3 Tuner Tivo....Hmmmm

[Resist]

If a 2 tuner tivo is good, wouldn't a 3 tuner Tivo be even better? Being able to record 3 shows at once......now that would be sweet.

[mulscully]

relative man..... then in a year or so we would say 4 tuner Tivo, now that would be sweat..

[RonDawg]

If you have AT&T U-verse in your neighborhood, their DVR will supposedly record FOUR simultaneous shows.

Unfortunately it will only tune one HiDef channel at a time...

[MikeyB]

^^ That would have been the first GOOD thing I've heard about the U-verse service, but that was negated by the "one HD at-a-time" issue. Yuck. I'd rather spend the money on another TiVo and use MRV.

[Luke M]

I believe the multi-stream CableCards can handle six streams, so that's the target to shoot for...

[MichaelK]

I dont recall seeing anything about the series 3, but at one point there was a discussion that the original series 2 architecture was made modular in such a way that they could add more tuners (I think 6 or 8 got bandied about).

That said- I think 2 is probably the sweet spot. Just get another tivo with MRV. And at some point the hard drive is going to get slammed.

At this point you could have 4 simultaneous HD streams being handled. Anyone know what the limit on a sata drive in the real world is?

2 HD recording
1 HD playback
1 HD being MRV'd to or from another HD capable device.


the box gets pretty bound up as it is trying to get season passes reordered not sure what adding anothe HD tuner to that mix would do... (well I'm sure it would slow things down even more- just not sure how much...)

[f0gax]

IMHO, going with more than 2 tuners and you need to look at some kind of "media server" type thing. A box that sits in a closet with a giant disk (or array) and a lot of RAM. But no video outputs. Managed remotely by either a PC or the "dumb" STBs that are its clients.

[flc]

Screw all that, I want a 100 tuner TiVo so I can record everything at once

[TexasGrillChef]

Originally Posted by mulscully

relative man..... then in a year or so we would say 4 tuner Tivo, now that would be sweat..

I have always dreamed of a TWELVE (12) Tuner TiVo....

YES I SAID 12!

TGC

P.S.

On a more realistic scale.... What I was actually thinking of, is a 12 (TWELVE) tuner TiVo SERVER. This unit would record from 12 different Tuners, Combination of Cable (CC), OTA, & Satalite. (They would be plug n play tuners) & would also have the capability of downloading HD Movies.

This Server would in turn "SERVE" out the recorded shows to TiVo PLAYERS that have ALL of the same features our S3 & HD units have now, except no tuners/cable cards. All recording would be done on the 12 tuner Server.

[alee]

Cooperative scheduling is the answer here. They all talk to each other and punt jobs back and forth depending on who's available, and who has enough storage. Find yourself with too many conflicting shows? Go out, get another 2-tuner TiVo, hang it off your cable, and the other TiVos in your home become instantly aware of more recording capacity and conflicts resolve themselves.

[MichaelK]

Originally Posted by f0gax

IMHO, going with more than 2 tuners and you need to look at some kind of "media server" type thing. A box that sits in a closet with a giant disk (or array) and a lot of RAM. But no video outputs. Managed remotely by either a PC or the "dumb" STBs that are its clients.

cablecard and copy protection ruin that plan unless you stream to the other boxes and tivo's dont yet stream.

[MichaelK]

Originally Posted by alee

Cooperative scheduling is the answer here. They all talk to each other and punt jobs back and forth depending on who's available, and who has enough storage. Find yourself with too many conflicting shows? Go out, get another 2-tuner TiVo, hang it off your cable, and the other TiVos in your home become instantly aware of more recording capacity and conflicts resolve themselves.

zactly...

[rainwater]

Originally Posted by alee

Cooperative scheduling is the answer here.

Except it can never work with CableCard technology because of CCI issues. There is no way to know ahead of time whether a show can be copied or not leaving cooperative scheduling worthless.

[surge]

I have a lifetimed Tivo series 1 that I use just for the Comcast digital cable box. I don't record anything... just use it for the trick play for the kids. Most of those channels are only on the digital portion. I also use it to watch HBO but with On-demand I don't use it to record.

My main system is a Windows Media Center 2005 and it has 4 tuners.

I have a few nights a week that all 4 tuners are recording at once. I've only had a few times where I had a conflict and had to dump a show. With a 500 gig harddrive (which is only about $100) I've yet to fill the drive. With 4 tuners and this much space I find myself recording things that sometimes I don't even watch, but it is nice to be able to.

I'm still on SD since MCE doesn't yet handle digital tuner cards or Cable Cards. (you can't get Cable Card support for DIY system... stupid CableLabs)

I think a 4 tuner TiVo would work very well..especially with the prices of harddrives coming down.

MCE also has an add-on that allows multiple machines to pool their resources. Hopefully we will see something like that from TiVo.

[ericr74]

Heck, let's just record the incoming streams (all antennas and cables). Then do the channel decode later when you decide you want to watch a program in the recorded stream. Yeah that sounds nice. Not practical though.

