Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV

Posted by timothy on from the no-prior-restraint dept.

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. "

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Timing by _Shorty-dammit · · Score: 5, Informative

    well, with my PVR machine I record at 9Mbps for video and 384Kbps for audio, barely over 1MB/s. With two tuners, that's just over 2MB/s. Watching one of the previous recordings while recording two shows at the same time, that's just over 3MB/s. Even a mediocre HD can handle that no problem. Hell, while it's doing that it's also either scanning a show for commercial breaks or recompressing that 4GB/hour mpeg2 stream to a 1GB/hour mpeg4 stream, so there's a bit more workload, still doesn't break a sweat. So, one HD per recording is way overkill.

  2. Simple Math by WarwickRyan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.