Monster DVR

Via Engadget comes news of Sony's new 1 Terabyte DVR with 7 tuners.

When I started this site last summer, I was toying with the idea of producing a terrabyte tivo as a hacking project. It's not that I'd ever actually want that much space, I just wanted to see if it was possible. I explored it for a few days and there was an outside chance I could hack LBA48 support for larger hard drives into my old standalone TiVo, but I'd still have to mount two of the drives externally and figure out a way to split the IDE cables and still have enough juice in the power supply to keep it running. I scraped it because it wasn't really worth it.

But Sony's working on it, and the seven tuners part seems more outrageous than the amount of storage. If it will be recording HDTV content, a terabyte of storage will allow for a decent amount of content (50+ hours?) and is actually useful. Personally two tuners is great, and there's only been one or two instances where I wished I had one more tuner, but seven is ridiculous. I can't imagine what use case they designed a 7 tuner recorder for. I don't think there has ever been seven things on TV worth watching at once.

Comments

[bats]

The new HDTivo from directv has 4 tuners -- 2 satellite HD tuners and 2 off-the-air tuners. Clearly 3 programs at once might happen, so three OTA and three satellite tuners, a total of 6 is not unreasonable -- why not throw in one more? (Okay, 7 seems like a lot.)

[MegaZone]

The question is now many tuners can be used at once? The HDTV DirecTV has 4 tuners - but only 2 can be active at a time. Any 2 of the 4, but still just two recordings at a time.

[Jim]

The extra tuners might be to provide a television output to other televisions within the house.

[Jonathan]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the HDTV spec allows for broadcaster to send out as many as 4 signals over the same channel (at less quality than HDTV, but still better than NTSC). I can think of a few uses for this: imagine a football game divided into 4 signals -- one each favoring each team, one for both teams, one heavy on the replays, or whatever. Or maybe next-gen reality TV may be able to use this (one signal for the doods, one for the chicks). Anyway, point is, I think in the future there's going to be much more simultaneous signals that will need recording.

[Jacob]

I'll tell you what such a monster is going to be used for: politcal campaigns.

I've read -- and I can't seem to find the article, but I think it was in the Atlantic Monthly -- about a team of politcal operatives in the Bush camp that spend their days watching hours upon hours of TiVo'd news footage, looking for openings to exploit. The article mentioned that what they do would be basically impossible without TiVo's ability to record, archive, and quickly skim hours of footage.

I've no doubts that the Democrats do the same, and I've seen Jon Steward (The Daily Show) mention a number of times that they use a TiVo to find the clips they air on the show.

[Kevin Reynen]

Not just politics, but any research. I've been looking for a way to record 6 channels for 30 days for an academic research project. The Type X would be the perfect solution.

[Scott Johnson]

Sure it's overkill. But that's why we want it, right? ;-)

[John Hood]

In the UK sky+ currently allows 2 recordings at once, but I would welcome at least 4 tuners, which I believe sky is looking into. I owned TiVo for a few weeks, but lack of support (in the UK) pursuade me to move to sky+!

[Matt]

The tuners would most likely be used for thin set tops throughout the house. Similar to the concept of Voom's demo'd distributed DVR.

So you could record 2-3 shows at one, watch a show in the bedroom, watch a show in the living room, etc. The set tops in the rooms would be small, inexpensive devices with no tuners. They would just instruct this mega-DVR to tune to a given channel and send the video in an MPEG stream.

[Jeff]

You scraped it. You put a nasty scratch down the side? Or perhaps you scraPPed it :)

[Bob Miller]

A single tuner will record all the streams in a given channel. You don't need a tuner for each program.

MPEG4, WM9 or VP6 will allow for as many as 12 NTSC quality streams in a 6 MHz channel statistically multiplexed.

Once you have recorded these streams you don't need tuners to send them around the house from the hard drive as IP.

[azeem]

Seven tuners doesn't seem unreasonable. Very common place that there are five or six shows on at a time (BBC 2, BBC 4, Channel 4, a couple of movies, history channel) always 8pm. Not to mention the Simpsons on Sky One.

[gen]

The other thing to take into account is that there are 4 major TV channel platforms in Japan. There are the terrestrial channels (i.e. free TV, which is migrating to digital), "BS" which is a pay-to-see cable system, "CS" (which is also pay-to-see), and SkyPerfecTV, which is satellite. So when you consider that, 7 tuners doesnt seem that outrageous? No, still outrageous? Ok, yes ;)

[James Macgill]

With that many tuners and that much storage space perhaps they are just going after semi random recording. i.e. Pick some of your favourate channels and let it record all of them for most of the time just on the off chance that it records something you might have wanted to see.

[Kon]

A single tuner will record all the streams in a given channel. You don't need a tuner for each program.

You appear to have your duckies messed up. While it is true that a OTA DTV channel uses MPTS, and you can record the MPTS, you can't do this with a satellite feed (for one, CA rules won't let you). Also, tuning a channel in the RF sense has nothing to do with tuning a channel in the MPTS sense.

[gen]

Sorry to clarify. BS and CS in Japan are satellite-based but that same content can be found on cable systems as well.

[Mike Barrett]

What about being able to start all your recordings 5 minutes early and end them all 5 minutes late? Even if the official broadcast time for your programs doesn't confict, the desired recording time might.

- Mike

[Joe Mama]

YOU ARE ALL NERDS

[pax]

The seven tuners would come in handy for choosing your favorite stations for which you want to maintain an hour or so worth current captured content. There have been numerous times I've stumbled onto a program that I wish I could have rewound and watched from the beginning.

[Makaveli_786]

7 TV tuners can be active all at once meaning you can record from seven channels at once, if you have Sky and NTL this will be useful for you, I know it will for me.

1 terrabyte isnt much either considering Sky plan to turn to HDTV in 2005 so 1 terrabyte would only support about 40-50 hours of programming.

[Gregie]

Hey all,

This sounds great but my concern is it "vaper ware" and never intended to be put onto the market?

Has anyone heard of any release dates by Sony ?????

[Robert]

There are some great pictures of inside an hd tivo at www.robert.to/hdtivo/

[eric]

so, what are the quality of these 7 tuners ?
how good they are in terms of receiving off-the-air
hdtv signals from rooftop antannae ?
thx.

[eric]

does this box come w/ Wifi enabled.
If not, can I plug in an USB-based Wifi card ?

What I'm after is really the ability to stream recorded shows to other PCs in the house over my Wifi network. Given the fact that 802.11n is coming out next year, and indeed some pre-N products are already out, there should be enough bandwidth in the Wifi network to transport the hdtv contents.

[twinks club]

i'd rather stay home with a handful of twinks than go on a date with a stud

[seveone]

so does anybody have a date on this