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Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV
Thomas Hawk writes "Cory Doctorow is posting over at Boing Boing about some technology that he apparently saw this weekend at London's Open Tech conference. According to Cory, this new technology from Promise TV takes the form of a home-built PVR with lots of high-capacity hard drives and claims to be able to record every show on every channel being recorded in the UK for an entire month. 'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August. "
Just collecting email addresses now? Sounds like spam to me!
http://www.dreamsyssoft.com
I won't buy it until it can record...
ONE
MILLION
HOURS!
MWHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
Where are the frickin sharks with laser beams?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
and there is still nothing to watch on TV!
considering that the UK only has FIVE channels, i think a 60GB IPOD would be enough to record for a month.
Before you trot out all your legal objections, just let me say that you now have a legitimate reason to talk with the cute girl three doors over you've never met.
Agile Artisans
If they're going to be making an announcement in August, then why not wait until August to post the article?! There is no product and no information. It doesn't even say whether it records only the UK terrestrial TV channels (just 5) or the UK digitial ("Freeview") channels (MUCH more than 5).
I can understand how you could feasibly mock up a machine that recorded the 5 main channels to a RAID array or something, but I fail to belive that you can actually record "the entire UK channel multiplex" of ~30 digital channels in anything of a sensible size or price. It would have to save out 30 high quality(ish) feeds to very very large hard drives permanently. I can't see how you could do that with less than a few thousand pounds of disks and capture cards.
Does anyone else think this would require significantly more bandwidth than is currently available? I mean, every show on every channel? Unless they have like 20 channels there...
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
"...use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch..."
Those poor channel-hoppers, who can't watch a programme for more than 10 minutes without wondering what else might be on, will now have all the material from the past to choose from aswell. Lucky them!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
.. that you will never see this product on a store shelf!
...that each show will be recorded at 220x176 pixels and can only be viewed on an iPod.
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds to good to be true. I could see how this might work with conventional cable, but wouldn't you need a special digital cable box or dish receiver to be able to receive multiple channels at once?
that having PVR will help me in my eventual goal to become an extreme PVRt.. I mean every euro channel recorded? I could perv out for years...
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
The summary is nearly as long as the actual article, and contains practically all the information. It can't get any better for /. readers - even those that don't RTFA have all the information available.
/. ads were for products. Wake me when there's news. And when DirecTV supports this.
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Their next product: a home-built device that downloads the entire Internet for you to browse at your leisure...
It doesn't say which channels it will record. But based on the claim, probably only BBC1 & 2, ITV1 and Channel 4. Though if it records all the freeview programs it will definitely show promise.
Rock is Dead! Long live Paper and Scissors!!
This sounds like a perfect start for on-demand programming services to me. And at least in GB, you won't have as many channels of crapola as you'd have in the USA. A good delivery system could make this into the DVR killer app.... just.... need..... bandwidth..... urg...
The UK has hundreds of channels, so I don't know where you get your dumb ideas from.
I suspect they're talking about the 20-odd "free" terrestrial digital channels (FreeView) rather than the hundreds we can get on Satellite (Sky) or Cable (NTL/Telewest). Also, HDTV hasn't really made it to the UK yet, so we're talking standard res.
How do they know anyway how many people are watching those programmes? Isn't receiving a broadcast a passive thing?
The massive groan of thousands of couches under the collective weight of their potatoes as this device reaches a release date.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
There are about 300 digital satellite channels in the UK, maybe 250 digital cable channels and about 30 digital free to air broadcast channels (Freeview). There are 5 analogue terrestrial channels - and I'm assuming this is what they're talking about when they say the can record every single show on the air. It all just seems a bit pointless.
And maybe they can get together with Infinium Labs and merge it with the Phantom game console.
Besides, its not like price will matter to anyone anyways...
Scott Swezey
OpenTech 2005 was featured in a Slashdot article a few minutes ago here
Did anyone go to OpenTech and see this thing?
Although... it says there that it will record an entire week, not a month. So maybe that was this one's baby brother.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams (NewRomancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, one of the Cyberpunk Fathers)
There was a video-recorder, so he watches TV for you and you have time for your own, and an electical monch, which prays for you, so you got your own time.
More channels = bigger videorecorders. nnuts. (nothing new under the sun)
I seriously doubt they'd be able to record everything out there.
