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Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jul 26, 2005 07:20 AM
from the no-prior-restraint dept.
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. "
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Places Pinky Against Lip (Score:2, Funny)
ONE
MILLION
HOURS!
MWHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
Where are the frickin sharks with laser beams?
A month later (Score:5, Funny)
You just need one hardcore nerd per block... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block... (Score:5, Insightful)
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. := 100% chance of buying a russian bride.
Selling pics of a cute girl to pervs and collecting $$$
Parent
Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Timing (Score:2)
Playing around with the Linux DVB information you'll see that the DVB streams are easy to save off to disk or transmit across a network. As there are only 5 or 6 multiplexes it wouldn't take that much to save them all off to disks.
Get a decent controller and the right software and you're effectively time-shifting the entire broadcast spectrum.
Of course this doesn't come close to enough if you look at Sky's 60+ transponders each pum
Re:Timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Timing (Score:5, Informative)
Because the system was demoed at OpenTech 2005 on Saturday.
I was there and I saw it. So here's a bit more info on how it works. I records digital terrestrial televison, not analogue. I suppose it could be changed to use satelite DVB instead of terrestrial DVB - but you can't get a DVB-S card that decode Sky's encryption, so there's not much point. It records an entire mutiplex off the DVB-T card. They only appear to have one card, so they were only recording the BBC multiplex. There are 6 multiplexes in the UK, so I suppose to record "all" DVB-T transmissions, you'd need multiple cards.
As for costs, while the DVB card was quite cheap (they said around 50 quid) and the PC is faily inexpensive, the storage costs are about the same as a plasma tv - but falling all the time.
Parent
Re:Timing (Score:3, Informative)
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/90983090@N00/2814720
Cheers,
dwm
Re:Timing (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Timing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Timing (Score:3, Informative)
You assume they're recording analog broadcasts, which they aren't. Recording UK terrestrial digital broadcasts requires no compression. It's already compressed. They're directly recording the Freeview [wikipedia.org] multiplexes.
Channel Hopping (Score:4, Funny)
"...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!
Yeah, but... (Score:3)
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!
I promise.. (Score:2)
Perfect /. article (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous
Re:Perfect /. article (Score:2)
Why stop there? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why stop there? (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#c ached [google.com]
Every Terrestrial channel? (Score:2, Insightful)
This was featured at OpenTech (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenTech 2005 was featured in a Slashdot article a few minutes ago here [slashdot.org]
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.
Seriously Doubt (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Seriously Doubt (Score:5, Informative)
That's only if you record at crappy quality. If you record at "good" (not "best"), you get around 15. Which goes real fast, let me tell you. What's worse is that there's no way to find out how much space you've used up or is available.
[/gripe]
Parent
well say 4TB (Score:3, Interesting)
There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:4, Informative)
It would be relatively easy to record all the Freeview channels at once. You only need one receiver per multiplex, not per channel, then you just record the raw data stream which contains all the channels on that multiplex. IIRC there are only about half a dozen multiplexes. So 6 tuners would be enough to record everything on Freeview.
Parent
This or VoD? (Score:2)
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
Is this really a feasible home appliance? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [mythtv.org] 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.
Re:Is this really a feasible home appliance? (Score:2)
This seems like yet another "we can do it so we must". Eventually we're just going to run out of natural resources to make that a useful argument...
Why not spend the time and energy on better codecs? Oh wait, because that would be hard work and useful...
Tom
Re:Is this really a feasible home appliance? (Score:3, Informative)
And where... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this really a feasible home appliance? (Score:3, Interesting)
And why watch that much TV? (Score:2)
Simple Math (Score:5, Informative)
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.
How about processing power (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [coinmill.com]
Why not? Here's why... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sometimes these things answer themselves... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why.
This experiment has been run before... (Score:3, Informative)
Then he spent 24 hours camping outside.
He wrote it up in 'The Age of Missing Information'. [amazon.com] (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.
How it might work, and some calculations (Score:5, Informative)
According to http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital- video/dvb-trans.html [abdn.ac.uk] 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!
Re:5 channels (Score:2)
considering that the UK only has FIVE channels, i think a 60GB IPOD would be enough to record for a month.
Five TERRESTRIAL channels, and a whole bunch more on Digital (Freeview). Plus Cable and Sky, but I'm not counting those since they're not accessible to everyone.
...and it's four channels; Channel 5 disnae count ;-)
Re:5 channels (Score:2)
Even that's not right really. Five ANALOGUE terrestrial channels, DIGITAL terrestrial has dozens. Cable/Sky has hundreds.
Re:5 channels (Score:2)
Even that's not right really. Five ANALOGUE terrestrial channels, DIGITAL terrestrial has dozens.
Aye, that's it. Temporary analogue/digital/terrestrial confusion caused by five days at music festival without the colour teevee... oops!
Re:5 channels (Score:5, Informative)
http://freeview.co.uk/whatson/index.html [freeview.co.uk]
I doubt you'd bother making something that recorded from an analogue source - too much CPU power.
Parent
Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:On Demand Programming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe some script which prevents it from downloading the stuff you already know is rubbish (I hate soap operas and daytime TV generally - why waste bandwidth). Or maybe, just maybe, a script which only downloads things you've specifically asked for.... hang on this is starting to sound like another product....
Re:Ummm... (Score:2)
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Funny)
> And if you only count 60% of those 5 you end up with 3. Sure, just 3. That's 40% down on your bizarre subset of the channels available for free.
And if you don't count those 3, we have no TV.
MY GOD, WE HAVE NO TV! Who will watch the tellytubbies now?