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Maxtor & Others working on 6-stream drives for future PVRs
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Posted by: Dajad

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5164465.html

TiVo-like devices to get booster shot

By Ed Frauenheim
CNET News.com
February 25, 2004, 4:00 AM PT

Having proved their popularity with American couch potatoes, digital video recorders are about to get a boost in features that will allow them to zap several video streams throughout networked homes.
Engineers in the consumer electronics lab of hard-drive maker Maxtor, for example, are working on DVR-type devices that can record or broadcast at least six media streams at a time. That compares to three streams in current DVRs, which are hard-drive-based machines that can record video and temporarily pause live broadcasts. Three-stream machines can simultaneously record two live channels while playing a previously recorded program.

DVRs in development not only will be able to serve up video in multiple rooms at the same time, but also handle data from a home video security system, said Jasbir Sidhu, director of engineering for consumer electronics products at Maxtor. The coming DVRs may hit the market sometime in the next 18 months, he said.

The strategy of making DVRs more powerful and comprehensive could help cement their place in the household electronics pantheon and hold off competition from PC makers that have unfurled plans to put modified desktops on top of televisions.

"The beauty of the DVR is it can do so much more" than just record video, said Bob Van Orden, vice president of product management for subscriber networks at set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta.

Scientific-Atlanta is testing a six-stream DVR due out this summer. The company's "Multi-Room" DVR product is designed to record two live broadcasts even as it sends pre-recorded programs to up to four different televisions scattered throughout a house. A set-top box would be needed for each of those televisions, though the Multi-Room machine acts as a set-top for one television. Van Orden said the company envisions a number of other features in the future, including voice-over-Internet Protocol phone capabilities and allowing consumers to move digital photos from PCs to televisions.

Convergence in the living room
Advanced DVRs are part of a growing convergence of computer and entertainment technologies. Stephen Baker, an analyst at market research firm NPD Group, said DVRs in the future could even manage information from so-called smart appliances, such as Internet-connected refrigerators that are communicating about their repair needs.

The DVR machine, in effect, would act like a data traffic cop. The home "needs a central authority to direct where all these streams of content go," Baker said. "You don't want the information that your refrigerator is sending regarding its compressor over the Net to interfere with your cable TV signal."

DVRs, also known as personal video recorders, have been relatively rare in homes thus far, but are taking off quickly. According to market research firm In-Stat/MDR, the number of DVRs shipped worldwide grew from 1.3 million in 2002 to 3.7 million last year. Shipments will reach 8.3 million this year, according to the research firm, partly due to a push by satellite broadcasters to promote the devices.

DVRs can be provided along with satellite or cable TV service, and the products also are sold on a standalone basis. Hard drives embedded in DVRs store data from broadcasts, letting viewers pause live television temporarily and to review a scene or event. This feature was used by many TiVo users during the Super Bowl after Janet Jackson's infamous breast-baring incident. TiVo sells DVRs and a subscription service that allows consumers to do such things as find and record movies by a favorite director. TiVo's ability to track viewer actions during the Super Bowl raised privacy concerns about DVRs' interactive abilities.

Hard drives up to the task
Despite a doubling in the number of media streams DVRs can handle in the future, a single hard drive is still sufficient for the task, Maxtor's Sidhu said. That's because the hard drive can transfer data at a rate of up to 60 megabytes per second (mbps), while TV signals--even high-definition TV streams--require much less bandwidth. Standard television consumes up to 10mbps and HDTV needs up to about 20mbps, according to Sidhu.

Still, he said, you've got to tune DVR systems so they write and send out data efficiently. Otherwise, you can't handle even three streams concurrently. For example, it can be wiser to snag data in larger chunks than is usual for hard drives, so the drive actuator arm jumps around less, Sidhu said.

Already, DVR systems on the market are taking on new features. It's possible to buy a DVR with a built-in DVD writer, which facilitates archiving old recorded shows and freeing up space on the hard drive.