I mean, just look at a standard Tivo box. 40G hard drive gives you about 35 hours of recording time. And that is just one or two shows at a time.
A month's programming on 200 channels simultaneously?
c'mon.
This is utter bunkum because there are hundreds and hundreds of UK channels - 5 analogue terrestrial, about another 25 on digital terrestrial and about another 300 (!!) on digital satellite. Yes, with 5 analogue or digital tuners, they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite (which they will *not* be able to record massively in parallel - Sky who run it currently only have a twin tuner for example and that needs a dual LNB on your dish too !).
I'd rather see some effort made to allow broadband users to download TV shows (even a small fee for this would be acceptable - a few pounds a month) from the time they are aired on normal TV for, say, up to 2 months afterwards. Now this would be *far* more useful, especially now that 2Mbit/s is starting to become the normal for UK broadband.
Being a registered uk Ltd company, companies house has some public data on them:
8 87ceeea9b0a0c4ae//compdetails
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/76c266b3e165fd8
So is this a suitable alternative to video on demand?
True, it has a much higher direct cost to the consumer for the extra kit, but you're not replying on the broadcasters to buy into the VoD deal, and you wonl't be paying the undoubtedly higher prices they'll be charging for it, along with bandwidth costs.
Other than movies, there's very little reason to have the expense and trouble of Vod until we all have very high bandwidth connections at a low cost. I'm talking 100mb/s here.
Until we all have terrabit connections ot our handheld PCs, this just seems the better way to go to me - a PVR or steroids for those who want it.
Let's make some calculations assuming that they're going to record all the DVB-T ("Freeview") content in the UK. I watch DVB-T in Spain using a MythTV box but the numbers should be roughly the same as for the UK.
45 mins recording of one channel = 1401390703 bytes
=> 1 hour = 1868520937 bytes
=> x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 1.37 TB per month per channel
Now there are about 30 freeview channels so we would need 41 TB of storage .... that's 82 500GB hard disks in RAID0! Which would occupy something like half a rack and use about 1kW of power ...
Even to record the 5 main channels would be nearly 7 TB - still a lot of noisy spinning hard disks to stick under the TV. This doesn't sound like a feasible idea with the size of today's hard disks.
Never ..
while you are watching one channel filled with crap
100 other channels full of crap are bieng recorded.
So you spend eternity watching crap.
I dub thee the CrapboX
So can I record a month of QVC to watch later?
Go to www.suitcasetv.com and look at Purple Logging. REAL multichannel logging, not vaporware. Nerys hughes
Long live television!
Television is dead!
Long live television!
Now, studios are no longer in control. A 'amateur' show can compete with everything, based on your friendsters. Neilsen will have to find a way to cope with this.
kulakovich
Cool, but not practical. We're already well into information overload to the point where I watch (or have intellectual time to watch) about one show a week, and as of late I haven't watched television in about two months.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
At least you now don't have to explain why you're recording channel5 at 2 in the morning
able to record every show on every channel being recorded in the UK for an entire month
Yeah but that's only three shows, right?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
So if you were ever worried your vote didn't count, TV's the place to worry. That, and government. ;)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
As this sounds like pure marketing, we can make some assumptions:
a) Number of channels included will be the minimum available to all.
b) It'll be "VHS quality" recording.
There are 5 terrestial TV channels in UK:
BBC1
BBC2
ITV (commercial)
Channel 4 (commercial)
Channel 5 (commercial)
We've about 50 via digital TV, and loads more via cable or satellite.
However there are only 5 available right now.
So, that's 5 channels * 24hrs * 28 days = 3360 hours of recording.
Lets assume a VCD bitrate of 1300kbit/s video 128kbit/s. Total 1428kbit/s.
Number of seconds in 3360 hours
= (3360*60)*60
= 12,096,000
So, for all that video we'll need
= 1428 * 12,096,000
= 17,273,088,000 kbit
= 17,687,642,112,000 bits
= 2,210,955,264,000 bytes
= 2,159,136,000 kilobyte
= 2,108,531 megabytes
= 2,059 gigabytes
So that's like 4 * 500gb drives plus 1 * 120gb drive to correct for the drive maker's marketing departments.
