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. "
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:2, Funny)
Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 $$$
Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block... (Score:5, Funny)
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:2)
There are 6 multiplexes on Freeview. Recording them *is* possible - I happen to know someone who writes Freeview box software, and the company he works for has two dedicated machines capable of recording one multiplex each (for testing purposes, apparently). I think it's prett
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.
Re:Timing (Score:2, Interesting)
There are 30 channels, of these 21 are 24hr and I'll assume the rest are 12hr making 25.5 24hr streams.
There are 3 shopping channels so ditch them making 22.5 streams.
Recording on myth each of these streams is approx 1.3Gb/hr, if you don't care too much about the picture quality compress this to ~400M/Hr.
S
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.
Re:Timing (Score:2)
Re:Timing (Score:2)
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html [nist.gov]
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.
Re:Timing (Score:2)
Re:Timing (Score:3, Informative)
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/90983090@N00/2814720
Cheers,
dwm
The real reason for the "product" (Score:2)
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.
Re:Timing (Score:2)
Compression would be unfeasable as you'd have to compress 30 mpeg streams simultaneously, that's a lot of expensive hardware.
Re:Timing (Score:5, Informative)
sage can do this too. (Score:2)
Re:Timing (Score:2)
Here in the US, a big city is likely to have 10-15 OTA channels, plus a hundred or so cable channels. Can this box record all of that?
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)
Re: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.
Re:This was featured at OpenTech (Score:2)
Yes, it was a really good day.
The amount it will record is entirely dependent on how much you want to spend on storage - apparently, the cost to record a months worth (I beleive of just a single multiplex - they only appeared to be recording the BBC multiplex) is around the same as a plasma tv.
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]
Re:Seriously Doubt (Score:2, Informative)
Not optimal, but it IS a way.
Bemopolis
Re:Seriously Doubt (Score:2)
well say 4TB (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seriously Doubt (Score:2)
Obviously, they're not talking about the United States here. And it seems even for the UK, they were only talking a few SD-quality channels. So, basically equivalent to only getting the SD versions of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and UPN in this country. Nothing to write home about - you can build a PC-based DVR that can do this already. You just stick five PCI tuners in it.
Even if you did 30 SD-quality digital cable channels, most of them are only running a
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.
Tuners ? Why tuners at all, if it's cable (Score:2)
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.
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:2)
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:2)
2MB is certainly growing in popularity but you would be very hard pushed to say that it is the norm. I'm still on .5MB (upgrading to 1MB in a couple of months time) and find it pretty quick. I don't see myself upgrading to 2MB anytime soon as there is nothing I do that I feel requires it (and yes I do large downloads). Even downloading TV shows IMHO doesn't require more than 1MB if you can plan your time in the slighest.
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:2)
One of the things that struck me while watching the promise.tv demo at OpenTech was how pointless it seems having such a device in every household, when centralized servers could provide the service instead.
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:2)
This was using an inexpensive freeeview digital card, so only the free-to-air channels like BBC1, BBC2 etc, the "25 on digital terrestrial" would be captured.
* If the numbers are wrong it's my fault - I didn't take notes.
Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels (Score:2)
They just realized that Rowling was wrong. Magic and muggle tech work very well together.
The only problem is that it requires proof of the deflowering of two virgins to buy.
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)
Yeah but... (Score:2)
Yeah but that's only three shows, right?
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.
A bit of digging on promise.tv (Score:2, Interesting)
Web site source code says 'Promise.tv Ltd'
Companies house gives
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/b09fe60fa8e4ad5f 3ea4d24014a52ce2//compdetails [companieshouse.gov.uk]
A quick search on the registered address gives
http://www.touchslough.com/business/list/bid/91560 0 [touchslough.com]
A TV repair centre in Ascot. At least these people will be able to repair the thing when it goes wrong
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]
Re:How about processing power (Score:2)
Only 10% of US households use analog broadcast TV, but a heck of a lot of us use analog cable.
I refuse to downgrade to digital because it takes so long to change the channel on digital, I would need a cable box, and wouldn't be able to plug the cable directly into the back of my TiVo.
One of my coworkers says that he just got a second newer digital cable box and they seem to have fixed the channel flipping speed problem on it, but his original cable box still takes almost a second per channel. I'll pr
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.
hardwired torrent appliance, natch (Score:2, Interesting)
First step towards Adblock for TVs? (Score:2)
If this thing can be modded to adblock TV, then I'm buying it just for that, any PVR features are just a bonus.
Sometimes these things answer themselves... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why.
One WEEK's worth, BBC Freeview only. (Score:2, Informative)
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
Record Free to Air Net TV? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Can do this with mythtv already (Score:2)
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.
Why not use a bayesian filter (Score:2)
Wait! TiVo does something very like that *already*!
Let's not be elegant about this then. Lets use brute force instead.
Re:Why not use a bayesian filter (Score:2)
Recording all 5 freeview multiplexes is a reasonable idea, but storing it all for a month is just stupid IMO. Something that did that for a couple of hours would be nice... for when you switch channels and catch the end of something that looks good - you can rewind it and watch it properly.
I'm assuming it's recording DTT.. recording analogue would be pointless because it takes mor
Distributed System (Score:2, Interesting)
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 m
Screw the storage, where do they get the tuners? (Score:2)
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
Re:Screw the storage, where do they get the tuners (Score:2)
Efficiency (Score:2)
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
TV Guide (Score:2)
You can accomplish the same thing with a TV guide. Yet another technogical "solution" that just makes things more complicated without solving anything.
Don't get so exceited (Score:2)
Okay, this is dumb (Score:2)
Am I confused? Or are they? (Score:2)
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
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.
There's still nobody home. (Score:2, Insightful)
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from [pink-floyd-lyrics.com]
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:2)
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.
Re:5 channels (Score:2)
The storage-requirements would still be humongous though, recording *one* channel 24/7 requires on the order of 1TB/month, so you'd like 4*250GB drives for each channel. (yes, there's bigger disks, but they cost *more* for the same storage)
Total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Total BS (Score:2, Interesting)
I think back to that line, and look at how far we've come - more channels, same shit.
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?
Re:Ummm... (Score:2)
Terrestrial analogue we have BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Five.
Re:TV Ratings (Score:2)
Re: not quite correct (Score:2)
So if you were ever worried your vote didn't count, TV's the place to worry. That, and government. ;)
Re:I love QVC too (Score:2)
(totally plagiarized from some comedian)
Re:How it might work (Score:2)
A/D converters in the MHz range are tough enough to come by...most are audio ADC which are in the kHz.
Cable goes up to something like 900 MHz, maybe up to 2GHz now.
That's lab-grade equipment right there.
I remember there was a GNU Software Defined Radio project, and the thing that made it so tough was the fact that the DAC for it was insanely expensive.
Re:How it might work (Score:2)