That's a feature Scientific-Atlanta is looking into, Van Orden said. The company also is interested in the possibility of adding an external hard drive to boost storage capacity.

Although the DVR is growing more powerful, Van Orden stops short of predicting its victory over the PC in the "battle of the living room."

"I think they'll kind of coexist," he said. "I can see the two worlds linked over a home network

Posted by: Thom

Basically, they need to change the ATA spec so that drives can handle more than one command at a time. SCSI can do this, but the largest SCSI drive that I can find is 146 GB, with a list price of about $1000, spinning at 10,000 rpm.

Posted by: T-Wolves

quote:
Originally posted by Dajad
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5164465.html
...The company also is interested in the possibility of adding an external hard drive to boost storage capacity. ...

Anybody know why TiVo doesn't already do this?

Posted by: ZeoTiVo

so this company is a year or two behind TiVo or even Replay TV in terms of all the gee whiz features like multiroom viewing and connection between DVR and PC. (edit - I predict that this year there will be a commercially available product to hook up via etehrnet or USB to pull shows off the TiVo - NOTE this is seperate from TiVoToGo to a PC - but a portable video player type like the TAZ)

on the other Hand they have a direct link with Maxtor to make better hard drives even more specifically suited fro a DVR.

anyone have 3 or more DVRs (TiVo or Replay) and try multiroom viewing among them to find the limits of sharing shows between them.

I only have one TiVo so far and just broadcast it around the house to share whatever TiVo is showing at the moment.

Posted by: papabrody

Is this just the result of the ATA spec or will they need more platters, higher density platters, faster spinning platters? It is nice that there is actually a use that could drive the technology b/c I am kind of amazed that although drive sizes keep getting larger and the caches are getting larger often the harddrive is the bottleneck in many of the operations of my computer.

Posted by: pendragn

quote:
Originally posted by PRT940
Anybody know why TiVo doesn't already do this?

All the content in the TiVo is stored in a big database. The database supports expanding, but it doesn't support losing space. If any of the database is missing, the TiVo won't boot. So I imagine technically it would be possible to expand the database to an external drive, if that drive were ever unhooked or unplugged, the entire TiVo would be down.

Also, I think TiVo doesn't like the idea of having something portable with recordings on it. With all the different hacks out there, it's tough to tell what unintended functionality that would provide.

tk

Posted by: T-Wolves

quote:
Originally posted by pendragn
All the content in the TiVo is stored in a big database. The database supports expanding, but it doesn't support losing space. If any of the database is missing, the TiVo won't boot. So I imagine technically it would be possible to expand the database to an external drive, if that drive were ever unhooked or unplugged, the entire TiVo would be down.

Also, I think TiVo doesn't like the idea of having something portable with recordings on it. With all the different hacks out there, it's tough to tell what unintended functionality that would provide.
tk

Thanks for the explanation. :up: So it sounds like supporting external storage transparently would require a pretty serious re-design and re-code effort. Too bad -- it would be a big win for TiVo and for us, IMO.

Posted by: Dennis Wilkinson

quote:
Anybody know why TiVo doesn't already do this?

In addition to pendragn's comments, you'd have to connect such a drive via USB. None of the Series 2 boxes do USB 2.0 (some have the hardware for 2.0 but not the software support required), and USB 1.1 doesn't have enough bandwidth to record and play simultaneously at Best quality (and probably not at High quality, either -- I don't recall the specific bit rate.)

Once USB 2.0 is supported on the units that have the hardware for it, some boxes should be physically capable of storing to an external drive, but all the other software and IP issues mentioned by pendragn would still apply.

Posted by: pendragn

To further complicate this issue, there are hackers with boxes that have USB 2 connectors that do something like this. Instead of the external drive being part of the MFS database, it's just flat file space. They export recordings from MFS to the external drive. This allows them to remove the recording from MFS, saving space. They copy it back into the MFS if they need it.

This proves that something like this is technically possible, although I doubt we'll see anything like that from a production unit.

tk

p.s. Please don't ask for any links on how to do this. I don't want to upset the powers that be.

