[rescue] (no subject)

[joshua d boyd]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 03:41:51PM -0500, Reagen B . Ward wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 04:21:02PM -0400, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> 
> > then we would need to find which drives work and emulate them.  easy enough i
> > would think since it looks like we would have to build the whole damn thing
> > from the ground up anyway.
> 
> I would think that it would be MUCH easier to build a PC-based PVR than
> to build this storage device.

There are two problems with that plan.  First, there is the issue of
listings.  The second is the issue of quality.  The TiVo uses some
seriously nice hardware chips for doing it's video work.  Getting good
decoding hardware, isn't hard, but encoding hardware tends to be
expensive.

One possibility would be to make it a dual proc machine with a lot of
scratch space, then record mjpeg to disk, and have the second CPU pretty
much dedicated to converting it to MPEG2.

The other issue is looks.  A TiVo look decent.  A PC based PVR is a PC in
the living room.  Bleh. Now, maybe an FDDI based video distribution system
would be cool.  Stream video from netapp to TiVo, and vice versa.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
http://www.cs.millersville.edu/~jdboyd/