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Tivo Quadcard Promises Thousand-Hour PVR
edrock200 writes "The folks over at 9thtee are developing a quad card for Tivo series 1 and Tivo/DirecTV combo units...it will allow you to
add 4 hard drives to your Tivo and also break the 133gb limit for each drive....this will effectively give you a 1200-hour unit with 4 320GB drives. Theres also a fairly detailed thread of the development process over at the AVS forums." Gonna need the space since scifi has decided to air 4 episodes of SG1 a day!
Quick question, I don't own a Tivo or HDTV but if you were to record an HDTV broadcast would it not require more HD space? Would this not better quality be a better use than more recording time?
I'm thinking of buying a PVR soon, but I'm still undecided as to which. ReplayTV seems to have more features than Tivo (ethernet, commercial skip), but I'm interested in hearing from the Slashdot folk which they prefer. Thanks for your answers!
http://www.talknerdy.org
Now, if those 4 drives are a raid array, and I can keep my shows through a disk crash, then I'm impressed. Otherwise, nah.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
That's 50 days of straight programming. 50 days, 24 hours a day.
It's cool, but come on, it's unnecessary. If you are 1200 hours behind in programming, you are just not going to catch up, period.
Actually, there are certain shows that I save to videotape for later referece. Sometimes I get a lot of shows that I intend to dump to VHS backed up on my drive and it takes a couple of weekends to dump them. If I had 1200 hours of programming, the TiVo itself could become my video library. There are of course some issues regarding backing up the data and such but still, I'd love to have my entire library of VHS tapes sitting on one harddrive instead.
Also, when you live in a household with more than one person, you'd be suprised how much space you can eat up. I have 80 hours of capacity on my TiVo and it very rarely actually has space to record TiVo suggestions.
What I really need to do is get an ethernet card installed and figure out how to share the video files but I say bring it on, I'll take all the space I can get.
From one of the linked pages:
I know from my own Tivo that heat is definately a problem in these things with only two drives.
What might fit the ticket a little better would be a firewire (or serial ATA ?) interface and external drives in a separate case, with separate power supply. Unfortunately, I calculate USB to be a bit too slow for simultaneous record/playback at high quality.
Or, even better, how about SCSI with external drives? Well, maybe it's not better, given the price differential on SCSI drives. Hmmm.
I think we have 10 comments already on how you don't need this much to keep up with your tv watching. Which is of course true.
But what makes this compelling to me is as a permanent storage medium. You can store entire seasons of many of your favorite shows. Every Seinfeld, Buffy, +20 other shows episode available within a few seconds, in perfect broadcast quality for ever.
I'd pay for that!
Replaytv 4000s and up can support dedicated video servers (with the help of programs like DVarchive). You could put terrabytes of storage on the server, service both replaytv and pcs, and implement fault tolerance. Who wants a noisy, hot, electronic device in their living room?
Don't think of it like your current Tivo, where you record shows to watch later in the week; instead, think of it as a video archive machine. I was just going through my old video tapes last night, and was amazed by the things I have on tape that I totally forgot about. Imagine that instead of having every episode of the Simpsons on tape somewhere, you have every episode archived and instantly available on your Tivo. And heck, you would probably put all of your home videos on it; now you can re-watch the birth of your son at the push of a button!
Of course, this probably actually requires more space than 1200 hours (you would want redundancy, so RAID eats some of that, and you would want to record in a higher-quality mode, eating even more.) This is ridiculously expensive today, but I bet that in 5 years, the "Tivo video archive" will be common.
Haven't we all been waiting for a way to archive all our movies the way we've archived our music? Just because TiVo records 1200 hours worth of programming doesn't mean you have to watch it all!
Mine has 120 hours of capacity and I've always got some Hitchcock and Woody Allen movies along with the regulary Buffy, Simpsons and West Wing stuff.
More capacity means I can keep stuff on the TiVo much longer and still use it like muggle TiVo owners do.
And no, you CAN NOT make a PC do this with ANY capture card. TiVo's software rocks. It's like Mac OS X vs. DOS. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video inputs. It's got Coax, RCA and S-Video outputs. It's virtually silent. On-screen programming guide. Two-button recording. Wish lists. And a whole bunch of other stuff you just can't appreciate until you have one.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Turn on close captioning on your TV or VCR. That's what I do.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Well, they don't sue you but they are taking steps to stop you. As far as I know, since this hack requires a new kernel it will not work on the new series 2 TiVos (ie the only ones you can buy new now) since they have "PROM lockdown" code preventing any changes from being made to the system; similarly you can't run TiVoWeb on the Series 2 either. It's possible that someone will break this in the future (it's been done for the DirecTiVos) but I wouldn't overstate the case about TiVo being "hacker friendly."
Here's what I see as the problem with this much storage:
If these issues can be resolved, I bet quite a few geeks would actually get some use out of 1200 hours of programs.