[mythtv-users] Tivo/Yahoo deal - How convenient!

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Monday 07 November 2005 11:53, James C. Dastrup wrote:
> Although the Yahoo portal for your Tivo is new, this feature, with the 
> minimum 1-hour in advance,  
> has been around for a while at tivo.com.  Slowly, the canned and 
> subscription DVR's are  
> listening to what people really want.  But I don't understand why they 
> won't just put a simple  
> web interface on their own devices. 
> MCE has a similar feature - logon to msn.com and schedule a recording, 
> but no remote access  
> directly to your MCE from a browser.
> Reasons like this are why we all love our MythTV.

I'd say it's pretty likely that the lack of a web interface in 'canned' 
DVR appliances has more to do with security/liability issues.  It's 
much more secure for the DVR to query a remote web site every hour than 
it is to have an open web server running on the DVR appliance.  After 
all, the average consumer may not have a firewall, etc, etc...

Imagine the negative publicity and possible lawsuits that would arise if 
a default web server configuration on a Tivo or MCE was found to have 
an exploitable security flaw?

At least with MythWeb, the user has to set up & configure their own web 
server.  It's not much of a hurdle, but at least any security issues 
are entirely the user's own responsibility.

-JAC