Why is this not invented yet.
I know sky plus can record programs onto a harddrive for later watching, replaying, and slow mo etc. This as I think is correct can record one channel at once.
Well what instead of recording one channel cant you record all of what is comming in from the ariel or satelite LNB. That way you could feed the recorded signal back into the receiver and play back any channels from the period recorded.
I'm guessing bandwidth in what ever does the recording currently prevents this?
Well what instead of recording one channel cant you record all of what is comming in from the ariel or satelite LNB. That way you could feed the recorded signal back into the receiver and play back any channels from the period recorded.
I'm guessing bandwidth in what ever does the recording currently prevents this?
Post edited by Scottie_uk on
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.....and still watch another channel while you're at it.
to record every channel (analogue channel, or digital multiplex) you'd need one tuner for each frequency. For satellite that'd mean a head for each frequency.
technically I guess you could build a wideband software defined receiver, and throw lots of processing power at it. You'd generate massive amounts of data though.
The last thing I watched then found to download was Micro Men.
Yeah, similar to what Guesser says, an Arial/Dish doesn't actually work that way. It is the tuner that keys into a single frequency that then makes a reception picked up and you need one tuner for each freq. you want to listen on. Nice idea though!
You know you have a really good point there, I dunno what TV back home is like now, but it was shite when I lived there. One thing's for certain though UK TV at it's worst is probably still better than US TV at it's best!
Telly is total and utter nobcheez here, I haven't watched TV properly since I moved here cos' the majority of it is total bollocks!
I watch Top Gear or Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America now, and maybe Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods or Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations on whatever bloody yank channel they're on, and that's about it :D
The only actual US TV show that's caught my attention in almost 4 years is V, and they've cut it off again until Spetember, no wonder so many bloody TV shows here get canned when you have to wait 3 feckin' months to watch 2 episodes.
Could it not be possible to record the whole signal range and have the receiver tune into a specific frequency on the recording?
short answer: no
long answer: yes, but storing a wideband recording like that would require phenomenal amounts of storage capacity. The nature of the recording would also prevent you from compressing it in any effective way, so you would really want to decode all the channels in parallel, and save them as video.
it would still need massive amounts of storage though, and the receiver itself would be extremely complicated. you would be far better building all the receivers separate, running in parallel... but then that's just the same as having a big stack of hard disk recorders each set to a different channel...
commericlal tv is all about demographics.. more viewers = more advertisers
so they wanna make you watch their shows and get more adverts
why ya think murdoch buys all the media he can
I haven't watched TV for ages, but the bits I saw have been good.
I will NEVER get Sky. On principle, I do not see why you should have to pay for a service which has adverts.
People knock the BBC, but to have reasonable quality programmes without adverts, I'll happily pay the licence. iPlayer is one of my main sites (on PS3 and pc) and it is so good not to have alll these ads.
I just switch off to 4OD, and the rest as adverts begin to creep in. Even youtube seems to be getting more crappy ads on sites (channnel 4 for example)
they worked out.. without adverts on tv.. per person.. ?12 per episode.. so look at it that way.
obv. with sky / virgin u can skip the ads .. so now people are putting adverts in tv shows to get around that
remember Truman show film ? :)
My dads stunned i dont do the same, if somehow i'm taping two things at once and theres a third show on i think thats someone saying 'you're watching way too much, get out there in the sunshine instead of trying to tape 20 programs at once'.
To be fair a while back i was watching tons of US stuff (Office USA, Lost, 24, V, Clone Wars) but as its all over i'm not watching much at all now. (Need to start watching the wire/sons of anarchy at some point)
My freeview box has that.. I would tape Over the Rainbow (for my eldest daughter) while it also recorded Doctor Who Confidenial on the other side..
yeah sky is shit, most of it is repeats anyway. sky one had about one new show on a night then the rest is just simpsons repeats, as far as i remember.
EDIT - wtf happened there? i can't be arsed fixing than, i was trying to quote urbanupstart (Dont worry i've done it ! - mod)
I dont find the BBC to have reasonable quality programs at all. I rarely watch any of the BBC channels at the weekend, in the old days it seemed to have quality but now its terrible.