[Dan203]

Originally Posted by ericr74

Heck, let's just record the incoming streams (all antennas and cables). Then do the channel decode later when you decide you want to watch a program in the recorded stream. Yeah that sounds nice. Not practical though.

Not possible. Cable and OTA, even digital, is modulated onto different frequencies of the radio spectrum. A tuner is required to lock onto each of those frequencies and grab the associated data. There is no way to just record everything and decode it later. There would need to be some sort of tuner involved. Now if someone came up with a tuner capable of tuning and decoding all the frequencies at once then you'd have that option. However you'd run through a 1TB hard drive in a matter of seconds, so storage, as well as internal throughput of all the electronics, would also have to increase for that ever to be a reality. Who knows, maybe in 50 year.

Dan

[ericr74]

Originally Posted by Dan203

Not possible. Cable and OTA, even digital, is modulated onto different frequencies of the radio spectrum. A tuner is required to lock onto each of those frequencies and grab the associated data. There is no way to just record everything and decode it later. There would need to be some sort of tuner involved. Now if someone came up with a tuner capable of tuning and decoding all the frequencies at once then you'd have that option. However you'd run through a 1TB hard drive in a matter of seconds, so storage, as well as internal throughput of all the electronics, would also have to increase for that ever to be a reality. Who knows, maybe in 50 year.

Dan

Exactly. I guess what I was imagining was oversampling the incoming streams to the point where you could decode any of them later. But as you mention, that would eat up hard drives rather quickly, not to mention the throughput issues. It's just a pipe dream.

[TexasGrillChef]

Originally Posted by alee

Cooperative scheduling is the answer here. They all talk to each other and punt jobs back and forth depending on who's available, and who has enough storage. Find yourself with too many conflicting shows? Go out, get another 2-tuner TiVo, hang it off your cable, and the other TiVos in your home become instantly aware of more recording capacity and conflicts resolve themselves.

If you had a 12 Tuner TiVo SERVER... with TiVo PLAYERS... then cooperative scheduling would be a MOOT point.

I like the idea of TiVo Server with X-Raid & 12 tuners to be great.

TGC

[Luke M]

Originally Posted by Dan203

Not possible. Cable and OTA, even digital, is modulated onto different frequencies of the radio spectrum. A tuner is required to lock onto each of those frequencies and grab the associated data. There is no way to just record everything and decode it later. There would need to be some sort of tuner involved. Now if someone came up with a tuner capable of tuning and decoding all the frequencies at once then you'd have that option. However you'd run through a 1TB hard drive in a matter of seconds, so storage, as well as internal throughput of all the electronics, would also have to increase for that ever to be a reality. Who knows, maybe in 50 year.

Digitizing the entire cable spectrum is theoretically possible, but not practical or desirable.

Recording 100 SD channels at 3mb/s each is almost practical today. With a 1TB drive you'd have 7 hours of storage. So recording "everything" is not science fiction.

[chip_r]

Originally Posted by Luke M

Digitizing the entire cable spectrum is theoretically possible, but not practical or desirable.

Now ... let me join in the number fun and do some calculations ... Assuming minimum Nyquist sampling of a 1GHz signal @8 bits/sample, we're looking at 2GBytes/sec or 8.33 minutes/1TByte. Yep, possible but not very practical.

A more fundamental question is can you find a single show in all of those bytes worth watching?

[bizzy]

Originally Posted by chip_r

Now ... let me join in the number fun and do some calculations ... Assuming minimum Nyquist sampling of a 1GHz signal @8 bits/sample, we're looking at 2GBytes/sec or 8.33 minutes/1TByte. Yep, possible but not very practical.

You're assuming encoding into a binary bitstream, but QAM encodes into a signal 'constellation' that effectively jams more than one 'bit' into each signalling interval.

[TiivoDog]

I'd like to toss my suggestion below into this thread for any thoughts:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb...&&#post5646933

[chip_r]

Originally Posted by bizzy

You're assuming encoding into a binary bitstream, but QAM encodes into a signal 'constellation' that effectively jams more than one 'bit' into each signalling interval.

Correct, my assumption is that the RF is treated as a baseband signal that is simply sampled. As with many encoded communications channels, QAM included, they can be highly efficient. A simple example is 56K modems using the ~3KHz analog bandwidth of a phone line.

But my second comment remains unanswered ... broadcasters need to produce material worth watching

[mulscully]

Originally Posted by ericr74

Heck, let's just record the incoming streams (all antennas and cables). Then do the channel decode later when you decide you want to watch a program in the recorded stream. Yeah that sounds nice. Not practical though.

I actually heard of people semi doing this with the HDHomeRun, recording an entire QAM channel then separating the subchannel out later alowing you to rcord multiple channels at once on a single tuner

[stulaloyd]

I decided to keep my Comcrap Motorola DCT-3412 after getting a Series 3. Might seem a bit much, but on nights like tonight: Washington Wizards game, Washington Caps game, The Office/30 Rock and Braveheart all on at the same time kind of justified it for me. 4 shows at the same time, no problem. $150 or so extra a year, probably not worth it for most, but worth it to me.

