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  • A question for a/v technophiles

    i got bored last night waiting for calls to roll in and came up with an idea for a new type of satellite receiver. since i started working for a big dish company Ive heard nothing but complaints from heavy techers who want an all hd setup but don't want the hassel of one receiver for each room and the costs associated with them. so heres my idea, what im hoping is that the folks here may have ideas to help bring this to fruition.

    this would be an HD satellite home distribution system. dvr capable with 5Tb storage via a raid 5 configuration, separate hdd for receiver functions. 8 inputs for signal from the dish, one for OTA antenna. output would be compressed and transmitted via cat5 or 802.11n to small set top boxes. these boxes would have 1 input on the back and the standard hd outputs (component and hdmi and 1 pcm). all signal would be routed through the central system and then to the stb.

    i think this would be perfect for most high tech customers but also for some of the customers who like moving their tvs around and don't want to pay a tech to do it for them, (my company charges $100 to do that). well folks let me know what you think and also if you think its feasible.
    This is a drama-free zone; violators will be slapped. -Irving Patrick Freleigh
    my blog:http://steeledragon.wordpress.com/

  • #2
    I'm not too skilled when it comes to Video in/out or DVR's, but from a computer aspect...

    5 Terabytes of storage space in RAID 5... that's 3x 5TB hard drives? Very expensive.

    Do 5 Terabyte hard drives even exist?
    Fixing problems... one broken customer at a time.

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    • #3
      Quoth Blade_Raver View Post
      Do 5 Terabyte hard drives even exist?
      i imagine if my company took the idea they would wait till they were cost efficeint, i think the largest comercially available is 2.5tb right now
      [Edit] looking at websites its only 2 tb right now
      Last edited by SteeleDragon78; 11-03-2009, 05:18 PM.
      This is a drama-free zone; violators will be slapped. -Irving Patrick Freleigh
      my blog:http://steeledragon.wordpress.com/

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      • #4
        Quoth Blade_Raver View Post
        that's 3x 5TB hard drives? Very expensive.

        Do 5 Terabyte hard drives even exist?
        I dunno if they exist, but that's not how RAID works. You'd just need 6x 1TB drives. Your set up for RAID 5 would yield 10 TB.
        Ba'al: I'm a god. Gods are all-knowing.

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        • #5
          Hmm, can you explain how 6 1TB drives = 10TB storage with RAID 5?

          From what I understood RAID 5 was striping and redundancy and required at least 3 hard drives of equal value to perform.

          Example: 3x 1TB hard drives in RAID 5 configuration = 1 TB of secured, redundant storage.

          Perhaps I'm wrong. I will stand corrected if I am though.
          Fixing problems... one broken customer at a time.

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          • #6
            With RAID arrays, your loss is normally one divided by how many drives you use in it*. Blade_Raver's three-drive array would have a loss of space of one third, while an array of ten drives would suffer a loss of one tenth of the total potential space. The "lost" space is used to store the checking info so the system can still run if a drive in the array goes Tango Uniform, and a dead drive can be rebuilt from the remaining drives.

            It all depends on how much space you need, and what you're willing to pay up front.


            *For math types, 1/x where x=the number of drives in the array. Not too tough, really.
            The Rich keep getting richer because they keep doing what it was that made them rich. Ditto the Poor.
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            • #7
              Quoth Blade_Raver View Post
              Hmm, can you explain how 6 1TB drives = 10TB storage with RAID 5?
              No. YOUR 3x 5TB drives would give 10TB. MINE would give 5 TB. Reread my first post. Geek King explained the math. RAID 5 efficiency is n-1. If you have 10 identical drives, your storage is equal to 9 of them. If you have 6 drives, it's equal to 5 of them. 3 drives would be equal to 2.
              Ba'al: I'm a god. Gods are all-knowing.

              http://unrelatedcaptions.com/45147

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              • #8
                so, debate on raid configs aside, does the idea interest anyone here or am i just shooting to high with this?
                This is a drama-free zone; violators will be slapped. -Irving Patrick Freleigh
                my blog:http://steeledragon.wordpress.com/

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                • #9
                  Quoth SteeleDragon78 View Post
                  does the idea interest anyone here or am i just shooting to high with this?
                  Well, it interests me, but I've practically no idea what you're talking about, is all. This might just be the wrong audience for a solid critique.
                  Ba'al: I'm a god. Gods are all-knowing.

                  http://unrelatedcaptions.com/45147

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                  • #10
                    I see where you're going with this. It's basically a tv version of a dumb terminal network. The problem I see with it is that it's not very practical. With your design, all the computing aspect is put onto the main receiver (for deciding on distribution and decoding, amongst other things.) which means one central processing setup for the dish and one for each remote access unit. To say nothing of the cable requirements, as you'd be dealing with a high density one way signal and a rapid two way signal. Finally you'd have a single point of failure on a (rather large I would say) multi-unit device, that could not be repaired on site, and replacing would be no small feat.

                    The current setup in place is equivalent to more modern remote terminal systems, where each desk(tv) machine is capable of handling it's own processes and the central server(receiver) is used for general duties. Much easier to isolate the problem and replace the unit in that case.

                    It's an interesting concept, but an equivalent approach for networking has already been implemented some time ago, and replaced some time ago as well for a more practical solution.
                    I AM the evil bastard!
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                    • #11
                      MythTV

                      Works with satellite dishes, HD cables boxes, internal TV tuner cards, etc. From there, use a decent gigabit switch, run CAT6a wire around the house (so you can upgrade to 10 Gig switches when those become affordable).

                      Get yourself a big ass server case, one that can hold a lot of drives, and make sure you've got a quad core processor to help handle the incoming data and outgoing streams. I've seen server cases that can handle 10 drives, so doing 8 2TB drives is feasible, but 12 would be better if you can find it (ah, look: newegg has one that has 11 3.5" bays, plus 3 more 5.25" bays, so you could easily fit 12 drives in, and have space left over for a DVD drive to boot, and it's only $85!).

                      Configure the drives to go into a RAID 10 array, which will provide you with mirroring and striping (RAID 5 does parity bit checking which is useful, but too easy to suffer catastrophic loss when two drives go down. RAID 10 will be much more resilient, and it's much faster to boot. I've seen a RAID10 array able to write data at 200 megabytes / second). Granted, this will only provide for 6 drives worth of space, so a mere 12TB, but that's still quite workable.

                      Depending on mood/etc, also throw in a separate couple of SSD drives (of course in a RAID1, for mirroring and redundancy), and use them for the OS, allowing the user to have the full 12TB of space for storage.

                      From there, you can build myth front end boxes which have very little space (a single and small SSD will do fine here), a decent enough video card to have component out, dvi out, and hdmi out. Don't forget to make sure that the audio out has optical, coax, and standard 1/8" mini jacks. Again, gigabit ethernet in the front end boxes, all of them connected via gigabit ethernet to the backend over a good quality switch, and you should be able to handle at least two streams, maybe more (haven't checked the actual bandwidth requirements for HD, but have consistently heard of two streams being done simultaneously).

                      Oh, and before you go building such, you might want to look into pre-built boxes that meet these requirements. I have heard of them, though not used them myself.

                      Why, no, I haven't been using MythTV in this fashion for years, just without the monstrous amount of HD space. Why do you ask?

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