Quite happy paying for Sky, granted they take the mick pushing up their costs but theyve also done a ton for TV. Before Sky came along the BBC didnt bother much with football, FA cup wasnt bad but you rarely rarely got any live division games on tv. I love sport so Sky is superb, there is a ton of crap on it but amongst all those 1000's of channels theres a lot of good stuff, plus i like a few of the music channels. Also Sky+ is just superb and has totally changed the way people watch tv.
I'm sure my great great granddad refused to buy a tv and instead keep the wireless but you have to keep up with the kids grandpa ! ;)
Doesn't look like much has happened on it in the intervening 5 years though: http://promise.tv/
What we're looking for is something that will record to hard disk, then if its a keeper to DVD. Or straight to DVD. We have cable and use the catch up feature mainly, so if it could record that too, guess it would be good.
My eyes just glaze over when the assistant starts telling me about features it has got without listening to what I want, so if anyone could suggest something, Mrs Spex would be happy.
Thanks.
S
the wire
generation kill
micromen
top gear
family guy
mighty boosh
what more do you want.
this wouldn't work with digital signals at all since they are already heavily compressed. it also wouldn't work with analogue TV as the framerate is the slowest part of the signal if you think about it.
say you tried to record 576 channels... (where did he pick that number from... well lets imagine a perfect world with no vertical flyback. that's the number of picture lines in an analogue tv signal)
you would get one picture line from each. not exactly watchable :)
aha you say, lets multiplex at a higher frequency! ok then, but then you'll end up with a picture that looks like this:
where each colour/letter is a different channel. when you demultiplex the signal to watch it you just end up with this:
there's unfortunately no way around the fact that if you multiplex an analogue signal you're going to lose data, the only way to do it on analogue video signals without losing parts of the picture would be to multiplex at a multiple of the pixel clock* multiplied by the number of channels which will take you to an extremely high frequency again so the amount of data you need to record to describe that will be huge (do you see a pattern emerging? ;))
*yes I know analogue telly has continuous horizontal lines so has no actual "pixel clock" but it's generally accepted that it's a 4:3 picture so the number of vertical lines is related to the horizontal lines by that factor.
and do you think that ad designers ever look at how their ad will look at x2,x6,x12 etc? making the key logos and such appear on screen at those speeds?
Like anything, the best thing to do would be to have a compromise: a PVR with perhaps 3 tuners so you can record 3 different channels simultaneously, rather than trying to capture everything which quickly becomes impractical (and do you really need to record the shopping channel, and the 100+ channels that are showing "Programming starts at 7pm"? How many channels do you need to record or watch simultaneously? It's probably not very many). There may already be PVRs out there that do this (I don't know, I haven't watched broadcast TV since the BBC iPlayer came out, it's made my TV totally redundant except as a display for a Speccy or Amiga)
I would assume you'd have a wideband digital receiver and multiplex the signals digitally. As you say there'd be no way of retuning a single receiver at that speed.
is that when the two signals get into a race condition, and one wins? ;)
yup, that was the only wrong thing with my message. ;)
Cable boxes seem to be favouring 3 tuners and it's hard to believe you'd ever really need much more than that. Is there ever a time where there are 4 things on at once that you'd want to see? That aren't repeated later in the week?
No on most occasions there is nothing I want to watch let alone 1,2 or 3 concurrent programs. It was just a crazy and now as I'm aware non practical idea thats all.
Electronics manufactures are always trying to sell us fancy stuff with loads of features we don't need. Like TV's that are so high definition that only people with perfect eye sight will benefit, or those sat real close.
high def is pretty much a necessity with monsterous screens that fill half your living room (whether these are worth the money instead of a bog standard 21" telly is of course debatable!). Watching normal standard def content on these screens really does show up the difference. This is the reason I always assumed those big flatscreen tellies were crap. The muppets at Comet etc were driving them off the same low res source as everything else so the picture looked awful. Dunno if they've got the memo and switched to HD or not as I never set foot in those awful places these days :p