Vincent Oberle’s blog
A P2P video recorder box
Building its own PVR (Personal Video Recorder) seems like a fun thing to do, and there are several web sites that provide manuals and software to help, like MythTV. Today, even the cheapest hardware provides enough processing power for a PVR. Thanks to the small form factor boxes, the PVR doesn’t need to look like an ugly PC, but can be quite discrete in the living room. And all the needed software is freely available in the open-source world.
I’ve read that future version of TiVo will provide some kind of Video-On-Demand. To limit their bandwidth cost, they would use some P2P system, like Bitorrent. It is a system like Netflix, where one creates a list of movies to rent on some web site, but instead of being sent by mail as with Netflix, they would be downloaded through P2P. I guess one of the challenges of such a system is the DRM.
Now what would be fun to have (for the user, not the movie studios…) is one of these PVR projects integrating transparently P2P software.
Imagine a PVR where the list of programs you can record or watch is not limited to the ones you can actually receive, but where all existing programs broadcasted in the world are available. Here is how it works: You choose the program; if you can receive it, the PVR records it and makes it available for sharing; if you cannot receive it, the PVR seeks it on the P2P network. It means also one could record show from the past, simply by seeking it from someone who has recorded it. All this transparently is happening to the user, which is the nice feature compared to traditional P2P software: The user doesn’t have to explicitly share programs, he just watches them.
Make all this simple by providing a precise list of compatible hardware, a one-CD distribution that installs without user help and it works, and this could be a killer I believe.
December 19th, 2004 00:44
great idea indeed, and every program you watch, is stored.. so it can be shared, (and obviously watched again) what about the issues of storage space though?
deleting a program would surely be ok, if everyone else keeps it.. but if it was a rare one, and 2 people owned it and they both deleted it without someone else recording it first, the program vanishes forever.
so there’d need to be a server making sure one copy exists! or, 2 actually..seeing as that one copy could vanish via hard-drive failure, which takes us back to the drawing board has having a central server means subscription costs, and something that can be shutdown.
so make it easy to expand, and add more storage would be the only answer.. and thats only for PC literate people..
February 17th, 2005 18:57
With bittorrent one person initially seeds a file, then people grab pieces and share what they have, until the file is seeded by many. With a BT based PVR what would happen if two people recorded the same show? Analog cable (PVR cant do digital cable, yet) reception varies, so who is to say which recorded show is the best seed? Obviously if two people record the same show you cant grab some parts from one person and the rest from the other recording, the resulting file wouldn’t match either original.