[ericr74]

Originally Posted by mulscully

I actually heard of people semi doing this with the HDHomeRun, recording an entire QAM channel then separating the subchannel out later alowing you to rcord multiple channels at once on a single tuner

Interesting. That sounds like the first step towards my idea of recording everything in one stream.

I have to agree with chip_r though: broadcasters need to produce material worth watching. As a related issue, cable companies need to allow more options to reduce the service level. I know this doesn't benefit them, but once there really is more competition (internet, etc) maybe they will to cater more to their customers. I pay $49/month to receive about 60 channels from Comcast. Of those I watch 2-3 cable sports channels, the locals and once in a rare while something on the History Channel. I don't really care about the movie channels or the news channels. So it would be great if I could save some money by getting rid of what I don't use. Right now, I can scale down to about $17/month if I only get the locals, but when I want to see my sports team they need to be there.

[TexasGrillChef]

Originally Posted by ericr74

Interesting. That sounds like the first step towards my idea of recording everything in one stream.

I have to agree with chip_r though: broadcasters need to produce material worth watching. As a related issue, cable companies need to allow more options to reduce the service level. I know this doesn't benefit them, but once there really is more competition (internet, etc) maybe they will to cater more to their customers. I pay $49/month to receive about 60 channels from Comcast. Of those I watch 2-3 cable sports channels, the locals and once in a rare while something on the History Channel. I don't really care about the movie channels or the news channels. So it would be great if I could save some money by getting rid of what I don't use. Right now, I can scale down to about $17/month if I only get the locals, but when I want to see my sports team they need to be there.

Thats Called "ALA Carte" Cabeling. There are several bills in legislation currently to require Cable Companies including DirecTV & Dish to offer Ala Carte Programming.

In addition to the legislation currently pending at our US Capital, There are several lawsuits currently pending in our US Court system against said cable companies that if the lawsuits win, would require the Cable companies (Including DirecTV & Dish) to offere "Ala Carte" Programming.

The Cable companies though, are "CLAIMING" although I beleive those are fase claims. That if they were to offere ala carte Programming. That you would STILL PAY about $50 a month to get those 6 or 8 channesl you currently watch.

Why & How?

1st. They would charge a "BASE" fee. The cost to just open an account. That BASE fee would be $30 a month. They the would charge on average $5 a channel. Giving a discount for every 10 channels you subscribe too. So 9 Channels of cable would cost:

Base Fee $30
9 Channels at $5 a piece (9x5) = $45
Total Fee for 9 Channels $75

Which is of course More then your $50.

Even if they do the minimum of $3 a channel... 9x3 = $27 + $30 for base fee and your now at $57.

Ala Carte programming will ALWAYS require a Base Programing fee with NO channels.

This is the view that cable companies are going to take, & are arguing to remain profitable.

Ala Carte Programming will ONLY be Financially reasonable if you get a minimum of 30 to 40 channels. Especially if Cable Companies get full control over HOW to charge for Ala Carte Programming.

TGC

[ericr74]

Originally Posted by TexasGrillChef

Thats Called "ALA Carte" Cabeling. There are several bills in legislation currently to require Cable Companies including DirecTV & Dish to offer Ala Carte Programming.

In addition to the legislation currently pending at our US Capital, There are several lawsuits currently pending in our US Court system against said cable companies that if the lawsuits win, would require the Cable companies (Including DirecTV & Dish) to offere "Ala Carte" Programming.
TGC

Well thanks for that info. I hadn't heard about the legislation. Without knowing anything about the various proceedings, I'm kind of doubtful that the cable companies will be forced to do anything like that. It seems like the customer is really stuck in our TV provider oligopoly.

[TexasGrillChef]

Originally Posted by ericr74

Well thanks for that info. I hadn't heard about the legislation. Without knowing anything about the various proceedings, I'm kind of doubtful that the cable companies will be forced to do anything like that. It seems like the customer is really stuck in our TV provider oligopoly.

You never can tell what our congress is going to do, will do. Elections are coming up, & Technology, DRM, Copyright has been in the news with our prospective presidents.

Congress has done things in our favor. They finanly put a "Deadline" on conversion to HD. (February 17th, 2009) which I think is in our favor.

I personally haven't decided if "Ala Carte" programming is a positive thing or not. Just depends on how the cable companies charge.

Current gossip from the cable companies with their proposed pricing schemes will make ala carte programming more expensive unless you get 30 channels or more.
Ie, the $3 / Channel fee, plus The $29.99 Base Price fee that won't include any channels.

TGC

[vstone]

Originally Posted by MichaelK

...
And at some point the hard drive is going to get slammed.
...

I think the Seagate DB35's are designed for 10 HD streams.