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Sony PC/DVR Incorporates 7 Tuners & 1TB HD
GFD writes "TechJapan has an article on the 'Type X' Viao PC/DVR that will have 1TB and 7 tuners - allowing the recording of 7 shows at the same time. It also has a very cool look."
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So does that mean I need 7 boxes from my SAT or cable company? Do they offer some kind of bulk discount for that?
It's not too bad, you have to compare it to some of the other ugly stuff people have sitting next to their TVs. The 7 tuners is just a gimmick though. I can only get 5 channels anyway, including the satallite as one. Bet it costs a lot for a a 1TB PVR though. Bear in mind 4x250GB ATA is only 300 these days.
The web page is just saying 'Internal Server Error: Process limit exceeded for uid 11363' at the moment. Cue some joke about them running the webserver on the PVR.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
With 1TB disk, would it be most likely to have some kind of high-speed RAID configuration? I mean, what's the peak bitrate for recording one channel? And what will the peak bitrate for 7 channels be?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Even so, who wan't to bet on some for of copy protection for things like new releases, and popular series. Sure you can record Kill Bill Volume 10, but I bet you cant transfer the file to your comp and burn a DVD.
So then your stuck with a bunch of video on your DVR, which must be erased in order to add new content. I have a DVR, and really like it, but beyond recording a show or two to watch a couple of hours or days later, that's it. If I had a terabyte of video, by the time I got around to watching it, I would have recorded over or could care less about the majority of it.
Now if I could burn it, thast would be outstanding
Well - it would make et possible to look at 6 channels at once to find the one not showing commercials.
7 tuners isnt just for recording 7 shows at a time - it is for recording 2 or 3, and then use the rest of the tuners for PiP stuff.
And besides - if the price difference for 7 tuners instead of 2 is minor - why not add them - this is definately not a product where those extra $50(or whatever) will matter
Something like this could be very useful in replacing security systems that use analog tape. Having decent frame-rate recordings you can keep for a while without having to maintain a buttload of tapes.
ok, how many of you tried http://gvision.google.com ?
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Well, while 7 shows at once might initially seem like overkill, what if you're a talk show host or a journalist and you have to do your research on something going on in the news, or perhaps keep track of different sports games, and yeah, I think the Olympics got mentioned here already which is an easy example.
How about using the 7 tuners to scan close captions on 7 channel for keywords you might be interested in so it can instantly start recording?
This would be great to monitor all the major 24/7 news channels.
As an owner of a ReplayTV, I can think of one great use for 7 tuners. Time shifting! Buffer the last seven watched channels or however many tuners available. That way if you switch to a channel and see something you want to go back and watch, it is buffered.
To all those people complaining that 7 tuners is too many, I suppose 640K was too much for you too.
Have some forsight. Maybe you only use 2-4 at once now, but one day when there's 3 of your favorite shows, a newscast, 2 movies, and the video feed from your backyard flying home maintenance robot that you want to capture all at once... I bet you'll be pretty pleased.
IMHO, DVR is a distributed problem. In the long run a distributed solution works better for everyone.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, (et al) all care about which shows people watch and whether or not people like them. And in exchange for people paying extra, there are no commercials.
The type of programming that the OP was talking about exists today in the premium channel systems.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Unless you can honestly tell me that you have never judged anyone based on the kind of vehicle they drive (or for that matter, the kind of music they listen to, the kind of food they eat, or any other product they've purchased), you're not standing on any kind of moral high ground.
My god, I hope not. Or at least, if they are, I hope they've really revamped the UI. TiVo's UI barely scales to two tuners on the DirecTV/TiVo integrated units. Screens like the dual-tuner conflict message are a joke. It just picks one stream to tell you about and mentions there's another stream it's not telling you about.
I've seen a TiVo rep claim that the TiVo UI is written to be x-tuner capable. But if I had a screen that said I couldn't record a program because of 7-way conflict and suggested I manually figure out where the conflict is, I'd throw the damn thing out the window.
Whatever. I figured, at about $300 for my Tivo, if it lasted two years, that's .50 cents a day for the privilige of never needing to sit through another commercial again. It was, and is WELL, WELL worth the price, and I just can't concieve having to deal with those inane, insulting, idiotic commercials again. .50 a show for it, but it's not an option right now.
Which is why pay-per-view tv(I mean being able to watch anything pay per view, not just porn) will be the real future. Advertisers are not going to pay for tv programming if nobody watches the commercials, so the smart tv execs should just skip the middleman and go right to the source, consumers. Imagine being able to watch only what you want to watch. The only reason I have cable is for The Daily Show, and instead of having to pay the cable company, I would gladly pay
Now that may sound like a lot, but what if in addition to the 7 input tuners, it had multiple outputs. If you could tie it into some kind of distribution system for your house, throw in Tivo's ability to predict what your family likes, you have a very cool system. Every member of your family could be watching a different program at one time. $9k is a bit pricey, but the price is bound to come down.
The other serious flaw with most set-tops and tv channel UIs (Tivo almost gets it right) is not having dynamic filtering and style sheets for the schedule and channels attached to the up/down channel buttons. E.g. there are some channels I absolutely never want: fine I lock them out now. But then there is the gray area which is content dependent: I'm not a big basketball fan so I should be able to make channels disappear completely during the time that basketball is on - if I up-channel through it, it just skips and if I chose it's even gone from the schedule. When other "desired" programming is on those channels re-appear again.
Now combine that kind of "editing/filtering" to 50 tuners with PVR and PiP: now you have television usability!!
A serious, serious bone-head UI gaffe on the DirecTV Tivo: you ascend channels up-screen with the channel up/down buttons but the program guide the channels ascend down-screen! Who was the moron...?! Oh yeah, Huge Air Crash idiots own DirecTV.
It's not the straight IO bandwidth that'd worry me; it'd be the seeks. I'd almost want to assign each stream its own disk. Maybe two write streams per disk if you had to. If a disk ran out of space, or if there were a request to read from a disk currently assigned to a writing stream, then assign a new disk to the writing stream. Idle disks defragment. Interesting exercise in filesystem design.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Let me know if I understand what you're saying. You're asking for television programming to change its distribution model to be closer to the way that the WWW is distributed - all content on demand. And you want to take advantage of the huge data pipe that exists between your home and the cableco to do this.
I suspect that the medium that is currently best suited to do that is the Internet. Essentially, you need something that does for TV programming what iTunes does for music distribution; iTunes allows people another choice for selecting music other than just listening to the radio. You want the same thing for TV programming.
The reason I think that the internet is the better medium for this is that iTunes doesn't preclude people who still prefer to listen to music on the radio from listening to the radio. But if your suggestion were implemented it would require most folks to change. And people don't like change, much less change that is forced upon them. This adversity to change would result in cableco's losing huge numbers of subscribers to satellite, which would provide the thing closest to what they're used to.
Personally, I'd love to see what you're talking about come into reality. But even if you get past the technical problems (bandwidth requirements) and the sociological requirements (people don't like change) you still have to get past the legal problems (copyright). If you can't get past the last one on the internet, I don't think that changing the medium (from the internet to the cableco's infrastructure) would make much of a difference.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.