I'm using VCD/MPEG as a basis for this, they'll invariably be using a better codec, probably with far stronger compression.
DVB-T is broadcast in a number of muxes (5?), each containing a number of channels. For instance, iirc, all of the BBC channels are in Mux1, Channel 4 and some others in Mux3, etc.
:)
Most DVB cards now are capable of streaming an entire Mux to disk for later decoding. I *think* mplayer has the ability to play back individual channels from a recorded Mux now.
So, in theory, to record the entirety of Freeview at any one time you'd need 5 DVB cards, not 30 as has been mentioned elsewhere. Of course, disk space would still be an issue...
FWIW, more than half of the channels are utter crap, so could safely be ignored
Ant.
Web site source code says 'Promise.tv Ltd'
Companies house gives
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/b09fe60fa8e4ad5
A quick search on the registered address gives
http://www.touchslough.com/business/list/bid/9156
A TV repair centre in Ascot. At least these people will be able to repair the thing when it goes wrong
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
but doesn't cable have a **HUGE** bandwidth? I remember hearing 500 MBps, but that could just be wrong. Even if you figure:
50 channels x 500 MB/hour => 25 GB/hour.
Ok, so storage isn't a problem.
But 25 GB/hour => 7 MB/sec writes..
Hmm, I guess it's possible.
job done
I'm curious as to why you would need a tuner at all in case of cable TV. (over-the-air (which freeview is?) is a different story, satellite would only apply to the signal being received)
For those who don't know... the tuner is the block in your TV/VCR/etc. that 'tunes' to a basic channel frequency and grabs the signal off of that. That's why you need 2 tuners or a dual-tuner for picture-in-picture ( unless that picture is of the same channel %) ).
However, all the channels -are- already on the cable line. So, at least in theory, you could store all the data coming across it. It'd take some massive storage space, but it's doable.
Then when you want to watch a show, send the signal back out and through a tuner, and you're all set.
Just having the disk isn't enough. You need a multi tuner to be able to break the spectrum in to n streams and you need enough processing power to be able to encode all of those streams at once.
Although, in theory I suppose it is possible that you could compress the entire spectrum in one block, but I think that the channels that have nothing but static would kill your compression ratio.
It also might work for satelite where you are getting all the channels already compressed. Then it might just be a simple matter of saving them all.
Some digital cable works by only sending you one stream at any given time (and when you switch channels the office starts sending you a different stream). With that kind of setup, you can only save what you can get.
Currency convertor where you can type "US dollars to rupees" and it knows what you mean
Because the amount of overhead involved is ludicrous?
Downloading every show broadcast in a month would be like downloading the entire internet and then running searches on your local server for the information that interests you.
Imagine duplicating this in EVERY household in the country. The impact to our energy grid would be sickening. We should be looking to lessen the amount of power we are sucking down, not increase it.
Moreover, there's no need -- TV listings are announced, you know what's going to be on, you can narrow down significantly what you know is highly unlikely to be of any interest to you. You don't want to capture something and then have to sift through it all. Finding that one good show or moment in a month of crap content will be like finding a needle in a haystack, unless you can find a way to dope the captured video stream with some metadata that you can use to aid your search.
There might be the occasional oddball thing that no one predicted would happen on TV that you might miss, but (and this is the true beauty of the internet) if that happens, there's sure to be SOMEONE who captured it, and it will be hosted on the internet somewhere (copyright laws be damned). It's just a matter of finding it. Google can make that reasonably easy. Friends and family forwarding links that they found interesting to your email can take up any slack.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Lots of 'it can't be done' posts, but a simple solution occurs to me - a pvr with a hard wired torrent application, which will record a random channel. Sell a few thousand of them, all the channels get covered/seeded, and although what you want may not be *immediately* available, with a broadband connection it can be had reasonably soon.
(totally plagiarized from some comedian)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Finding the redundancy in a month's worth of TV is a remarkably similar task to finding the adverts... if any 5 or more seconds occurs more than (say) 5 times thenI think it's highly likley to be an advert, trail or station ident.
If this thing can be modded to adblock TV, then I'm buying it just for that, any PVR features are just a bonus.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I can see it being an impressive feat recording every show of every channel for a month, that takes a decent amount of hardware. But, I guess the real question is, why? Seems like it's a bit overkill for me at least. Besides, the best archive one can have without all the bandwidth or hard drives included is the library! Read a book instead!