Posted by: ZeoTiVo

quote:
Originally posted by PRT940
Thanks for the explanation. :up: So it sounds like supporting external storage transparently would require a pretty serious re-design and re-code effort. Too bad -- it would be a big win for TiVo and for us, IMO.

it can be done already and could be supported by TiVo menus, probably without much effort - but it would have to be the copy back and forth method the hack uses. Since I can just put a bigger hard drive in the box itself with little pain simply archiving with no ability to take and paly the files elsewhere has no real appeal to me.
TiVoToGo is a much better solution for this archival aspect.

now a portable player I hook up to USB or etehrnet and pull shows from TiVo -- that is something!! I would not mind if I had to use a USB dongle here as well and that should keep the copyright holders happy and fall in line with TiVo strategic direction :up:

Posted by: HDTiVo

This very important topic gets hijacked by USB talk?

TiVo is dead meat on this issue. It makes their whole price structure and networking methodology look like the horse and buggy. This stuff could be competing against TiVo in 12 months.

Yikes!

P.S. Cable DVRs already have firewire ports which are designed in to offer the option of additional storage should the MSO allow it.

Posted by: MighTiVo

Maybe I am missing something...
The article reads to me like Maxtor is working on DVRs that can handle 6 streams as the drives are already up to the task. It sounded to me like the work was on the controller and the file format to reduce the overhead and allow 6 streams to be accessed without contention.

As to the USB port and an external drive.
I wish TiVo would get off its high horse being worried about encryption of programming that was delivered to our home.
Perhaps then a simple save to external device could be added that would work much like save to VCR only the video would be sent digitaly out the USB port to a storage device, another TiVo, a PC, or even a portable player.

Posted by: HDTiVo

quote:
Scientific-Atlanta is testing a six-stream DVR due out this summer. The company's "Multi-Room" DVR product is designed to record two live broadcasts even as it sends pre-recorded programs to up to four different televisions scattered throughout a house. A set-top box would be needed for each of those televisions, though the Multi-Room machine acts as a set-top for one television. Van Orden said the company envisions a number of other features in the future, including voice-over-Internet Protocol phone capabilities and allowing consumers to move digital photos from PCs to televisions.

TiVo=Horse & Buggy ;)

Posted by: Want1394

I don't understand the point of the article by Frauenheim. It is pretty unfocused, and it appears he has a bit of trouble distinguishing megabytes from megabits.

There certainly is nothing of technology interest in the article. A current Maxtor Diamond Max 9 160GB drive is spec'ed to operate at 133MB/sec (that's megaBYTES). In reality, in a new Windows XP machine, it can sustain about 40-50MB/sec of real data transfer (a Linux system does better buffering and can sustain up to 60MB/sec. These are actual measured transferred data using a disk I/O performance program from Intel called IOMeter.

The point of my comments is today (right now) I have a single Maxtor drive recording and playing back 8 channels of ATSC (HDTV) with no losses, plenty of disk bandwidth and using about 35% CPU load on a 2.4GHz P4. That's 4 channels record and 4 channels playback at the same time, each channel is ~3MB/sec. and the total load including data transfers (with 1024MB block size) and seeks is well under the capability of this modest drive. Normally, for recording and playpack, I use a larger array of disks, but only for storage size, not for any necessary performance. The real limiting factor on multiple streams of video is the poor buffer management in XP, which limits most machines to about 80-100MB/sec combined for disk and lan I/O. I max out at about 60MB/sec on a machine to machine transfer with dual GB Ethernet connections between them. Haven't figured out a way to beat that yet.

The article talks about the SA multiroom box. This is one they were showing at 2004 CES and it is hardly a prototype yet. What they want to do is a difficult job, but disk performance has nothing to do with it. They are looking at total bandwidth of no more than 6-8 MB/sec for the disk on that unit - and that is certainly no stretch for any disk on the market today.

