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. "

Comments

Timing

[nmg196]

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.

Re:Timing

[Goth Biker Babe]

Insightful? Hah!

Capture cards? 30 feeds? Don't be so analogue and old school. It only needs to save the multiplexes. Which on terrestrial digital is about eight including all the radio stations.

Right assuming it's digital only, it needs as many 'frontends' as there are multiplexes. Modern day silicon (non can/discrete component) tuners are pretty cheap and rather small. You'll also need the demodulators to go with them. All of which would fit easily on a single PCI card. Then you just process each of the multiplexes' transport stream enough to remove the redundant data such as the NITs and record the rest on to the harddrives as a stream.

Something like a Sky box already does this with two transport streams. One is recorded for the 'trick mode' pause live TV etc and one for recording a program. It will also play back a third stream from the disc. A more powerful PC based machine could easily cope.

Perfect /. article

[Overzeetop]

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.

That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous /. ads were for products. Wake me when there's news. And when DirecTV supports this.

Why not? Here's why...

[Junior J. Junior III]

'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.'

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.

Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block...

[Cervantes]

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.

Dude, if I have my own T1 line and a cute girl 3 doors down, I'm not going to talk to her, I'm going to use my T1 to stream hidden webcams from her house and charge $29.95/month for membership to the site.

Talking to a cute girl := 1% chance of something that could be called success.
Selling pics of a cute girl to pervs and collecting $$$ := 100% chance of buying a russian bride.