"'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August."
That's why.
I was at the Open Tech conference and also saw this PVR box. Actually there wasn't much box to it. It consisted of several large capacity hard drives (maybe about five SATAs) and a few DVB PCI cards, connected to a motherboard on a wooden base, no case.
It recorded one WEEK's worth of video from, as far as I could tell, only the BBC's Freeview channels (BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, News24, CBeebies, CBBC). The quality seemed fine judging from an episode of Doctor Who which went out on BBC3 the previous Thursday being projected behind the presenter.
I'd be more impressed if it could record all the "TV" broadcast over the net.
Seriously. They think we want their channels of media?
Keep your "TV"
Keep your "Blockbusters"
Keep your "Idols"
You had control in the past, but now its shifted and not even Boxes capable of holding a *million* hours of reality TV and home renovation or "Trusted Computing" or DRM or "The next big Justin Timberlake" will bring us back.
RIP centralised media
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
It might be possible if they used one drive for commercials and only recorded each unique commercial once. I don't know about the UK, but here in the states if you were recording regular tv and you could do this for cialis and capital one, you could probably fit a year on a floppy :)
1) The people who phone in. 2) The 80's TV presenters who you wondered "where are they now?" 3) Diamonique. 4) Comparing prices of computer kit with prices online. 5) That it's not as crappy as the other shopping channel on Freeview.
Also, don't start watching bidup.tv. It's completely addictive.
Honestly you can. yes it would require racks of mythtv slave recorder boxes with 2 -3 tuner cards in each one but it certianly can be done.
when i was dinking with mythtv I tinkered with that aspect of it, and it was really cool. I had 2 recording boxes with 2 mpeg cards in each and had the playback unit act as the database. it was really cool and certianly looked expandable enough to handle scaling up to 20-30 recording slaves with a decent enough database/server controlling the backend.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
To determine what the viewers like to record, then filter on the programme descriptions to record similar stuff automatically.
Wait! TiVo does something very like that *already*!
Let's not be elegant about this then. Lets use brute force instead.
Deleted
It seems to me that the best way to have a featureset such as the one they are boasting, is to have a distributed system. What I mean by this is that each customer would automatically download and hold several television shows at a time.
:|
Using a buffer, shows could be streamed to customers from other customers as they select it from the menu. Granted this wouldnt work for areas where there is a limited amount of bandwith per month, but I cant think of anything better right now. It is too early in the morning
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
720GB to record one channel for a month, times N hundred channels, yeah, maybe. But where do you get N hundred tuners and the signal to feed them? Or are they using the equivalent of Software Radio and digitizing the raw spectrum? In which case they must have the world's highest-bandwidth D-to-A converter(s).
Even if it were technically possible with today's technology, I can't see anyone except the ultra-rich affording it. And what about when such a complex device breaks or needs maintenance? It makes much more financial and technical sense to do TV-on-demand where you can use one room-size device for many feeds. Color me skeptical about this story.
blah, been there done that...
Encoder status
Encoder 1 is local on vector and is not recording.
Encoder 2 is local on vector and is recording: 'American Morning' on CNN. This recording will end at 10:00 AM.
Encoder 3 is local on vector and is not recording.
Machine information
Disk Usage:
* Total Space: 1525,504 MB
* Space Used: 1233,000 MB
* Space Free: 292,504 MB
Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.
Why use Google when I can download the whole internet and then search that? Really now. I have Zero, Zip, Nada, interest in 90% of the shows being run, for instance daytime soaps, in Spanish. Why bother to download those, just to delete later?
Much rather get the half-dozen or so shows I like, and a once-in-awhile recommendation for a new show is nice. But to record everything sounds to me like a management nightmare.
--
$tar -xvf
search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.
You can accomplish the same thing with a TV guide. Yet another technogical "solution" that just makes things more complicated without solving anything.
I was at the OpenTech conference in London. The PVR was being introduced by the BBC, so I doubt it's some sort of hoax despite the e-mail collecting page. Although they seemed to talk more about it as if it's a concept idea, more than a final product. Additionally in their example they mentioned that it would record a weeks worth of TV, not a months. They also mentioned the advent of large hard drives (500GB) made this possible and explained roughly what you would need to build this (DVB TV Tuner Card).