The really hard technical job is what TiVo has done to catalog and manage the streams, trick play, manage the guide, and in the case of the stand-alone units, manage the audio channels. All that will get harder as stream count goes up and more processor power and memory is needed.

Posted by: lajohn27

RE "TiVO = Horse and Buggy"

WHAT? Clearly whoever wrote that - no offense intended- has never touched a product, let alone a DVR from Scientific Atlanta ..

Sure the article sounds impressive.. and if you read the spec sheet on the SA-8000 DVR (which is out now) it sounds impressive too. Till you actually try to use the actual unit.

If you've actually seen the current Scientific Atlanta PVR - the 8000 - it defies the laws of physics as it both sucks and blows .. [at the same time!] I mean it's truly terrible with hardly a fraction of the same features that TiVo offers in the PVR department..

Want to search by title? You can't. Search by an actor or actress? Get that idea out of your head.. you can forget it. Suggestions? What are these suh-guest-shuns you speak of.. ?

If anything is 'buggy' its this SA-8000 unit which crashes constantly, frequently misses recordings (with no way to check why..) and occasionally blows out all recordings and wipes the hard drive for no reason.

That's an 'undocumented feature' that I'm sure users must LOVE. I can tell you that it thrilled me to no end when I came home on a Friday night to watch my weeks worth of TV and there was NOTHING there.

SA engineering efforts to date in the PVR department are at best weak and feeble. With no central 'TiVoMothership-like' computer to connect to, SA units rely on cable distributors to update the firmware and software through the network and let's face it - would you rely on your cable company to maintain something like that?

I don't even let those bozo's touch the wiring inside my home for pete's sake!

And doesn't TiVo use Maxtor drives? In any event, a six stream drive can be put in a newly designed TiVo box just as easily as a newly designed SA box.

Since I own a TiVo now, and I've seen how TiVo operates, I'm not worried. They tend to be secretive and test new products, new features and so on in relative silence till the product is nearly ready to launch. I am sure they've got stuff in the pipes that will impress me with actual operation and not just when I'm reading the spec sheet.

And, if I were TiVo, I wouldn't lose ANY sleep over anything from Scientific Atlanta .. especially their 6 stream unit.. cause it will likely be as 'buggy' and feature deprived as their previous 'effort'.

J

PS> I know I sound like some kind of a crazed-TiVo-worshipper in this post, but I've actually used this Scientific Atlanta DVR product and promptly returned it for a full refund of the rental charges. If I could have figured out a way, I would have demanded more in refund than I paid for the thing. And I was sure glad I didn't fork over the cash to own it.

Posted by: kb7sei

lajohn27:

You sound a lot like I did when I finally got rid of the stinking Pile of S!@# that was the DishPlayer and bought a DirecTivo. I totally understand what you mean. I had all the same problems with the DP you seem to have had with the Scientific Atlanta DVR. The Tivo software is so far ahead of that thing that they have nothing to worry about.

That said, I do think that Tivo needs to stop worrying so much about things like extraction and concentrate on providing people what they want. Right now a big thing people want seems to be portable video and PC/DVD video via the USB port. It's easy to impliment, and on an SA box, tell the content people to "F" off. You encoded it, you should be able to do what you want with it. People like me with a DTivo may be SOL, but we allready are with advanced features anyway because of DTV, no reason to drag you SA users down with us. ;)

Posted by: Dan203

quote:
Originally posted by Thom
Basically, they need to change the ATA spec so that drives can handle more than one command at a time.

Actually the SATA spec has command queuing technology just like SCSI. However currently there is only one drive on the market that actually implements it, and it's only 75GB.

Dan

Posted by: HDTiVo

>TiVo=Horse & Buggy ;)

Don't take me totally literally or seriously on this.

On the specific issue we (I) am addressing here, TiVo is looking pretty threatend technically. SA's concept is compelling.

From junk to stable product, SA has alot of $$ to spend and lots of people to work on it. TiVo is not moving as fast as SA or others, but these others are starting from way behind.

I hope TiVo doesn't end up the hare to the tortoises.

