Registered: Dec 2001
Location:
Posts: 11

From the New York Times...

The Entertainment Server

quote:

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In short, a battle for control of your living room is about to be waged by consumer electronics makers, developers of personal-computer hardware and software, and set-top-box designers that sell directly to cable and satellite providers.
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By this fall, TiVo customers will have the option of activating a RealOne media player, already a common feature on PC's. While the precise configuration has yet to be announced, the TiVo application is likely to provide not only streaming audio and video from the Internet, but also the ability to store and play hours of music directly from the TiVo's drive.
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In the next couple of years, Sony plans to introduce a similar product, the Personal Network Home Storage device. A concept product demonstrated last fall had a capacity of one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, which means it could hold either 450 hours of DVD-quality movies, 1,500 CD's or 600,000 high-resolution photographs. Presumably that sort of box would sit in the corner of the room or in the basement (one nickname for entertainment servers is "media furnace")

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Registered: Sep 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 293

quote:

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Originally posted by burnsy
...could hold either 450 hours of DVD-quality movies

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Holy crap!

-The Simpsons

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Essex County, NJ
Posts: 8070

So anyone want to venture a guess when a terabyte of storage will be available for high-end PCs? (That is, systems costing no more than 4 grand.)

I'm thinking sometime in 2004.

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Garden City, MI, USA
Posts: 29

Dear lord.

Well, that kind of storage is getting more and more affordable already. I mean, you're basically only talking about 9x128g hard drives, and I would recommend a RAID-5 for that little extra bit of safety considering the type of data you're entrusting in this array. I would imagine you could pick up such a box for about $2600-$3600 (low-end IDE RAID). Knowing how quickly hard drive capacity is increasing, I would give it 3-4 years to get into the $1000 range.

I don't even know how I could justify a TERABYTE of storage unless I had a fiber drop to my house. Especially for a VOD or other type of video/audio format that doesn't get its data from media I already own. I can't even get a Linux ISO in under an hour anymore (fscking comcast). I'm pretty sure I'd need fiber to each of my media outlets, since I just can't imagine every room in my house living off of the bandwidth of gigabyte ethernet. MAYBE switched gb ethernet with a fiber to the hard drive array... but I'd still like a little overhead for other purposes not directly involving video/audio transfers.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: NYC
Posts: 460

Discussion of DIY terabyte server on AVS here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/show...threadid=137853

_ITV

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Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Salvation Holdout Central
Posts: 5

quote:

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Originally posted by controlio
I'd need fiber to each of my media outlets, since I just can't imagine every room in my house living off of the bandwidth of gigabyte ethernet. MAYBE switched gb ethernet with a fiber to the hard drive array... but I'd still like a little overhead for other purposes not directly involving video/audio transfers.

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Garden City, MI, USA
Posts: 29

It might work, but you obviously don't understand how hard I hammer on the equipment I have in my house. If someone was to sucker me into installing 1tb of storage in my closet, you can bet I'm not going to be using it to stream a few movies. It'd better handle internet web caching, file serving, unattended downloads, file storage for drive ghosting, etc etc etc. All stuff I wouldn't mind hacking into the functionality of the box, of course.

For 100mbps to work, it would have to understand and fairly address packet prioritizing. If I'm watching a DVD in my room, my friend is watching a DVD in his room, the stereo in the living room is listening to uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) audio, and I'm downloading a cached Linux ISO on my computer, the server had better understand that network packets get the lowest priority, streaming audio gets medium priority, and DVD packets get highest or critical priority. The biggest buzzkill in a movie is watching jittering or pixelation... audio not only uses less packets, but is less annoying when you get the occasional dropped packet... and network traffic can take a back seat to everything else. There's no reason I need 100mbps data transfer with all of the other more important time-sensitive packets flying around my house.

So even though it could work with packet queueing and other tricks, I'd rather have the extra bandwidth to work with. After all, transfering 6 nightly multi-gig hard drive ghosts to a terabyte server over a 100mbps line just doesn't make a heap of sense when you can do it much faster on a different wire. Of course, then there's the newly announced 10gbps ethernet... mmMMmMMmMmmmMmmMmm...

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Last edited by controlio on 05-13-2002 at 03:18 PM

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