They did mention that you could record even more by telling the unit that you didn't like certain types of TV - eg: Sport, Children's, etc...
From http://www.nedrichards.com/
That seems a lot more likely (week not month), it also says multiplex, I'd assume a single DTT multiplex.
You're over thinking the matter. It's not a real product. This is just a scam to collect e-mail addresses of known, verified geeks for a new "opt-in" list.
The product will never come out, but the opt-in list will be resold for several times the cost of the web site and hosting that's generated the buzz.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
It's just a modded Phantom console from Infinium Labs.
Ok that would be a Great gift. Of course you might NEVER see the wife, the kids, the husband, or even the dog for a month......How do I get one of those TV's??? (Evil Grin)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' Ummm...maybe this is obvious to everyone but him, but I don't WANT to filter through all that programming. TiVO just works great. I'll take anything I can say, "Hey, gimme every 'Good Eats' episode" and not have to filter out 'Big Brother' episodes. Hello!?
What about all the material that they're going to miss NOW, while they're watching their pre-recorded shows? Who's going to record the shows they miss because they're watching pre-recorded shows? And when are those going to be watched? And isn't this going to lead to people just watching older and older stuff?
Sooner or later people will be going backwards in time, talkin' 'bout Threes Company!
You could probably record an arbitrary number of channels by having each PVR record a subset, and then share them using a bittorrent like protocol.
Not sure how you get around the legal problems.
40GB x 100 = 3500 hrs of recording 24hrs day * 30 days = 720 hours you can record for a straight month 4.8 channels non-stop
They use an inexpensive (~50 quid from Maplin) DVB-T tuner card to record the entire BBC multiplex (which contains several channels). As there are only 6 Multiplexes in the UK, you would need 6 cards (assuming a single pc could handle the throughput from 6 cards) to record all digital terrestrial television in the UK.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
...are you going to get a proc capable of encoding 30 divx streams simultaneously?
I am NaN
I was talking to a freind yesterday who was at the event and talked to the people demoing the system.
When they say every TV show, they mean the Freeview digital terrestrial broadcasts. They actaully rely on the fact that a single old-style analog chunk of bandwidth incorporates all the freeview channels, so they just record the digital streams. So they aren't talking about say recording all the SkyTV channels or everything your local cable company provides, they are talking about digital freeview only.
Second, the box had 1.5TB of capacity.
It seems to me that the mental image of "being able to record and store all programs for a month" is really a space indicator rather than the actual capability of capturing TV from all channels at the same time.
Surely they are also limited by the capture cards hardware limitations that allow only one or two channels to be captured at the same time. And I haven't even started to wonder about the amount op CPU and disk speed needed to compress and write to disk 20 or 30 channels of video at the same time.
I for one am not taking this "promise" very literally.
It's like claiming an I-pod can store all speech by your entire family for a month, but without providing the actual possibility of recording the audio.
Then he spent 24 hours camping outside.
He wrote it up in 'The Age of Missing Information'. (Amazon link provided for the reviews, no sales connection.)
Great book, I recommend it.
Now excuse me, I need to get back to /. before I miss something.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
We all know that recording more than a few channels at the same time runs into the processing power and bandwidth bottlenecks. But when you think about it, all those channels come in over ONE little wire. What if the broadcast is being recorded BEFORE being demultiplexed. Effectively, you could just get a fast enough A/D and sample the raw cable and do the tuning later. Cable is a one-way transmission, still, so what difference does it make when you do the actual tuning?
This is assuming analog cable, of course. Even with this concept, you'd still have degraded quality, just from the lack of bandwidth of the A/D conversion. Recording a single tuned channel at high quality is hard enough, trying to get a fast enough A/D to get a high enough bandwidth to not lose too much on the A/D could be tough. (in this case, I'm using the real meaning of bandwidth, as in frequency bandwidth of the A/D).
Why would you want so much crap?? My homebrew PVR can only record 1 channel at a time (soo to upgrade to 2) on a 160Gb 7.2kRMP drive and I can get around 80hours of TV (T4 is a bit grainy and takes the bit rate way up).