Posted by: spankspank

quote:
Originally posted by Want1394
I don't understand the point of the article by Frauenheim. It is pretty unfocused, and it appears he has a bit of trouble distinguishing megabytes from megabits.

Dajad's reprint messed up the capitalization of mbps. Look at the actual article, the author knows the difference.

quote:
Originally posted by Want1394

There certainly is nothing of technology interest in the article. A current Maxtor Diamond Max 9 160GB drive is spec'ed to operate at 133MB/sec (that's megaBYTES).

133MB/sec is the external interface speed. The author is discussing internal transfer rates. i.e. the raw transfer rate of the platter. About 60MB/sec average - it varies because the platter density is greater towards the center of the platter and therefore the transfer is faster.

quote:
Originally posted by Want1394
In reality, in a new Windows XP machine, it can sustain about 40-50MB/sec of real data transfer (a Linux system does better buffering and can sustain up to 60MB/sec. These are actual measured transferred data using a disk I/O performance program from Intel called IOMeter.

You're comparing two different filesystems, apples to oranges. NTFS vs. ext2 (Reiser?). But I agree buffering is a big factor, more on that later. Your benchmark that achieved 60MB/sec is no doubt transferring one sequential file. The point being made in the article is that multiple streams reduce the quantity of data that can be sustained. Seek time, less read ahead, etc.

quote:
Originally posted by Want1394
The point of my comments is today (right now) I have a single Maxtor drive recording and playing back 8 channels of ATSC (HDTV) with no losses, plenty of disk bandwidth and using about 35% CPU load on a 2.4GHz P4. That's 4 channels record and 4 channels playback at the same time, each channel is ~3MB/sec. and the total load including data transfers (with 1024MB block size) and seeks is well under the capability of this modest drive. Normally, for recording and playpack, I use a larger array of disks, but only for storage size, not for any necessary performance. The real limiting factor on multiple streams of video is the poor buffer management in XP, which limits most machines to about 80-100MB/sec combined for disk and lan I/O. I max out at about 60MB/sec on a machine to machine transfer with dual GB Ethernet connections between them. Haven't figured out a way to beat that yet.
[/B]

Buffering, yes. You're suggesting a DVR with 32MB RAM should be as I/O capable as your P4 with 512MB or 1G RAM just because the disk is the same. Buffering is better with more RAM. This is because you can read/write more like you are in your 60MB/sec benchmark. See how many streams can you run in your system when it's RAM starved.

And, you'll beat the 60MB/sec wall you're hitting when you put in a faster disk.

Posted by: lajohn27

Turns out -- not very 'Scientific'.

Their SA 8000 box shipped with firmware that didn't know that 2004 was a leap year. Using the guide from February 14th to February 29th causes the unit to *crash*... cause it doesn't understand that there IS a February 29th.

Some cable providers are uploading new firmware to the units over the network.. other cable providers complain that they haven't been given the firmware update from SA yet.. while still other indicate they haven't yet implemented the headend changes necessary to update the firmware..

Oops.

Apparently they weren't thinking they'd need to update the firmware so soon..

What a mess. Wonder if they're ready for Y2K yet?

Yah, if I were TiVo, I wouldn't be too worried about these 'Scientific' guys.

J

Posted by: HDTiVo

spankspank:

Much needed and well said.

>Yah, if I were TiVo, I wouldn't be too worried about these 'Scientific' guys.

Quintessential hare thinking.

What's TiVo's biggest product innovation in the last 6 months? Putting a 120GB HD in the box. Oh wait, that doesn't happen until tomorrow...oh wait again, Pioneer did that six months ago. My mistake.

Posted by: Dajad

As someone who just acquired an SA8000 last Friday I can confirm the leap year bug does/did exist ... in my case my cable provider Rogers downloaded the fix yesterday and all is well.

While it is not as nice an interface as TiVo by any stretch ... the lambasting it is getting here is also unwarranted.

