-2 files without any stuped DRM etc restrictions. I just hope this new model allows me to burn those recorded show on DVD.
  • 1. This machine only has a 166mhz processor. The TiVo Series2 has a 200mhz processor (Series1 had a 50mhz PowerPC deriviative). 2. There could be various IP issues relating to transmitting and storing pictures from a Nokia camphone on the PVR's hard drive...Replay received several patents about transmitting and storing media files on the PVR's harddrive - this is one reason why TiVo's Home Media Option only streams pictures and music from a PC/Mac to the TiVo and doesn't actually store it natively...of cou

  • Facts (Score:2)

    by slim ( 1652 )
    I read a print review of the MediaMaster T a few months back, so I might be able to fill in a few blanks. This is all from memory, so don't take it as gospel.

    The T model receives Digital Terrestrial broadcasts, rather than Digital Satellite broadcasts, but the technology is not much different, so most of what applies to the T will apply to the S.

    Unlike a TiVo, the MM does not compress video: it simply dumps the MPEG stream that's being broadcast onto disk.

    Pro: no loss of quality

    Con: you don't get to cho

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