TiVo in Taiwan (TGC), and other stuff…

Posted on Friday, January 6, 2006 by MegaZone

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is the TGC box TiVo has on display. That’s the unit recently launched in Taiwan. From checking out the box and in talking to TiVoPony, TiVoJerry, and all the TiVo folks who were so cool today (I apologize for sucking with names, no slight meant), TGC licenses the reference platform and the software, but they are free to make changes to it. They licensed the Series2 reference platform, and made the obvious change of adding a 10/100baseT port to it. So I asked the obvious question of a few people – any hope of seeing that in the US? It is a possibility, but there are no firm plans at this time. TGC also did all of the localization and customization for the software – and in the photo I took of the info screen you can see the version is 1.0 – a new tree. But the menus are so familiar that even though I can’t read Chinese, I was able to navigate the box – which is how I got to the info screen. The remote, as is obvious from the pictures, is a bog standard Series2 remote, except it is labeled ‘TGC’.

Also, the TGC units currently do not support any of the networking features – no MRV, TTG, HME, etc. The network port is only used for calls home at this time, though TGC may introduce the other features over time.

I also took more photos of the Series3 unit, including macro close ups of the ports on the back, and the OLED display and controls on the front, as well as photos of many of the new TiVo Central Online screens, and I uploaded those this evening.

I was utterly shocked by the response my post has received. Unbelievably, it seems like I may be the only person who posted info about the Series3 unit and the only one who posted photos. And now those photos are *all over* the net. If I’d realized that I wouldn’t have just casually dumped the raw 5 mega pixel photos on the server.

So, some changes to the photos:
www.gizmolovers.com/Photos/CES2006/Small/ – this now contains photos resized to 10% original. Better for the web anyway, and much smaller byte-wise. Thanks to usagijer for the quick resize script.
www.gizmolovers.com/Photos/CES2006/Large/ – this contains the original 5 mega pixel images for anyone looking for images for print, resizing, cropping, etc. Please don’t grab these unless you really need them, my server will appreciate it.

krellis pointed me at this mirror – which I don’t quite understand how it works yet – which may help get to things when the load is bad on my server:
www.gizmolovers.com.nyud.net/Photos/CES2006/Small/ – it looks like it is still caching the pre-resized RAW images. That should update at some point I guess.
www.gizmolovers.com.nyud.net/Photos/CES2006/Large/ – the RAW images.

Alex at tivoblog has been kind enough to setup a mirror here: www.tivoblog.com/archives/2006/01/05/tivo-pictures-from-ces-taken-by-megazone/ It looks like it is still partial (33 of 42 right now), but he’s working on it.

I’m also uploading the photos to Dave Zatz at ZatzNotFunny and he plans to mirror them – he has a few now that he managed to grab from my server when it would respond.

If anyone else wants to mirror them, feel free to grab them from my server – or I can SFTP/FTP the originals to you if you give me a login. If you use my photos or host them, etc, all I ask is that you give credit to ‘MegaZone’ and/or ‘TiVoLovers.com’. I’m not going to bother watermarking them or anything, I don’t care that much, it is just a nice thing. If you do setup a mirror, please drop a comment here with the URL. Thanks!

I wish I could tell you about what I overheard being discussed around me while I was sitting in the TiVo room blogging my two entries earlier today, but it didn’t sound like something I should blab – and I asked and confirmed that they’d rather I not. So I’ll just have to bite my tongue (fingers?) for now, which is going to drive me nuts. But I’m not going to ruin my relationship with TiVo just to scoop something.

EDIT: Some more mirrors! Thanks folks!

www.something-fishy.com/photography/TiVoS3

spidertrace.com/Gallery/Tivo3

starjewel.org/pics/tivo/

For the record, there are 42 photos total – at this point. I may take more tomorrow.

EDIT 2: Dave Zatz has his mirror up now too: www.zatznotfunny.com/PSN/tivoces.htm

EDIT 3: More mirrors!

64.247.19.118/

theomelet.com/index.php?itemid=62