Rogers provides it to me for free (meaning no hardware purchase) and the monthly rental is $12 Cdn - less than TiVo's monthly charge.

It records two highest quality shows at once - that kicks TiVo's stand alone butt!! The recording quality is spectacular.

Yes there are gotchas and you can't search the way you can with TiVo ... but for 99% of the market it will do them just fine. It accomplishes 99% of what I want out of a PVR - it records all my shows flawlessly with two shows recording at once (no more choosing between Friends and Survivor) and has 50 hours of highest quality recordings on it.

If I actually had to choose between a Series 2 TiVo and the SA 8000, given the dual digital recording capability without the need for IRs, I'd pick the SA 8000. Unfortuantely in Canada I don't have that choice ... but happily for me, finally I have a PVR availalbe that works with my cable system here in Canada.

...Dale

P.S. All that said, the interface truly is lame and I expect to create a detailed comparative post at some point once I've used it for a few weeks to fully understand it all.

Posted by: samo

Congrats Dale! How long has it been since you moved and had to resort to manual recording? :) I agree with your opinion, most PVRs on a market today have trick play, time-shifting and guide capabilities. Implementation differs, but basic functionality is the same. It just like using different word processor or photo editing software - as long as you can get the same result, majority of people will opt for cheaper version and after they get used to cheaper version, they are not likely to change. For example, I been using Corel PhotoPaint practically forever and when I tried Adobe PhotoShop I just didn't like it because it was different, not because it costs 5 times as much.

Posted by: Jabberer

A couple of quick points I'd like to make here:

- I'd agree that Tivo could have a problem if this product were to ship as described *and* Tivo did not have any product to counter it. The assumption that Tivo is standing still is an interesting one - if they are, though, I'd agree they have a deep problem, just like any other company that doesn't continue to develop their product.

- As I noted above "if this product were to ship as described". SA does have the track record to deliver what they say, unlike some (can anyone say "Moxi"?), but still, it's vaporware until you can buy it, so I'm not going to go around flapping my arms yelling that the sky is falling quite yet. In 6 months, that could change.

- As for not being worried about the "Scientific guys", I'd keep in mind that Scientific Atlanta is a company that has been around for awhile and they have a very large market share in the cable industry. So, they had a bug - my DTivo is still telling me it's downloading program guide data and it should be all available in 1 - 2 days and it's been doing that for about a month or so. The key is that SA fixed the problem before this Sunday.

- Finally, when it comes to Maxtor, do you seriously think that they're only going to sell this new technology to SA? If these new hard drives are all they say they are, they'll be selling them like hotcakes to everybody and their brother. It wouldn't surprise me to see Tivo, Dish, Replay, etc. all adopt this kind of technology for their DVRs.

Posted by: lajohn27

quote:
Originally posted by Jabberer
A couple of quick points I'd like to make here:

- As for not being worried about the "Scientific guys", I'd keep in mind that Scientific Atlanta is a company that has been around for awhile and they have a very large market share in the cable industry. So, they had a bug - my DTivo is still telling me it's downloading program guide data and it should be all available in 1 - 2 days and it's been doing that for about a month or so. The key is that SA fixed the problem before this Sunday.

You raise a good point - if this product were to ship as described.

And you raise another good point , SA offered a fix to the problem before this Sunday.. but lots of these units are crashing anyway because there are incomplete mechanisms to get that 'fix' to customers.

This is not the first bug that completely disables these units currently.

They still haven't fixed the bug where the unit will randomly completely wipe the harddrive erasing all recorded programs and scheduled recordings. And there are many others.

I don't doubt that Scientific Atlanta will command some share of the DVR market through cable distributors. They are in fact a large company with deep pockets and strong ties to the cable distribution community.

What I doubt is that anyone who compares one of those units to ANY model of TiVo, even a Series 1 box running the TiVO 1.3 software would find the SA box superior at this point in time.

Will Scientific Atlanta's product quality improve over time - no doubt.

If you doubt that TiVO's will too.. well, we can only wait and see.

J