Let me explain
I’ve been thinking about what I’m able to write about TiVo without upsetting anyone, and so I’ve been doing a bit of research about what’s already been written. Surprisingly, a lot.
So I decided that there really wasn’t a whole lot that I could say that isn’t already somewhere else on the web, and figured I’d just add in some technical explanations to questions that are likely to come up.
For example, the remote that we will ship has the thumbs buttons, but the Comcast remote [pdf] doesn’t. If you compare the remotes closely (there’s a picture of the TiVo remote in the article linked above), you’ll see the Comcast remote has two buttons that the TiVo remote doesn’t: Page Up and Page Down. There you go. The TiVo UI uses Channel Up/Channel Down as Page Up/Page Down in lists, so we don’t need separate Page Up/Page Down buttons, and use them for Thumbs buttons instead.
Also, to confirm what was written in that article linked to above, we really did rewrite our software in Java. Sort of. As the article states, we run on top of TVWorks’ TV Navigator middleware. It’s not a full OCAP implementation, but rather an implementation of OnRamp To OCAP, which is (from Informitv) not a precursor but “a subset of OCAP so that applications will be forward-compatible with the full OCAP specification.” In other words, we didn’t write the OCAP layer, nor the OS. And the Java-based software so far only runs on the Motorola hardware.