What would be more useful is a device that could record say atmost 3 to 5 channels symaltaniously but only record stuff you are interested in! By specifying a series of key words and topics is could scan the tv guids for shows it thinks you would like (also you can schedule your own choices aswell, you cant let the machine get above it's station). Failing that a benality filter to screen out reality TV and the like replacing it with re-runs of start trek/B5/Red Dwarf/informative documentary would be good.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
57 Terabytes and nothing on.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Roger Waters said it best:
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
eom.
Congratulations! We have collected 1 million email addresses (including yours) and distributed them to the biggest spammers in exchange for millions of dollars! We're rich and you're screwed!
Like others have said, this would take ungodly hdd capacity, tons of CPU power, and a lot of electricity. And what do you get? 5 channels? 30 channels? How many are shopping channels? Who needs every channel recorded? Do people need to go back and see what the weather channel was forcasting 17 days ago? Do they like to see what QVC was selling last Friday night? Do they care to see the afternoon news for last Wednesday? While this is talking about England, I'm sure they want to market it to Europe and the US. I don't see it happening. As most people who admint to watching TV here say, they only watch a small handful of channels. They couldn't care less what happens on 95% of what they are paying to recieve. Therefore why would they want to record it? On the other hand, an ultra high capacity PVR would be nice. My Dish PVR holds about 100 hours of programming. I usually have it at 50% capacity. Sometimes I find/refind a new show and record 10-20 hours of it. It would be nice if I had 5000 hours capacity. Then I could archive a lot of those shows indefinately. That isn't going to happen though until there is a cheap 5TB hdd available.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
According to http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital- video/dvb-trans.html each DVB multiplex runs at 24Mb/s.
So, storing one multiplex for a month needs
(24/8)*60*60*24*31 Mbytes of storage = 8 Terra Bytes
So 8TB per multiplex per month just about doable at the state of the art, but not very likely.
I haven't checked how many muxes in use for different channels. I think it's about 3, so say 24TB all in. That's a lot of disks!
Now, assuming that I could get as many as four tuners and four 500 GB hard drives per MB, I'd also have to buy 44 motherboards, power supplies, and cases (unless I bought some sort of server rack).
Of course, these computers would also eat up power. Let's say each averaged about 150 watts power usage per hour (probably modest, since they would be encoding and running the HDD constantly). That would be about 4,750 Kilowatts power usage per month (might want to check for a bulk deal with the power company in between enjoying your deluge of programing).
Of course, there is also setup time, maintenance costs, etc.
So excuse me for being just a tad bit skeptical. But the numbers don't add up to much of a promise. More like a bunch of horsehit that Cary Doctrow was sold on with a rigged up "demo" and bunch of ridiculous promises.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What's maplin? I tried getting TV tuners but have had no success. I got one, didn't work because it needed Windows XP. I got another, it worked, but not on Linux, just on Windows 98, and the picture was awful, all jerky, and the software was a waste of time. I can't find anywhere that sells proper TV cards.
As for the multiplexes, which channels are on which multiplexes? All the information I can find about digital TV is 99% hype.
Recording is mainly for time-shifting. If I dont watchit within a week, I'll probably never watch it. I rarely have time to watch that much in a week.
Unless they have secured agreements with each broadcaster they are taping they will be in direct copyright violation. Service's like Blink.tv have had to deal with these issues already.
I think the entertainment industry should take this as a strong indication of things to come. They have an extraordinary opportunity to give people what they want - access to the entertainment whenever (and wherever) the viewer wants. The extent to which time-shifting has becoming commonplace (everyone knows what tivo'ing a show means) should be viewed as the start of, not the end of, the revolution in entertainment. The archives of home users will only continue to grow. I'd prefer to see the entertainment industry realize the demand is for the ability to view any program, any time and just archive their collections. Revenue could still be made by including advertising, or by charging per-download for advert-free content.
Of all the amazing and wonderful things I saw this weekend at London's OpenTech conference, none came close to the stupendous Promise TV box.
Of all the amazing and wonderful things I see while visiting London, none come close to sucking as bad as British TV. Why would I want to record an entire month of that garbage? *ducks*
First, doesn't the UK have something like half a dozen actual channels on their over the air services?
Second - most of the recordings will be commercials and I cannot see spending good money on hard drive to record the drivel that passes for todays commercials. Nor can I support spending money to record programs that aren't daring enough, or that pander to the lowest common denominator of society.
