Snapstream's ten tuner Hydra PVR
A few months ago, Snapstream released their software and posted a story on their six tuner demo box. TV card maker Hauppauge recently released a dual tuner TV card for the PC and Snapstream upped the ante by using five of them to build a ten tuner PVR. Obviously, just a proof of concept but it does sound like their basic system operated fine while recording on multiple tuners and playing back at the same time. I suspect most enthusiasts would be fine with just one dual tuner card, maybe two, tops, but it's good to know most off the shelf PCs can do much more with the software and hardware available.
The hard part is feeding all those inputs. A lot of folks have cable or sat and they more and more require a box between the TV and the wire... which of course is horrible inconvenient and exactly what networks want :p.
Posted by: Griffon | February 09, 2005 at 06:01 PM
Such a media server would only be used in a group setting, such as a frat house where multiple people with different tastes in TV. Such a media server should also be using MythTV instead of SnapStream BeyondTV: You have to pay for each tuner you use with the software, unless you buy it through them. Plus, with that many tuners, even with integrated MPEG capture you need an extremely fast FSB to cope with all that data, and a hard drive that can store all that info that fast. And I also noticed they hooked the system into an HDTV - yet it only gets analog signals.
Posted by: KirbyMeister | February 10, 2005 at 07:10 PM
Are they joking? 10 tuners recording shows with only 240GB of total storage? I guess that's why Snapstream focuses on software ;>)
Posted by: Anonymous | February 11, 2005 at 10:39 PM
They had this box at CES. But they couldn't make it work with all 10 tuners! They were only running 5 or six of them. They advertise this without it even functioning. How lame.
Posted by: Waffle | February 25, 2005 at 06:12 PM
Well i have made a system recording with 16 tuners using beyond TV here at my work. It works fine and has been running fine without probs for the last two years. 16 tuners simultaniously and upwards 15TB discspace. So no it's not lame - it works. And by the way - you dont have to buy a license for each tuner - they removed that in version 4.xx
- AWP
Posted by: AWP | June 11, 2007 at 12:53 AM