Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV 264
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. "
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.
Perfect /. article (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous
Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Every Terrestrial channel? (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:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
There's still nobody home. (Score:2, Insightful)
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from [pink-floyd-lyrics.com]
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 $$$
Industry should take heed (Score:2, Insightful)