Matter of fact the web has become much more fascinating for me.
In that case, it would be even more stupid to come up with a method to consume all the coffee in England for an entire month.
I think my original point was related to a question I asked a friend of mine once; why do you need 200GB of porn?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
There was a time when I could record every show on TV on my single channel VCR...
Recording every show on every channel won't work so well if you have Cable or Satellite TV.
Oh well, what the hell...
You have reached the end of the Internet.
Please go outside now.
SYS 64738
Don't they only get like 4 terrestial channels in the UK -- BBC1-3 and ITV? Doesn't sound like a big technical accomplishment. OTOH, if I could continuously tivo about a dozen choice channels on DirecTV on an HD TiVO, and had a decent, useable UI (which TiVo sucks at), I would be happy to pay $$$$$ for the processor and software, if were extensible to a user provided disk array. And by $$$$$, let's say if it exceeded the cost of my Sony plasma, no problem.
So it can record BBC One, Two, Three AND Four. That's pretty impressive.
I have a DirecTV TiVo with 2 tuners. I can't possibly watch everything it records as it is. Not to mention, just about anything worth watching is probably available on the various P2P networks.
If I had the space for every TV show played over a month on all channels, that's not what I'd use that space for. Instead, I'd record everything that might interest me over the next 5 years and I'd probably have some room to spare.
The Science Channel, Dicovery, History Channel, History International, PBS, PBS U. Unfortunately, there isn't enough time to watch all the good educational programs.
Of course, there is more crap tv than good tv, but there's enough good tv on the above channels to invalidate anyone's claim that only crap is shown.
Moreover, there's no need -- TV listings are announced, you know what's going to be on, you can narrow down significantly what you know is highly unlikely to be of any interest to you
Except that the listings are inaccurate. The shows start and finish at random deltas from their listed times. The listings themselves only go out two weeks which means you have to stay on top of it. Go on vacation or just get busy and only the re-occuring stuff gets recorded. Finally, haven't you ever found out about something worth watching *after* it has already shown?
The problem is solveable, but not in the simplistic Tivo manner. Instead of a giant PVR at everyone's home, you have one one or several giant PVR's in the neighborhood. Smaller PVR's in each home. Impulse viewing is done with VOD from the the server. Re-occuring shows are recorded as they happen on the local PVR, saving bandwidth and load on the server. A little software magic to keep it all seemless.
Here's my take: just turn the question around. Here's my interpretation:
"Why record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch, when you can program a TiVo to get certain shows for you."
Exactly.
downloading the entire internet and then running searches on your local server for the information that interests you. Imagine duplicating this in EVERY household in the country.
You know, in about twelve years someone's going to look back on your post and chuckle at how naive you were for thinking that implausible. Kinda like the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Maybe so, but what's so great about the data stream from every TV station that we value it so highly that we're willing to invest THAT MUCH in order to keep redundant month-old archives of it all?
I can guarantee you that people will take longer than a month to sift through a month's worth of every channel's TV programming, and so that's going to stack up or get thrown out. And there will be stuff that some people will want to archive more or less permanently -- historical newscasts, every episode of their favorite show, their favorite movies...
And of course the content cartels are going to take serious issue with that, and make every effort to make this sort of thing illegal, even though it's falls well under fair use provisions.
And for what? Fucking television. Where 95% of the content is unwatchable. Why would anyone want to archive every last bit of it? It's like saving all your junk mail in case you might want to apply for a credit card sometime.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Every cable box dvr is sent out with a good size hard drive.
Now combine that with bit torrent that can access everything recorded by other cable customers. You put in digital rights so people can only see what they are subscribed to. You patch over the cable connection nightly with a new encrypted key to prevent hacking (like everquest did to slow down the programs that sniffed the eq streams).
As long as a show is recorded on any box in the cable tv network you can watch it.
Imagine- in a city- you would be talking 20,000+ user swarms with superhigh speed lines. In a state, there might be hundreds of thousands in a swarm. Plus the cable company could record 1 master copy of everything and keep it for a few months.
And of course they charge for this service- another couple bucks on top of the 6 dollar dvr surcharge (or include it to sell dvrs).
It's so obvious I do not know why they havn't done it yet. I've been thinking of it for over a year now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.